Epilogue: A Memoir - Hardcover

Roiphe, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061254622 ISBN 13: 9780061254628

Publisher: Harper, 2008

Synopsis

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, at age 70, she lost her husband of 40 years. Moving between heartbreaking memories of her marriage and the pressing needs of a new day-to-day routine, Epilogue takes readers on her journey into the unknown world of life after love.

About this title

About the Author

Anne Roiphe's seventeen books include Fruitful, a finalist for the National Book Award. She has written for the New York Times, the New York Observer, Vogue, Elle, Redbook, Parents, and The Guardian, and is a contributing editor to the Jerusalem Report. She lives in New York City.

From the Back Cover

Widowed novelist, near seventy, ex-Park Avenue girl, ex-beatnik, ex-many other things too complicated to list here, loves big parties, summers at the beach, grandchildren, seeks interesting man for dinner and a movie.

Anne Roiphe was not quite seventy years old when her husband of nearly forty years unexpectedly passed away. But it was not until her daughters placed a personal ad in a literary journal that Roiphe began to consider the previously unimagined possibility of a new man. Moving between heartbreaking memories of her marriage and the pressing needs of a new day-to-day routine, Epilogue takes us on her journey into the unknown world of life after love.

Roiphe decides to reenter the dating world. But between new lunches, coffee dates, and e-mail exchanges, she wrestles with an unsettling loneliness. Recollections of marriage evoke complex, unexpected emotions on her journey through grief toward new companionship. In beautifully wrought vignettes, she recalls hailing a cab for the first time and learning to lock and unlock the front door—tasks her husband had always done.

Eloquent and astute, Epilogue tells the story of love rekindled and life remade. Roiphe offers us an elegant literary pastiche not of grief, but of hope and renewal.

Reviews

Starred Review. Grief is in two parts, writes Roiphe (Fruitful; 1185 Park Avenue). The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life. In her new memoir of late-life widowhood, she encounters the latter. Roiphe's husband, H (Herman), died of a heart attack after 39 years of marriage. He left stacks of publications forwarded from his office that she can't help reading—psychoanalytic case histories in which patients are known only by initials. She lives in a stunned, rhythmless disconnect, unsure how to mark time, sleep or stave off fear and loneliness. Thoughts of suicide comfort her as her former sense of independence evaporates. She struggles to manage her finances, decide where to live, keep up with the contents of her refrigerator and learn countless tasks that had always been H's. Courtship, sex and gender roles confound her as she ventures to date men she meets through Match.com and the personal ad that her daughters place on her behalf. She considers her role in her family, her circle of friends, her new sisterhood of widows and the broader world in which she has no right to complain. In poignant flashes of everyday moments and memories, Roiphe tells an unflinching and unsentimental story of widowhood's stupefying disquiet, of surviving love and living on. (Sept.) ""
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Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061254622
• ISBN 13: 9780061254628
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224