J is for Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates on Widowhood

Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates, both acclaimed writers who chose to chronicle their first year of widowhood, have written books which couldn't be more different.

Didion struck me as detached, almost clinical; Oates is awash with emotion; in fact, she's almost melodramatic.

Didion's book is short, concise; Oates' is overlong, almost 400 pages, and repetitious.

Didion holds her emotions in; Oates pulls the reader into hers.

I read Didion's book shortly after my husband died and took an instant dislike to the author although I'd often read and liked her work. She took pains to tell us about the call from the Times asking for an obituary, the private plane a friend offered to her when her daughter (who died soon after the book was finished) became ill in California, the house she and her husband leased from a famous movie director years ago. Snob, I thought. I didn't like her much more when she gave a reading in Houston and marched on stage lugging an enormous purse. Again, she seemed cold. But that's just me. Many reviewers have heaped praise on her book and it was adapted to the Broadway stage. So don't take my word; read it yourself.

Oates is not an author I'd been fond of; yet I found myself underlining paragraphs and thinking, "Yes, I felt that, too." No, I didn't consider suicide as a fallback after my husband died as Oates did. No, I didn't fear taking medication or worry that I might become addicted. But I did go back to work soon after my husband died and I'm sure on the outside, I looked fine as Oates did, but inside I was a mess; so was she. But she shows us her journey--how difficult it was to get the car title changed, how she avoided the checker at the grocery store who had been so friendly to her and her husband, how she reconstructed her husband's garden.

What Oates doesn't tell us is that within six months of her husband's death, she met someone new and remarried after she'd been widowed thirteen months. I found myself wondering if she was really "over" her grief, was the new man a "replacement," another fallback, or did she truly fall in love again.

Many reviewers faulted Oates for her frequent use of the third person, referring to "the widow" does this and "the widow" does that as if she were referring to widows in general. I didn't take it this way at all. I felt she was stepping outside to view herself objectively and often with humor.

What I learned from these two books is that like these two authors, all widows are different. We face our lives "after" in very different ways. Famous or ordinary, we're all individuals.