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 from epic insomnia and terrifying hallucinations to the torment of death-duties, and a chilling evaporation of meaning. But Oates also rallies to offer droll advice on how to be a good widow. Oates has created an illuminating portrait of a marriage, a searing confrontation with death, an extraordinarily forthright chronicle of mourning. Her memoir of sudden widowhood will have an impact similar to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005).

novelistic and expansive, switching between first and third persons, seeking to objectify herself as `the widow' ... mainly focused on the dark interiors, the psycho-chaos of grief.

This book’s timeline includes the facts that Mr. Smith died on Feb. 18, 2008, less than a month before his 78th birthday, and that it took Ms. Oates more than a year and a half to remove his voice from their telephone answering machine. It does not say that by the time he had been dead for 11 months, Ms. Oates was happily engaged to Dr. Charles Gross, the professor of neuroscience who became her second husband in 2009.

How delicately must we tread around this situation?...A book long and rambling enough to contemplate an answering-machine recording could have found time to mention a whole new spouse.