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A Widow's Story
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Read A Widow's Story

A Widow's Story (2011) (edit title/settings)

A Memoir

by Joyce Carol Oates (Author) (edit contributors)

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'A writer of extraordinary strengths' Guardian

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audio version of this book - 14.8 hrs.

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  • “He was eight years older than I was, most of the calendar year.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy,.....”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “A wife who dreaded any thought of becoming a widow”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad—I could not bear to “outlive” them—for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers—their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges—But he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed—to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Once listening to a recording of Mozart’s Requiem Mass Ray had remarked in that bravado way in which, when you’re young, you might speak of dying, death as if you had not the slightest fear of it—“Promise me you’ll play that at my funeral.””
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “How exhausted I am suddenly!—though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling—almost—exhilarated.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Almost immediately the phone rings again. When I pick it up it’s to hear the words, if not the voice—the voice is a stranger’s voice, male, urgent-sounding—that I have been dreading since the nightmare-vigil began—informing me that “your husband”—“Raymond Smith”—is in “critical condition”—his blood pressure has “plummeted”—his heartbeat has “accelerated”—the voice is asking if I want “extraordinary measures” in the event that my husband’s heart stops—I am crying, “Yes! I’ve told you! I’ve said yes! Save him! Do anything you can!””
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “t is the most horrific thought—my husband died among strangers”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “There once was a ship And she sailed upon the sea. And the name of our ship was The Golden Vanity."¿Será el equivalente a la canción infantil que siempre cantábamos en los paseos de familia?: “Se va, se va la lancha Se va con el pescador Y en esa lancha que cruza el mar se va, se va mi amor"”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can’t confront it.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Soon I will learn that a widow is one who makes mistakes”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray—here? Is it possible that he won’t be coming home with me in another day or two, as we’d planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It’s like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “And now like a dream it’s unfolding—whatever is happening, that seems to have little to do with me—as the dreamer does not invent her dream but is in a sense being dreamt by it—helpless, stunned.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “The widow inhabits a nightmare-tale and yet it is likely that the widow inhabits a benign fairy tale out of the Brothers Grimm in which friends come forward to help. We loved Ray, and we love you. Let us help you. Ray would want this.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Harmful to the crematory? This is a sobering thought.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “What were his final thoughts, what were his final words?”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Some residue of his puritanical Irish Catholic upbringing remained with him through the decades, long after he’d dropped out of the Church at the age of eighteen; he disliked religion, in all its forms, but particularly the dogmatic; he disliked theology, particularly the morbidly arcane and exacting theology of Thomas Aquinas which he’d had to study at the Jesuit-run Marquette High School in Milwaukee”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “How casually people speak of such things!—Promise that at my funeral you’ll play Mozart’s Requiem Mass”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “In the waiting room of the surrogate court, time passes with excruciating slowness. The widow will discover that often she is waiting in public places—this is her punishment, for having been a wife”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “When you’re living in a house with someone it is often the case that he isn’t in the same room with you—and so, when I am home, I am free to imagine that Ray is on the premises.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely—perhaps never—furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you’ve ruined both our lives.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “When you are not alone, you are shielded. You are shielded from the stark implacable unspeakable indescribable terror of aloneness”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Suffer, Joyce. Ray was worth it.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “In our marriage it was our practice not to share anything that was upsetting, depressing, demoralizing, tedious—unless it was unavoidable. Because so much in a writer’s life can be distressing—negative reviews, rejections by magazines, difficulties with editors, publishers, book designers—disappointment with one’s own work, on a daily/hourly basis!—it seemed to me a very good idea to shield Ray from this side of my life as much as I could. For what is the purpose of sharing your misery with another person, except to make that person miserable, too?”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Perhaps it was naive, to wish to share only good news with a husband. I have always dreaded being the bearer of bad news to anyone—I take no pleasure in seeing another person pained, or distressed—especially not anyone for whom I feel affection.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Nor do I like being told upsetting news—unless there is a good reason. I can’t help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactionsMe pasa lo mismo. No me gusta escuchar malas noticias a menos que sea necesario. Sera bueno?”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Ray would never wish to upset me. Very likely Ray shielded from me all sorts of things I never knew, and will never know.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “But now I am thinking—obviously Ray revealed only a part of himself to me. Obviously, he kept much to himself. If he had not a “secret” life—(though possibly he had)—still there was an eclipsed side to his personality, of which I had no clue”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “America has become a rabidly politicized nation since the election of George W. Bush—since 9/11, ever more a virulently divided nation—it”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “And so, often I leave for home early. Where Ray and I often stayed late—and were among the last to leave a party—I am now the first person to leave.