The Widow's Guide to Dead Bastards

Starred review from May 20, 2024
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.

December 6, 2024

Essayist Waite's debut memoir details her journey through grief, rage, and compassion after her husband's sudden death. Narrator Cassandra Campbell describes the author being confronted with the awful secrets that her husband had been hiding, from affairs and drug use to a substance use disorder and a draw to porn. These painful discoveries called into question their seemingly perfect marriage and complicated the grieving process. Campbell's narration is as witty, lyrical, and raw as the author's words about contemplating their life together and struggling to wade through waves of grief while caring for her son and desperately seeking closure. The audiobook stresses that grief is not linear, nor is it the same for everyone, as Waite tries everything from traditional group therapy to drum circling, yoga, Shamanic healing, and more. As she comes to the first anniversary of her husband's death, listeners will hear how she's healed yet is still impacted by his fraught legacy. In the epilogue, listeners are also given glimpses into how the various family members are doing. VERDICT A tender and candid memoir, openly discussing mental health, human frailty, and the enduring connection between the living and the dead.--Elyssa Everling

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