The widow's guide to dead bastards A memoir

Review by Booklist Review

As shockingly forthright as its title implies, this memoir from a young widow explains how the author uncovered a cache of shameful secrets about her husband after he passed away unexpectedly. In 2015, Waite was notified that her husband had collapsed in an airport during a business trip. In sorting through his affairs, she made many disturbing and devastating discoveries about the man she thought she knew. Her depiction of pre- and post-death events provides context for and analysis of how she repeatedly failed to interpret now-obvious clues. Consumed by grief, she cycled through an exhaustive list of sources, including traditional avenues, alternative healing, and mysticism. Waite's journey is consistently riveting as it moves from grief to rage and searches ultimately for acceptance. She holds nothing back, despite the risk of personal embarrassment and rejection by her husband's family. Her disclosures will leave readers gobsmacked and empathetic for her righteous fury. Those who have experienced a significant loss either through death or extreme betrayal will glean comfort and courage from her moving account.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Essayist Waite debuts with a bracing account of her husband's sudden death and the secrets she unearthed after he was gone. In 1995, a 22-year-old Waite met and fell for Sean while they were both teaching English in Japan. They married and spent 20 years cycling between happy days and rough patches, owing in part to jobs that required frequent travel and Sean's bipolar disorder. In 2015, Sean died of a heart attack, and as Waite combed through his belongings, she made some rattling discoveries: Sean kept massive stores of digital pornography, hoarded cannabis despite insisting he didn't use it, carried on multiple affairs, and lied about the couple's finances. Reeling, Waite threw herself into grief support groups and writing to cope with the betrayals. Eventually, she came to a fragile acceptance of her husband's messy humanity. "What if the function of grief... is to guide human beings to a deeper understanding of the nature of life," Waite asks in the book's final pages. With startling compassion and surprising wit ("I'm looking at nine vaginas at the same time... laid out in a three-by-three grid, like the Brady Bunch family," she writes of finding Sean's porn stash), Waite shows how such an understanding might be achieved. This stirring study of loss and forgiveness isn't easily forgotten. Agent: Stacey Kondla , Rights Factory. (July)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A complex memoir about mourning, mental illness, and shocking revelations. In her debut, fueled with anger and grief, Waite recounts her husband's sudden death from a heart attack at age 47; her stunned discovery of his secret past of infidelity, drug use, and credit card debt; and their marriage, which was roiled by the recurring symptoms of his bipolar disorder. Sean had struggled with manic episodes, depression, and OCD, but his symptoms, rather than appearing in long cycles, were "rapid-cycling," seeming more like unpredictable mood swings than an illness that required medical intervention. Without therapy and medication for Sean, she and their son were at the mercy of his volatile eruptions, which sometimes left her wondering if the marriage could last. Waite acknowledges the complexities of grieving when the relationship had been so rocky and after discovering that the husband she loved betrayed her with prostitutes, affairs, and an addiction to online pornography. She sought help from a therapist and grief counselors, went to Camp Widow, met with a death doula and a psychic, and tried drum circling, art journaling, shamanic healing, yoga, and massage, all in an effort "to recalibrate to my new reality." Grieving was complicated, as well, by recurrences of "unusual-seeming" encounters that convinced her that Sean was trying to contact her from the beyond: lightbulbs in her house burned out; in the library, suddenly feeling faint, she saw through blurred vision only one book, whose plot exactly mirrored her life at that moment. "I wasn't the only member of the Waite clan whose television turned on by itself," she admits, "nor the only one whose 'normal life' was interrupted by unexplainable phenomena." Other mourners, she suggests, may find solace in the uncanny possibility of a "reciprocal nurturing relationship between the living and the dead." A candid, raw chronicle of bereavement. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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