I abandoned this one without really reading it. It might be the greatest memoir ever written in the history of the world but I'll never know.

It is a massive personal pet peeve of mine when authors remove names from their memoirs. Change them? By all means, go ahead! But when the book is nothing but a series of:

K said this to H and H said "aww hell no bee-otch" and L and B got into a fight over who could eat the most amount of raw bacon in under 30 seconds.

It drives me insane - just give them a new name! At least it's a little better than the authors who do the dreaded "T---- went to B--- L---- Elementary on G--- Rd in Wa-------".

Maybe. I don't know which one is worse but it definitely makes me less inclined to finish a book.

Anne is not quite 70 when her husband of 40 yrs dies. This is a memoir about the next 18 months or so. I really enjoyed her writing skill. Descriptions of emotions and sense of places were beautiful. ( )

Roiphe’s husband dies unexpectedly and she is terribly lonely. Her daughters try to help her by taking out a personal ad for her. She tries to help herself by going online and using a service. She gets calls and she goes on dates. It is all a tremendous disappointment.Time passes and Roiphe gives up on the outside dating help. She gradually comes to find a peace in her solitariness. She decides to wait and see if love comes to her. ( )

A raw and painful book of loss and grief. Roiphe is so honest, so brutal, so courageous in sharing with the reader the depth of her sorrow.

The lost, disjointed emptiness that follows the loss of a lifetime love is so well-expressed I felt myself nodding in agreement over and over. It was so interesting to read about her progress through the dark tunnel of pain, experiencing so much that I experienced but describing it so much better than I ever could.

I enjoyed her forays into dating, in response to a personal ad placed by her daughters. They were amusing and sad and infuriating and comforting. Men suffer in their losses too - an obvious concept that I somehow hadn't thought of before.

This book is hard to read at times, but if you've been there, you will find comfort and an easing of your loneliness. ( )

This book nearly knocked me down with its brutal honesty, with its bravery. But the stunning sadness of its subject will make it a hard sell. I'm not sure who will want to read at such length of grief. Anne Roiphe is a strong woman, of course. I knew her work only form a couple of her earliest novels: UP THE SANDBOX and LONG DIVISION. Both were early novels of feminism. So I was quite unprepared for this utterly human story of love and loss. There are a few moments here that are funny - her attempts at trying to get back into the dating scene, for example. But even those are ultimatley rather sad. I wonder if some people might lower their rating of a book like this simply because of its subject. Well, I won't be one of them. Because this is a powerful and beautifully written study of grief following the loss of one's soulmate and spouse. Roiphe is, I think, still trying to cope, to get out from under her grief. But I wonder. Does one ever "get over" something like this? This is five-star quality writing, despite the sadness of its topic. But I will be careful about whom I recommend it to. The emotions expressed here; the buttons it might push are too powerful and raw. I will not soon forget Epilogue. ( )