‘The sinkhole (to use her own term) of ever-present and unchanging misery’ – A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates

Three years after the sudden death of her husband, Raymond Smith, Joyce Carol Oates has published A Widow’s Story, a memoir of the first six months of her bereavement – a long and fractured account of loss, grief, bewilderment and anger, but, above all, of enduring love.

Now, call me cold-hearted, and I do agree that it seems almost mean-spirited to analyse or criticise a book – a piece of non-fiction, especially – about something so personal and raw as the loss of a spouse, but, still, I found myself ambivalent about this one. It’s certainly powerful – Oates’ account of her fluctuating emotions after Ray’s death, her denial, her hurt, her insomnia, her depression, her battle not to end up addicted to tranquillisers and sleeping aids – is recounted with such immediacy that it feels almost visceral. And it’s poignant – the transcripts, not only of her own thoughts, but of the emails she sent to her friends in the immediate aftermath of her loss, and of letters she received in return, are genuinely sad to read. The length of the book, which in some ways irked me, reinforced the horror of her situation – that grief continues, that loss doesn’t go away, that recovery, if it’s ever possible, is elusive and, for now, far from present. The relentlessness of the situation that’s borne out over the four-hundred pages is probably the strongest message to emerge from the text: you think the horror and the loneliness will pass, but it won’t. And Oates insists that, as personal as her grief is, it’s no different that that shouldered by countless other people – widows – every day; so, as well as being her own personal memoir, it’s also presented as a widow’s handbook: an acknowledgement that her own personal pain is one that’s repeated and relived every day by strangers, and a reassurance, to those strangers, that they’re not alone. And I think she’s successful here – anybody who’s experienced the loss of a loved one or a family member will find echoes of their own experiences in A Widow’s Story. There’s no sense of abstraction, either; it’s not a lecture or a manual, but the very personal story of Joyce and Ray Smith, their life together, and Joyce’s attempt to survive the unexpected loss of that life.

So what’s my problem? Well – the very stylistic devices that make the book work, in the sense of conveying intimacy and seducing the reader into the author’s own personal misery, made it (for me) a rather irritating read. The length, for a start – four hundred pages is a pretty extended wade through another person’s psyche – and the repetitive nature of the anecdotes and memories and thought-patterns throughout hindered me from getting really involved. Again, I can see the value of this technique. It’s realistic. Mourning is repetitive; thought-patterns are cyclical; depression is often unvaried and wearisome. Oates dwells on this; she’s laying out her actual emotional journey for the reader, and part of her aim is to show how bereavement doesn’t follow a neat trajectory and how a calm outward appearance or professional demeanour can hide the sinkhole (to use her own term) of ever-present and unchanging misery beneath the surface. It’s just that, as a reader – and this could be indicative of nothing more than this particular reader’s obsession with narrative structure and plot – the temptation was to constantly skim, to think yeah, yeah, I know, we’ve done this before. And then, of course, to feel very guilty for being ever so callous. Nevertheless, though, I did find it long-winded and repetitive beyond necessity. Oates hasn’t prefaced the book with an introduction, and, at the time of writing this review, I haven’t come across any explanatory interviews with the author, but the episodic structure and the use of dates and the present tense suggest to me that she’s lifted sections from her own diary entries or fragmented notes at the time. Again, this makes it raw, it makes it real, but it also makes it excited and informal in ways that distanced me from the actual content. The em-dashes, the fragmented sentences, and the heightened emotional language made the writing feel too unfinished, as if the whole book were an extension of a personal letter she’s been composing, rather than a final, edited text. This is probably her intention; but I didn’t find it engaging. I also found the italicised asides at the ends of many of the chapters, dealing with ‘the widow’ as an abstract condition, dishing out almost ironic-sounding advice, were alienating – it’s as if the author, having revealed so much of herself, needs to crowbar in some distance between herself as writer and herself as mourner. As well as forging a rather dubious identity between bereaved women (widows) rather than between bereaved people, it adds a false note to an otherwise apparently brutally honest account.

However! This distancing effect is actually related to the thing that I found most intriguing about the book: the way Oates describes and explains the deliberate split between ‘Joyce Carol Oates’, professional writer and teacher, and ‘Joyce Smith’, widow. We’re left in no doubt that the latter identity is more real to her; that Joyce Smith is the real, living person, and ‘JCO’, as she puts it, is nothing but a persona – one that she continues to deliberately espouse (‘impersonate’) in the weeks after Ray’s death to enable her to get on with life. She’s astonished, at times, to see that other people don’t recognise the falsity of the ‘JCO’ construct – that they expect her, the ‘ever-prolific’ writer, to be working out her grief through prose; that, within three or four moths of her husband’s death, she’ll already have a new novel under her belt, dealing with her loss, with her married life, with Ray’s life, when, in fact, she’s struggling to even get out of bed. The fame and reputation of JCO give her a mask to don on occasion, but that mask is not her, and it’s a mistake to conflate the two. The split between artist and self, she says, can be seen in her marriage – she talks about how Ray didn’t read her fiction, and how, now, she’s afraid that he consequently didn’t really know her; that her dual identity as both Mrs Smith and JCO created a gap in their relationship that can never be bridged. Likewise, she acknowledges that there were areas of Ray’s life (his relationship with his father, his Catholic upbringing) that she was excluded from by mutual, almost unspoken, consent. And now, with Ray gone, her ‘real life’ has been irrevocably upset, even though her continued output as JCO (several books and articles by Oates were published soon after Ray’s death that she had, of course, written long before his short illness) seem to cause others to underestimate the trauma of her situation. Finally, despite its focus upon the life of Mrs Smith and its expression of incredulity that people actually believe in the reality of JCO, A Widow’s Story is published not by Joyce Smith, but by Joyce Carol Oates, as usual. Was this a cynical marketing decision or a protective barrier thrown up by the still-wary, still-grieving widow? It’s hard to say, and it’s probably a combination of the two, but it certainly got me thinking about authorship and identity and all sorts.

Any Cop?: If you like memoirs, and aren’t put off by the length and the subject matter, go for it. I found it alternately interesting and drawn-out. I doubt I’ll revisit it. But like I say, maybe I’m just cold-hearted – though let’s (please!) give me the benefit of the doubt… 

 Valerie O’Riordan