Epilogue: a Memoir

When sixty-nine year old novelist Anne Roiphe's husband dies, she is forced to rely totally on herself for the first time in her adult life. I almost slammed the book shut at the very beginning when Roiphe described how she never really had to use a key before or hail a taxi--my feminist body recoiled--but I'm glad I stuck with it. Roiphe is tough as nails and her description of that first year without her husband is sad, funny, interesting, and always described by a questing and perceptive intelligence. At first, the pain is so great that she thinks how easy it would be to leap out her window. Her children and step-children live nearby, but she does not want to burden them. Awkwardly, she returns to life: to dinner parties--being the only single person in a room full of couples. Then she starts online dating. She wonders if she is too set in her ways and too familiar with one person to ever deeply connect with another again. She corresponds with an arch-conservative from upstate New York, but one final rant by him turns her away. She meets one email contact in a coffee shop and he proceeds to grope her. A seventy-five year old retired school counselor decides he wants to have a relationship before he dies and invites her on a trip to Vietnam. "Would she? She would. She wouldn't. She won't." But mostly, Roiphe describes the dailiness of living alone, the way little things bring back memories: a recipe for glazed carrots scribbled in her husband's hand on a sheet of loose paper in a cookbook sets off new tears. Similar to Didion's Year of Magical Thinking but more down-to-earth and with more humor to balance the dark material.