When author Joyce Carol Oates’s husband, the editor and publisher Raymond Smith, is taken to hospital with a fever, she expects a few days of ill health, then his return to gardening and working alongside her. But Ray does not come back, and as Joyce is back home, feeling glad he looked so well when she left him in the hospital last, he goes into cardiopulmonary arrest and leaves her, bereft and alone, to cope with the fallout.

A Widow’s Story begins with a stream-ofconsciousness writing style peppered with meandering thoughts and a surfeit of exclamation marks and ellipses. It can be a struggle to read in the beginning, but by the end, as the initial visceral reaction to her husband’s death begins to fade, it becomes a clear and beautifully rendered story of their past together, her present, and thoughts on the new future before her. My whole opinion of the book changed by the time I put it down, so immersed in Oates’s loss that I felt the closest I have come in literary terms to feeling a raw loss of my own.

Oates recounts letters and emails from the friends who helped her so much – with devastating grains of truth like ‘Suffer, Joyce. Ray was worth it’ – and details the intricacies of life after the death of a spouse, from needing infinite copies of the death certificate, to the pharmaceutical assistance she tried to avoid, but was necessary to keep her from following him. Being so immersed in her thoughts is an exhausting task for the reader, but her account of grief, by the last pages, is utterly worthwhile.

Fiona Hardy is from Readings Carlton