I thought this was a very interesting book for a lot of reasons, one of them being that JCO never really mentioned the fact that she had remarried by the time she was done writing the book. A review of it in THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS took her to task a bit for this and in today's issue, she responded. She admitted she should probably have included that information in an afterword, but also said that it didn't change the experience of grieving for her husband.
She compared it to a memoir about cancer. If the writer recovers does it make his/her experience less valid.
Does she have to continue to grieve for us to give credence to this book?
Where does the story end--I guess that's the question? Does her happiness now make her unhappiness after her husband's death then a lesser one than someone who never married again?
18 comments:
It was silly for them to take her to task over that issue. I agree it doesn't make the experience less valid.
I think it was perhaps how quickly she remarried, rather than the fact that she remarried at all, that has raised the hackles of some readers. I believe she remarried less than 18 months after her husband's death. I agree--it should be irrelevant in terms of how we read her memoir. I wonder how many reviewers would feel the need to take a male author to task if he wrote a memoir of losing his first wife while married to his second. I don't think many people would give it another thought because it's so common for men to remarry soon after losing their spouses; women, not so much.
I am trying to think of a male writer who wrote about the death of his wife. Can you?
The only thing that comes to mind is Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes. But I'm not sure that's really the same thing.
That may be the closest.
Actually, crime fiction writer C. B. Gilford, but few if any of his memorial stories were published. The death of his wife left him a wreck.
Fritz Leiber was spun back into alcoholism by the death of his wife, but I'm not sure that he wrote memorial fiction about her...he did deal with it briefly in his short memoir, first published in THE GHOST LIGHT...and, I believe, in at least one of his essays.
Of course, William Burroughs wrote about his wife's murder, but actually killing your spouse is rather further away than what we're looking for here (interesting, though, that while Leiber was an alcoholic and abused "downers" such as cough syrup, his wife, much like opiate-addict Burroughs's, was an amphetamine junkie...Leiber wrote a story about their abuses, "The Secret Songs," one of his several powerful autobiographical stories in playlet form.
And, no, I don't think she needed to be a martyr to his memory if she felt she could have a new marriage. 18 months isn't exactly rushing into things at all.
But leave to BACKBITER'S WEEKLY, abbreviated TNYRB, to run a piece that would scold a survivor for Daring to marry a year and a half later. Even after writing a book about how losing her partner of forty plus years was devastating. Clearly, she was carousing on the royalties. Or something.
13 months, Oates notes. Still not exactly dancing across the grave.
Oates letter
And Julian Barnes, in his review (visible at a link at the head of the Oates letter-link-page), ends with a quotation from Samuel Johnson:
He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good or evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless, till it is driven by external causes into a new channel. But the time of suspense is dreadful.
That's interesting. She perhaps should have mentioned that she remarried in an afterword or even a preface, and said that it didn't affect her grieving for her first husband.
As someone who lost my partner many years ago, and fairly soon had another long-time partner, it did not stop the grief or mourning at all, which went on for years, and decades later, still does, and sometimes crops up and hits me when I'm least expecting it.
But always the month that he passed away is very difficult for me, and I never do anything (even deal with a medical crisis) on the anniversary of his passing.
One human being does not substitute for another. And there are many reasons for grieving, one of which is one grieves for the loss of life of that individual, for him, what he's missing, what he could still have done. That does not go away with another person's presence.
I can think of several memoirs written by men about their late wives. I'm not sure if any of them were written after the authors remarried (if, indeed, they did remarry). Calvin Trillin's ABOUT ALICE, Donald Hall's THE BEST DAY THE WORST DAY, and Rob Sheffield's LOVE IS A MIX TAPE are the first three that popped into my head.
Jane Kenyon-How could I forget that.
Great insights, Kathy. Thanks.
Todd-I think a sign of a good marriage is you want to repeat that relationship and from what I have read about JCO in bios and such, I think she needs that bulwark to write.
Deb, I was also going to mention Calvin Trillin's book about his wife Alice, which I thought was very moving in its understated way.
Jeff M.
I heard an interview with Joyce Carol Oates on NPR where she defended her telling of her story in this way. The fact that she remarried a year later seems irrelevant to me. The grief she describes at her husband's death moved me profoundly.
Me, too. The book kept my interest despite my fear of that experience.
Jeez, what happened to all our comments? Blogger is going cuckoo-bananas recently.
Still hoping it will be restored but doubt it.
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