In 2008, after her husband is diagnosed with pneumonia and dies unexpectedly of a hospital-acquired infection, National Book Award winner Oates (Them) struggles to move forward and redefine her life without him. Oates's grief is palpable as she describes battling depression, insomnia, and impolite questions, but her strongest passages comprise her recollections of the time she spent with her late husband. Whatever sort of dark humor Oates attempts to achieve with her advice on how to be a "good widow," however, is not entirely successfully captured in actress/narrator Ellen Parker's treatment of the text. Still, fans of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and/or Marilynne Robinson's Gilead are sure to savor. ["A worthy purchase that will be appreciated by readers of memoir generally and older readers especially," read the review of the Ecco hc, LJ 10/15/10.-Ed.]-Johannah Genett, Hennepin Cty. Lib., MN (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* Brutal violence and catastrophic loss are often the subjects of Oates' powerful novels and stories. But as she reveals in this galvanizing memoir, her creative inferno was sequestered from her joyful life with her husband, Raymond Smith. A revered editor and publisher who did not read her fiction, Smith kept their household humming during their 48-year marriage. After his shocking death from a secondary infection while hospitalized with pneumonia, Oates found herself in the grip of a relentless waking nightmare. She recounts this horrific siege of grief with her signature perception, specificity, and intensity, from epic insomnia and terrifying hallucinations to the torment of death-duties, painful recognitions of confidences unshared and secrets harbored, and a chilling evaporation of meaning. But Oates also rallies to offer droll advice on how to be a good widow and describes her struggles with mountains of lavish sympathy gifts and the attendant trash with a widow's slapstick-comedy. In a stunning extension of the compelling disclosures found in The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982 (2007), protean and unflinching Oates has created an illuminating portrait of a marriage, a searing confrontation with death, an extraordinarily forthright chronicle of mourning, and a profound pilgrimage from chaos to coherence. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The incomparable, best-selling Oates fascinates readers, and her memoir of sudden widowhood will have an impact similar to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005).--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

Early one morning in February 2008, Oates drove her husband, Raymond Smith, to the Princeton Medical Center where he was admitted with pneumonia. There, he developed a virulent opportunistic infection and died just one week later. Suddenly and unexpectedly alone, Oates staggered through her days and nights trying desperately just to survive Smith's death and the terrifying loneliness that his death brought. In her typically probing fashion, Oates navigates her way through the choppy waters of widowhood, at first refusing to accept her new identity as a widow. She wonders if there is a perspective from which the widow's grief is sheer vanity, this pretense that one's loss is so very special that there has never been a loss quite like it. In the end, Oates finds meaning, much like many of Tolstoy's characters, in the small acts that make up and sustain ordinary life. When she finds an earring she thought she'd lost in a garbage can that raccoons have overturned, she reflects, "If I have lost the meaning of my life, and the love of my life, I might still find small treasured things amid the spilled and pilfered trash." At times overly self-conscious, Oates nevertheless shines a bright light in every corner in her soul-searing memoir of widowhood. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"Writing up a storm, eh, Joyce?" Shortly after the sudden death of Joyce Carol Oates's husband, Raymond Smith, in February 2008, an acquaintance put that familiar question to her. A closer friend was sure that words were tumbling forth, too. "Knowing how you write," the friend said in a condolence note, "you may already be completing the first of many novels that will help you explore what you've been experiencing." Oates felt herself "shaking with cold, with a kind of choked fury." The Wonder Woman of American Letters, as she learned an exhibitor of her vast array of books had christened her, could not compose even a thank-you note. "Yes it's true that I used to be a writer - a writer with a very mixed reputation - 'controversial' is the kindest term," she imagined trying to explain at a somewhat calmer moment. "But now - I am not a writer now. I am not anything now. Legally I am a 'widow' - that is the box I must check. But beyond that - I am not sure that I exist." At its visceral core, grief is a stress response. So scientists have explained, and other experts have charted the emotional journey. What Oates discovers in "A Widow's Story," a cascade-of-consciousness that will mostly mesmerize you and surely move you, is that grief can also unleash an identity crisis: Where and how does imagination fit into a marriage? In fact, Oates did manage to scribble notes on paper, curled in her "nest," as she calls the side of the bed that she turned into a cluttered refuge amid despair during the half-year after her husband's death at 77. Working with them, the prodigious author of some 50 novels and perhaps 1,000 stories - as well as poems, essays, plays - has assembled a book more painfully self-revelatory than anything Oates the fiction writer or critic has ever dared to produce. The voice that echoes most hauntingly in this patchwork of vivid scenes, memories, reflections and hallucinatory visions, with some letters and e-mails thrown in, belongs to a sleepless widow in a tangle of bedclothes - teeth chattering one moment, skin "sweaty-clammy" the next, capsules of calming Lorazepam at hand, as well as paper and pen. She has