It's impossible to adequately review this memoir without comparing it to its bestselling predecessor in both form and topic, "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion. The circumstances of both authors's widowhood are remarkably similar: Oates, a well-known and bestselling author, lost her husband of nearly 50 years, Raymond J. Smith, a respected writer and editor, unexpectedly when a hospital-acquired infection killed him; Didion, a well-known and highly successful author and screenwriter, lost her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Donne, also a well known and highly successful author, when he died of cardiac arrest at their dinner table. Both women had had close, work-together-at-home relationships with their husbands. Both writers use the memoir form as a way of exploring, expressing, and understanding their grief and the grief process. Oates's approach, however, unlike Didion's, is intensely focused on herself, her understandable grief, but also her feeling of helplessness and hysteria, her near-constant suicidal ideation, her rethinking of her marital relationship, and, finally, her way of finding help through her grief by taking over the everyday, ordinary household obligations that she had left to her husband for 48 years.
Initial disclaimer: I enjoy reading Oates's non-fiction essays and reviews, and occasionally her short stories, but am decidedly not a fan of her longer fiction, which I find bizarre, dark, and violent. I was drawn to this book, however, by the excerpt published several weeks ago in The New Yorker, and I still find the opening scene, which was included in that excerpt, to be stunning. In it, we learn much about Oates and her situation: she has come from visiting her husband at the hospital, where she continues to be baffled both by his treatment for pneumonia and the hospital atmosphere. She returns to her car to find that she has parked it askew, tires well over the white line in the street -- her upset and burgeoning hysteria resulted in an unfocused drive to the hospital and a botched parking job. She sees something under the windshield wiper, and, relieved to find that it isn't a parking ticket, she reads the scrawled note: "Learn to park stuppid bitch." Oates comments at this point that her "situation, however unhappy, despairing or fraught with anxiety, doesn't give her the right to overstep the boundaries of others," and we find as the memoir develops that this is a pattern of her grief: helpless and hapless, internalized, hysterical, while insistent on maintaining the privacy of her grief and on showing her best side to the world.
Throughout the memoir, Oates refers to herself primarily in the first person but also, frequently, in the third person as "the widow," as in this passage: "What the widow must remember: her husband's death did not happen to her but to her husband. I have no right to appropriate Ray's death." Oates searches for the "meaning" of grief, the reasons why she feels ill, has heart palpitations, has intractable insomnia. Her fears of being alone in the unusual, glass-walled house she and Raymond Smith shared, with its "ghosts" around every corner and outside every window, are only surpassed by her unease being away from the house, which she says she "yearns" for whenever she leaves. Oates's grief is internalized and compartmentalized when she leaves her home to continue teaching and lecturing, keeping commitments she had made months and years before. When she is at home alone, her grief is all-encompassing, sadness and regret mixed with rage, but also self-indulgent and, as she says in the memoir, bordering on insanity. She spends many of her wakeful dark hours counting out a collection of medications and sleeping aids to use in a suicide attempt, an attempt she researches but ultimately decides against. Oates says that her "survival" of the first year of widowhood is due to the fact that she is fortunate in her friends -- they guide and chauffeur her through the necessary post-mortem miasma of probate, etc., and are careful to call her, invite her to dinner, and encourage her in what is finally her salvation --learning to take ownership of the numerous aspects of her life that she had ceded to her husband over the years.
Didion's experience of grief was compounded by the serious, continuing, near-fatal illness of her only child, a recently-married daughter, who was hospitalized in a coma at the time of Donne's death. The focus on Quintana, a major character in the memoir, expands the memoir beyond Didion's own, beautifully expressed internal grief, and gives it an other-directed accessibility that Oates's memoir lacks. In the end, Oates is not an attractive widow. Her story is valuable and compelling in many ways, but her distracted, almost willful, helplessness and hysteria are wearying. Everyone has their own way of grieving, certainly. But it's hard to sympathize with someone as determinedly fragile as Oates. Indeed, much about the memoir feels off, and reads like a work designed to sell books.
Ultimately, this reader's inability to sympathize with Oates is confirmed, in a way: barely a year after Smith's death Oates remarried, to a professor colleague at Princeton.
Didion, we know, soldiered on, even enduring the death of her beloved daughter several months after the memoir was finished. Again, different people grieve differently, but Didion's memoir comes across as much more honest, devastated indeed, but also heroic. No one can predict if the reading public will find Oates's book as irresistible as Didion's, but to this reader, the comparison leaves Oates's memoir the lesser work of the two.