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “A widow’s emotions—I think this must be generally true—resemble the “lake effect” of the Great Lakes. One moment, a clear sky and sunshine; minutes later, enormous dark thunderheads moving like battalions across the sky; soon after, a lightning storm, churning waves, danger . . . You learn that you can’t predict the weather from visible evidence. You learn to be cautious. The “lake effect” is ordinary time, speeded up. pag 2436”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “n the nest, there is anonymity. There is peace, solitude, ease. There is not the likelihood of being asked How are you, Joyce?—still less the likelihood of being asked, as I am beginning to be asked Will you keep your house, or stay in it?”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Watching late-night TV, I came quickly to discover, is like trolling through the uncharted deeps of the ocean—a roiling Sargasso Sea of high-decibel melodrama, gunfire, car chases, helicopter pursuits, CNN and FOX News repeats—the collective underside of our culture—the banality of our fetishes. What a lovely silence, switching off the TV to hear wind, rain pelting against a window.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “All this, you have lost. The happiness of domestic life, without which the small—even the colossal— triumphs of a “career” are shallow, mocking”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “She never undertook to know What death with love should have to doe; Nor has she e’er yet understood Why to show love, she should shed blood”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “We play at paste till qualified for pearl”
    Emily Dickinson
  • “For this is the most exquisite of intimacies—not needing to speak.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Sure was glad to get out of there alive!”
    Bob Dylan
  • “When you live alone, eating a meal carries with it an element of scorn, mockery. For a meal is a social ritual or it is not a meal, it is just a plate heaped with food.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Better to be angry, than to be depressed. An angry person would never wish to hurt”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “I needed a strategy by which to endure and go on—as who doesn’t?”
    Philip Roth
  • ““To get you through these difficult weeks.” Weeks! I can’t envision anything shorter than a decade”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Why am I thinking of Plato?—that fascist reactionary? Why am I thinking of Socrates?”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Not revenge, still less financial compensation, is what I want. What I want is my husband returned to me . . .”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “It does no good to be angry, as it does no good to be devastated; crying is as reasonable a response as any other, and as futile.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Being a writer is like being one of those riskily overbred pedigree dogs—a French bulldog, for instance—poorly suited for survival despite their very special attributes.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “I am thinking how, of all classic American writers, Hemingway is the one who writes exclusively of death, in its manifold forms; the perfect man of action is the suicide”
    William Carlos Williams
  • “Later, rowing back home from the Indian camp, Nick asks his father why the Indian killed himself and his father says, “I don’t know, Nick. He couldn’t stand things, I guess.” No theory of suicide, no philosophical discourses on the subject are quite so revelatory as these words. Couldn’t stand things, I guess.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “He never drew the attention of a gathering of friends by telling stories or anecdotes, his manner was to murmur asides, at the margins of a gathering.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “I did not want to be distracted by the huffing/puffing/grunting of red-faced sweaty men at their machines like visions out of Dante’s Inferno of twisted bodies, contorted faces, popping eyeballs.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Ray’s Jesuit training in adolescence had instilled in him a predilection for what is called perfectionism but which might resemble, to a neutral observer, obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Suffer, Joyce. Ray was worth it.”
    Gail Godwin
  • “It’s ridiculous to think of completing the voyage when the most you can hope for is to stay afloat.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
    Albert Camus
  • “Like all permanently lapsed Roman Catholics, Ray much resented any incursion of his old “faith” into his post-religious life”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “My discovery is: each day is livable if divided into segments. More accurately each day is livable only if divided into segments”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “If you stare too long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you”
    Friedrich Nietzche
  • “From things that have happened and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “The blunt fact is: to be a writer, you have to be strong enough to write. You have to have emotional strength, and you have to have physical strength. Now that I no longer have this strength, it seems wrong of me to try to answer young writers’ questions like some sort of writerly Delphic oracle . . .”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “I was naive enough to ask Wolf Kahn what it was like to work in beauty every day, not to be snarled in prose like writers of fiction, and Wolf replied, with an air of explaining something elemental which I should have known: “The canvases aren’t beautiful to me. Beauty has nothing to do with it. I’m solving problems.”) Solving problems. Of course. This is what it means to be human.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Now I have done my work. It will endure, I trust, beyond Jove’s anger, fire and sword, Beyond Time’s hunger . . . Part of me, The better part, immortal, will be borne Above the stars; my name will be remembered Wherever Roman power rules conquered lands, I will be read, and through all centuries, If prophecies of bards are ever truthful, I will be living, always”
    Ovid
  • “it’s rather that such a claim, or even such a wish, has an ironic/comical ring to it. Who could have guessed, in Ovid’s time, in the first century B.C., that there would one day be a world in which the very term “Roman power <ruling> conquered lands” would be divested of all meaning”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “. . . over four decades she has written over 115 books, 55 novels, more than 400 short stories, over a dozen books of essays and nonfiction, eight books of poetry and thirty-plus plays.(Joyce Carol Oates)”
    Larry Grobel