lost more than her husband of 47 years. Oates has also lost her own sense of wholeness. Or to put it more accurately, she is suddenly forced to confront her tidily divided identity as wife and writer, which she has clung to both at home and in the world: shy Joyce Smith and the prolific force she refers to as "JCO," whom she has elsewhere described as "not a person, nor even a personality but a process that has resulted in a sequence of texts." Oates is shocked into a reckoning with the dual self that has let loose torrential, dark art while leading the quietest of lives, "measured and decorous as Laura Ashley wallpaper," in her own well-chosen words. Unmediated though her memoir's fragments feel, Oates also - by habit or design - knows how to impart tragic momentum. It is almost as though she herself has become one of her often ill-fated female fictional characters, cast from blind innocence into gothic turmoil. Even her address is straight out of one of her many stories in which nightmares lurk beneath placid surfaces. The glass house inhabited by Mr. and Mrs. Smith - who rarely spent more than a night apart after marrying as graduate students, he at 30 and she at 22 - is on Honey Brook Drive in Hopewell Township, near manicured Princeton. There they worked mere rooms apart, Smith busy editing The Ontario Review although rarely reading the reams of fiction issuing from his wife in her study. The loving and productive stillness was bulwarked by the highly unusual marital practice of not sharing "anything that was upsetting, depressing, demoralizing, tedious - unless it was unavoidable." The glassed-in idyll shatters with an urgent phone call just past midnight, a week after Oates has taken her trim and active husband to the E.R. suffering from what proved to be pneumonia. He seemed to be rallying, but by the time she arrives at his hospital bedside a half-hour later, his "eyes are closed, his ashen face is slack." Oates the stunned widow discovers that near derangement is suddenly unavoidable. JCO, the writer obsessed with violent suffering, has known such depths. In her fiction, she realized, she had "plunged ahead . . . into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss." But only now is actual experience catching up with imagination. With whom can Oates share the turmoil for which she feels so unprepared? IT'S the rare griever who escapes the frantic urge to cry out in a world that seems deaf to the overpowering waves - of fear, sorrow, anger, guilt, suicidal hopelessness, numbness - that break after the death of someone deeply loved. Only the similarly bereft seem able even to begin to hear. For the once decorous wife who saw to it that JCO the grim-visioned writer stayed "walled off," both from herself and from her husband, it is clear where she must turn for the deepest communing: the now desperate widow can no longer keep her writerly consciousness at bay. As the walls come down, disturbing questions clamor for answers. In spending so much time in "the world of my/the imagination," Oates doesn't flinch from asking, did she elude her husband? Did he elude her? Could she claim to know "anything of Ray's imagination"? That last mystery in particular lends unexpected suspense to a memoir buffeted by digressions - and sets it starkly apart from a recently minted classic of the genre that Oates is implicitly responding to, "The Year of Magical Thinking" (2005), written by another bereft writer, Joan Didion, after the sudden death of her husband (and frequent collaborator), the novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne. Emily Dickinson understood how grievers size each other up in the quest for solace: "I measure every Grief I meet/With narrow, probing Eyes - /I wonder if it weighs like Mine -/Or has an Easier size." Oates circles around a doubt that Didion, half of a writer-pair who shared everything - from bylines to marital strains - was spared. Might her husband, had Oates been more attuned, have pursued fiction himself? Without striving for anything like Didion's clinical coolness, Oates is nonetheless an expert at pacing as she approaches this "sinkhole," her term for "places fraught with visceral memory, stirring terror if you approach them." For pages and pages, she avoids a box in the closet that contains the unfinished novel Ray Smith had been working on before they met - much as in life she meekly (or was it selfishly, she dares to ask) hung back from probing his troubled family life or his decision to set aside fiction. When Oates at last brings "Black Mass" into her nest to read, she finds disconcerting secrets. It turns out that Ray Smith - who is tamely eulogized as "born editor" and devoted gardener, "a gentle soul and honest and sweet," in the many notes Oates cites - was still toiling on his clearly autobiographical novel into their early marriage. In it, his alter ego (a priest) wrestles with the challenge of sacrificing his vocation in order to love, and save, a haunted younger woman writer of great gifts. Oates is shaken by the jolt to her self-image as deferential wife to an older husband. How utterly different, too, from the drama of victimized women and monstrous men that recurs insistently in her fiction. Oates expresses regret - if only she had encouraged him! - yet there is also a strong undercurrent of relief, and of gratitude. Oates (who has since married a neuroscientist) is reluctant to face the real power balance between artist and spouse, but her memoir boldly betrays her and in doing so pays fuller tribute to the husband she lost. It seems obvious - and understandable - that Ray Smith was overwhelmed by her creativity; he could not be her competitor, or her editor. But he was a man who faced down his own demons to be the calm companion who helped her career, and her imagination, take off. Widowhood forced Oates to confront the divide between shy Joyce Smith and the prolific force she calls 'JCO.' Ann Hulbert, Slate's literary editor, is the author, most recently, of "Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children."