Authors, and want to be writers all need to find their “authors voice” so much so that their readers hear that voice and that there is no mistaking who's speaking to them. Joyce Carol Oates (Smith) has this voice and every time I put down her memoir about her husband's death, I could hear her in my thoughts as I looked back on my own loss. She takes you through the uncomfortable inner journey she went through that she didn’t even tell her own friends about. So much of what she’s written touched me and gave me more insight into this lonely place I found myself walking through as I start over alone. Also, I find some comfort in reading about women who had no children and were married to other creative spouses. I got this book through my library so I couldn’t underline the passages that spoke the loudest, and there are many. It’s good to read different memoirs on grief because each person lives with loss in their own way. ( )

A Widow’s Story is the memoir of the devastation Oates experienced when her husband unexpectedly died. The account is dissonant, a tale of wounds rubbed raw recounted in a distanced, refined style.
Oates has entitled her book “A” widow’s story, but often in the course of it, she describes herself in the third person, in italicized letters. Some of these passages read like a third-person commentary (“In this way, unwittingly, and against the grain of her temperament, the widow has made a good decision,” p. 366). Others are formulated as bits of advice, almost like excerpts from a book of etiquette (“Any act a widow performs, or contemplates performing, is an alternative to suicide and is in this desirable however naive, foolish, or futile,” p. 97).
I doubt many would prefer a life that never knows companionship, or a series of short, troubled relationships, to a long, happy marriage. There is a price to be paid, however. As Oates describes it, “widowhood is the punishment for having been a wife” (p. 102).
The writing isn’t flawless. At times, Oates uses two adjectives when either (acrid, bitter) would have made the point. And I continue to wonder: are jellyfish both translucent and transparent? A minor quibble, I admit. I admired the way she interspersed batches of her e-mails into the account; they seem like a seismographic chart of her emotional upheaval. It’s a well-structured book, for instance in the recurring motif of the manuscript of Ray’s unfinished novel, abandoned decades earlier.
This is not the kind of book I can say I “liked.” The pain, for all of the polite polish of Oates’s style, is too believably conveyed. I doubt I will soon forget the experience of reading of her struggles with the “basilisk.” That's the name Oates gives to that part of her interior dialogue that she describes as a beady-eyed lizard at the periphery of her vision, ever-reminding her that she is wrong to outlive her husband and that it is futile to continue to live. Does this sound crazy? Oates won’t argue: “Traveling in the wake of my husband’s death has been the outward face of my madness as my madness has been the inward face of my grief” (p. 238). ( )

I make a habit of not reading memoirs, especially of 'famous' people - I find them rather personal, too personal, and takes such a deep look into someone who I've never met that it makes me uncomfortable as a reader - but since Joyce Carol Oates is my writing heroine, I felt compelled to pick up her memoir of life after the death of her husband, Raymond Smith. I am glad I did, or as glad as anyone can to read such a story of grief and life after death. In her usual vivid prose, Oates pulls us into the world of the widow, a world marked by absence and the burden of living on after one's significant other has passed away. Oates does not try to romanticize her experiences or comfort the reader with pulled punches; this is a work marked with emotion from start to finish without any pretense about what it is about - death, dying, loss, grief, and a culture that would rather sweep it all under the rug than look these undeniable truths in the eye. There are memoirs are then there is A Widow's Story. For anyone who has ever lost a loved one and known what it is like to live a second life after death, this is for you. ( )

Love the stories of her memories, and also feels like a privilege to be let into her grief journey. Long though. ( )

Enjoyable? No. But this account of Oates' raw grief following the loss of her husband of nearly fifty years wasn't meant to entertain. At a writer's workshop, a professor once said that a good writer "bled out on the page." She certainly did that, and she is to be forgiven a certain repetitiveness for, as she noted in the narrative, each day became an space of time to be survived, and inherently repetitious.