  • “What someone is, begins to be revealed when his talent abates, when he stops showing what he can do.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “My father, my mother. My husband. One by one disappearing. Where?”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Only brash adolescents mock grief, laugh uproariously at death, are drawn to video games simulating violent death—presumably because they’ve had no experience of death, except as a game”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Ulysses!—that most beautiful, rhapsodic, phantasmagoric of novels from which Updike learned so much.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Dying Is an art, like everything else.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • ““I choose to have a mother who is dead,” and that helped . . . After a while it is self-punishing to resist or regret what’s real”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Though it may not help to assuage the sadness of your loss, I pass on to you something <my late husband> said to me in the days before his death: “You will be grief-stricken for the rest of your life, but don’t lose your vitality.””
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “‘Whatever is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.’”
  • “Terrible as losing a husband is, there is perhaps a worse predicament in losing the person he was; living with him on a daily basis as he deteriorates; feeling that you have no choice finally, as Rachel felt, but to arrange for him to be hospitalized, in the face of protests from his relatives and friends who have no idea what you are experiencing”
    joyce Carol Oates
  • “Unvoiced between us is the question—which of us has been less lucky. To lose your husband suddenly, or—to lose your husband by slow excruciating degrees. To lose your husband amid a flood of sympathy, or—to lose your husband amid accusations and recriminations.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “My sense was that Ray’s parents were politically conservative, like many Catholics; that, in the volatile matter of civil rights for Negroes, and in all matters involving radical or even reasonable social change in the United States in the early 1960s, they were adamant in opposition”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Perversely, what is “fiction” is likely to be what is “most real”—in writing of fictitious individuals, the young writer is most likely writing about him-/herself.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “How distressing this is, that my young writers—the oldest would be twenty or twenty-one, the youngest nineteen—are so obsessed with suicide; or, if not with suicide per se, with the severe depression that precedes suicide.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “A wife must respect the otherness of her husband—she must accept it, she will never know him fully.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “The Church, in Ray’s lifetime, was characterized by the most intractable demands—the absolute obedience of all Catholics to the dictums of priest, bishop, archbishop, cardinal, pope. As young children Catholics were taught to believe that the slightest, most trivial of infractions (i.e., before the Church law was changed, eating meat on Fridays; breaking your fast before communion by allowing even a snowflake to melt on your lips; any use of “artificial” birth control) could constitute a sin for which the sinner would be damned to Hell.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Within its straitjacket of absurd canon law, by tradition the Church is curiously flexible, if not whimsical. To be prayed-over after your death is a kind of lobbying and, like lobbying, requires payment to individuals in authority.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “If a Catholic did not sufficiently confess his impure thoughts to a priest, and if he took the sacrament of communion, he would be committing a mortal sin and if he died in this state of mortal sin, he would be punished forever in Hell. How ridiculous such notions seem to us! To some of us.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “(Among the Catholic religious orders, the Society of Jesus is the Brahmin caste. Perversely, Jesuits take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—but Jesuits have traditionally/historically moved in the highest social classes in both Europe and the United States and have exerted political influence disproportionate to their numbers.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Editors and gardeners are perennial optimists. No one steeped in a tragic sense of life can be either.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “Essential as it is to be immersed in one’s work it is equally essential to move through it, and past it.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • “And now, I was being made to see the situation from another perspective, like one who is traveling about a disaster site, viewing the disaster from different perspectives.”
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • From things that have happened and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason.
    Highlighted by 108 Kindle customers
  • For this is the most exquisite of intimacies—not needing to speak.
    Highlighted by 90 Kindle customers
  • mantra—Live or die but don’t spoil the world for others.
    Highlighted by 78 Kindle customers
  • Our great American philosopher William James has said—We have as many personalities as there are people who know us. To which I would add We have no personalities unless there are people who know us. Unless there are people we hope to convince that we deserve to exist.
    Highlighted by 67 Kindle customers
  • it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.
    Highlighted by 64 Kindle customers
  • The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.
    Highlighted by 59 Kindle customers
  • For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.
    Highlighted by 53 Kindle customers
  • There are those—a blessed lot—who can experience life without the slightest glimmer of a need to add anything to it—any sort of “creative” effort; and there are those—an accursed lot?—for whom the activities of their own brains and imaginations are paramount. The world for these individuals may be infinitely rich, rewarding and seductive—but it is not paramount. The world may be interpreted as a gift, earned only if one has created something over and above the world.
    Highlighted by 49 Kindle customers
  • For when Ray was alive, even when he wasn’t with me I was never alone; now that Ray is gone, even when I am with other people, a crowd of other people, I am never not-alone.
    Highlighted by 49 Kindle customers
  • The cure for loneliness is solitude—as Marianne Moore has said. But how frightening solitude seems to me, now!
    Highlighted by 35 Kindle customers
Show all 102 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

February 15, 2008. Returning to our car that has been haphazardly parked - by me - on a narrow side street near the Princeton Medical Center - I see, thrust beneath a windshield wiper, what appears to be a sheet of stiff paper.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Joyce Carol Oates (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: ECCO, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers
Country: United States
Publication Date: 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-201553-2
Page Count: 417

Classification edit see section history

Movie Connections edit see section history

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