Epilogue: A Memoir

by Anne Roiphe

Book Overview

From Anne Roiphe, the critically acclaimed author of Fruitful, comes the New York Times bestselling Epilogue, a beautiful memoir about death, life, and widowhood. Roiphe explores what happened when,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061254622
• ISBN13: 9780061254628
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.0" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

EPILOGUE

As a new widow, I can relate to all the problems, concerns, feelings, adjusting, and just getting on with your life after a husband dies. Anne Roiphe has written such a beautiful memoir of her experience with the death of her husband, it was like she knew what I was feeling, or I knew what she was feeling and going through. I will be sharing this book not only with my widowed friends, but also my married friends. Epilogue: A Memoir, is a book I will be reading over again. I know life goes on after death, and this book shows how this can happen. This book will make you laugh and cry and hope for better days. I could be her friend.

Epilogue

So sad, but beautifully written. If you have ever lost someone important, critically important, in your life, reading this book will help you know you are not alone in your suffering. It is life.

Recomposing a Life after Widowhood

Epilogue (HarperCollins, 2008) is a gripping memoir by National Book Award finalist Anne Roiphe, who was forced to recompose her life after the sudden loss of her husband of 39 years. With compelling candor, Ms. Roiphe shares the intimate memories of her happy marriage and the uncertainties of her life as a new widow. In Booklist, critic Carol Haggas writes, "No one can really prepare a woman for this passage in life, but Roiphe's luminous memoir is a beacon of help, and ultimately hope." After reading this provocative book, I mulled over its lessons, some of which touch on female friendships, and was thrilled when Ms. Roiphe graciously agreed to expand on some of her thoughts on that topic in an email interview. See her thoughts on female friendships on my blog: www.fracturedfriendships.com

Anne Roiphe's new memoir is a painfully honest and deeply affecting work

While Joan Didion's THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING is likely to remain the touchstone for contemporary books about a widow's grief, Anne Roiphe's new memoir is a painfully honest and deeply affecting companion to Didion's work. In December 2005, Herman Roiphe ("H.," as she refers to him throughout the memoir), a well-known New York psychoanalyst, her husband of 39 years and 12 years her senior, died suddenly. Now Anne must begin her life again as a widow at the age of 69. "Grief is in two parts," she writes. "The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life. This book is about the second. Although the division between the two parts is not a line, a wall or a chasm." With that candid insight, Roiphe launches her account of the 18 months or so that followed her husband's death. What's striking about Roiphe's situation, especially for such a highly educated, sophisticated woman, is how ill-equipped she seems to be to deal with some of the daily reality of it. Like many widows, she's mystified when it comes to financial matters ("This is his job. But he is not here and now I will do it, badly, but I will do it. Resentfully I will do it."). But she's equally at sea trying to perform even the most mundane of tasks, like fitting her key into the door of her apartment, which she always had left to her husband, or deciding which subway to take in a city where she's lived all her life. It's as if the loss of H. has rendered her disabled in some mysterious fashion. Granted, some of the challenges Roiphe must confront are hardly the ordinary stuff of widowhood. Claiming that she's forbidden to provide details, she's left to clean up a lawsuit "for a considerable amount of money stemming from something in my husband's past." And she must deal with the blackly comic demand of her husband's ex-wife for an entire month's alimony ("the last drop of honey from the pot") for the month in which he died. Thanks to a personal ad placed by her daughters in The New York Review of Books, and her own foray unto Match.com, Roiphe doesn't lack for male companionship (the way that e-mail has transformed dating rituals, even for senior citizens, is one of the subtexts of Roiphe's story). From the self-absorbed to the desperate, she chronicles her experiences with these men, even describing with refreshing honesty her sexual encounter with an attorney named M. The most bizarre of them (and the only one to which she does not attach an initial, a style borrowed from psychoanalytic writings) is a man from Albany, New York, who bombards her with email filled with increasingly virulent, even paranoid, right-wing propaganda. Although the two never meet, she seems oddly tempted by the notion of a relationship with him. It's puzzling that Roiphe, a passionate feminist, would have tolerated this onslaught of messages so at odds with her core beliefs for so long. As befits an author of 15 books of fiction and nonfiction, Roiphe's voice is rich with nuance. At times she's concise

A stunning book, beautifully written, and absolutely honest

There are few books that look at life, death, and aging squarely in the face, but this is one of them. Anne Roiphe has written a deeply felt account of her experience of widowhood. While the book is not cheerful, it is unexpectedly life affirming. Particularly engaging (and often funny) are her descriptions of many internet relationships developed on match.com. She doggedly continues to seek a life partner, despite the unsuitability of so many of her cyber suitors. She seems particularly drawn to a right-winger from Albany even though his e mails are filled with hate and venom. She recognizes the wounded soul beneath the anger and carries on the correspondence much longer than she probably should have. She continually grieves the loss of her psychoanalyst husband who she refers to as "H" throughout the book. In fact, all the individuals are identified only by their initials as if to both protect their privacy and reveal everything at the same time. The book shows us how we hold on to grief as we try to release it, how we retain our illusions as we try to shed them, and especially how those of us who continue to brave the storms and arrows of outrageous fortune choose to carry on. Let me offer an altered paraphrase of Whitman: who touches this book touches the heart and soul of a woman.