Winik’s 1996 memoir, First Comes Love, about her first marriage and widowhood in her mid-30s, is being reissued by Vintage with a new introduction and accompanied by an audiobook recorded by the author. When the book was first published, Daphne Merkin wrote in a review for the New York Times that the author “perfected an unblinking narrative tone that is frequently very funny, in spite of the fact that much of what she has to impart is painfully sad.”
Thirty years ago, when I was writing a memoir of my marriage and my husband’s death in 1994 from complications of AIDS, there were not a lot of models I could look to. This is because 30 years ago, there simply were not a lot of memoirs. The early to mid 1990s was the start of the memoir boom, with Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr, Lucy Grealy, Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Knapp among the authors who reinvented the genre, with novelistic treatments of sensitive portions of their autobiographies giving open access to their inner lives. C.S. Lewis’s much earlier work, which kicks off the list below, was considered so raw that it was originally published under a pseudonym.
In the years since my own memoir, First Comes Love, joined the boom, a whole subgenre of widow memoirs has grown around it. You can bet I snatched up each one of them and read it with the eagle eye of sibling rivalry. I loved some and was bemused by others, but I’ve included all of them in the chronological list below because as a group they mark the limits of what this type of book offers its readers.
A Grief Observed
This is a gorgeous, elegiac, and very short real-time chronicle of Lewis’s experience of agonizing grief after the death of his wife from cancer. It’s a great choice for a recently bereaved person to read for comfort, particularly a person of religious faith, since the role of God in the situation was a major aspect of Lewis’s struggle. But even an atheist like me was deeply moved by the clarity and simplicity of his observations. It truly did make me feel less alone.
A Widow's Walk
September 11, 2001 was Marian Fontana and her firefighter husband Dave’s eighth wedding anniversary, and also their two-year-old son’s second day of kindergarten, but Dave never made it home that day, one of 12 in his squad who died at Ground Zero. She got through the months ahead with grit and grace, her sense of humor never completely deserting her. She also channeled the force of her grief into activism, founding the September 11th Families’ Association. Her strength is inspiring.
The Year of Magical Thinking
This National Book Award-winning memoir is the queen of the genre, and many consider it the best thing Didion ever wrote. The circumstances it documents are terrifyingly harsh. Just before Christmas 2003, Didion’s only child, Quintana, fell extremely ill and was hospitalized on life support. A few days later, her husband John Gregory Dunne had a massive, fatal heart attack at the dinner table. “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” One by one, her sentences sear themselves into your brain.
American Widow
I loved the Marian Fontana book so much that I was a little dubious when this one came out, but the charm of the graphic novel treatment moved me past it. Torres was seven and a half months pregnant when her husband started a new job at Cantor Fitzgerald on September 10, 2001, before losing his life in the attack. There’s a lot of outrage in this book, as Torres faced the moronic bureaucracy of the aid organizations, the media circus, and the fervency of public opinion and judgment. Those lazy, opportunistic 9/11 widows!
A Widow's Story: A Memoir
This book has its moments, but it’s about 200 pages too long. At first it is intriguing to read Oates’s emails to Gloria Vanderbilt and Edmund White, chilling to watch her agonize overdoses of Ambien and Lunesta, harrowing to share her obsessive thoughts of suicide, and blackly funny to watch her pitch out the baskets from Harry and David. But when you read, on page 324, “Somehow it has come to be April—nearly two months since Ray died,” you will be crestfallen. Surely it has been two years.
Saturday Night Widows: The Adventures of Six Friends Remaking Their Lives
Aikman’s Eat Pray Love for widows stems from the idea that girls, bereaved though they may be, just want to have fun. She found five other relatively young women who had lost their husbands, and once a month, brought them together for a good time—a cooking class, a museum visit, a spa weekend, a trip to Morocco. They replace the well-worn Kubler-Ross paradigm with five alternate phases of grief: Bonding, Laughing, Dating, Traveling, and Buying Lacy Underwear.
The Light of the World: A Memoir
While many of us widow-memoirists have to navigate the complexities of documenting a relationship with serious ups and downs, poet Elizabeth Alexander and her Eritrean-born husband Ficre Ghebreyesus had a beautiful marriage, a life filled with love and art and food and friends, two sons and a cozy home in New Haven. The curtain dropped with cruel abruptness on this glowing scene when Ficre suffered a heart attack just days before his 50th birthday. This luminous, lyrical elegy was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
The Iceberg
Like me, Coutts had plenty of warning that widowhood was in her future, and a rough journey to get there. Her husband, British art critic Tom Lubbock, was diagnosed with brain cancer and spent the next three years in slow and then more rapid decline. In the early period, he wrote his own memoir of illness. In the latter days, as Coutts puts it in her unflinching prose, there was “destruction: the obliteration of a person, his intellect, his experience and his agency. I am to watch it. That is my part.” Tell it, sister.
Black Widow: A Sad-Funny Journey Through Grief for People Who Normally Avoid Books with Words Like “Journey” in the Title
Streeter was working for a Florida newspaper as “the black Carrie Bradshaw” when she reconnected with Scott Jervitz, a white high school classmate, on a Facebook reunion page. They had only five and a half years before she found herself planning a funeral instead of a 45th birthday party. Opening her memoir with a riff on casket selection before flashing back to the night of Scott’s death, Streeter’s ability to ferret out the funny in almost anything is rare among books of this kind.
Molly
Butler begins his story with a gripping account of the day he came home and found a suicide note taped to the door. Soon after, through journals and phone records, Butler learned of his wife’s infidelity with many partners, including her college students and a long-term liaison. For some readers, it will be TMI, but God knows these things happen. I myself learned of my late husband’s extracurricular activities through a producer on the Oprah Winfrey show and would have included it in the book if it weren’t too late.
The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards: A Memoir
This title is hard to resist, but what about that “dead bastard”’s son, who was nine at the time of his beloved father’s death? I worried about that the whole time I was reading this book, having faced similar dilemmas in writing about my own late husband’s lapses. This woman faced an avalanche of nasty secrets about a husband she had mostly adored, though his undiagnosed bipolar disease had begun to cause trouble in their relationship toward the end of his life, before he died from heart attack at 47. Her appealing voice keeps the reader on board through the big messy reveal and the New Age/paranormal experimentation that follows.
Memorial Days: A Memoir
On Memorial Day, 2019, Tony Horwitz, Brooks’s 60-year-old husband, also a famous author and foreign correspondent, collapsed on a street in Washington, D.C., and died. In the days and weeks that followed, Brooks found herself too preoccupied with practicalities to grieve. Finally, in 2022, she had to stop moving forward and take time to heal. Warmly companionable and life-affirming, this book itself is a brilliant, restorative act of kindness, offering real comfort and inspiration.
