Sarah O'Connor

I received this book from Simon and Schuster Canada in exchange for an honest review.

“Driving home, I’m caught in the crazy paradox: people want to be remembered when they’re gone, yet everyone’s afraid to talk about the dead. The fastest way to forget someone is to stop saying their name,” (Waite).

When Jessica Waite’s husband dies suddenly of a heart attack she’s heartbroken. But as she prepares for the funeral and adjusting to life as a single mother to her nine-year-old son, she learns that her late husband was living a secret life of drug addiction, infidelity, and debt. Her grief complicated, Jessica’s feelings towards her dead husband become overwhelming as she tries to understand the man she thought she knew with the secrets he was hiding. And when her late husband appears to be trying to contact her from the afterlife, Jessica doesn’t know whether or not she wants a sign from him.

Grief is a difficult thing to experience, even more to write about. While your world stops after a loved one dies the rest of the world keeps going, and eventually the people around you get tired of your sadness. This sounds callous, but having experienced it and reading Jessica Waite’s own experience of grief in which after six months her friends and family no longer had the patience, or even saw her as a potential threat to their husbands, is an unfortunate, frustrating truth.

I think Waite does an excellent job at detailing her complicated and prolonged grief. She mourns her husband while also hating the secrets he kept from her. She went through an insurmountable amount of stress and heartache and I feel deeply for the unfairness of all that she discovered after his death and understand her “revenge plans” and anger. The life she thought she had was turned upside down, and when her husband died she was left with the stress, the possibility of homelessness and STI’s while also mourning not just her husband but the man she thought she married.

I will say that the description for this book isn’t entirely accurate. While this memoir is about Waite discovering these secrets about her husband there is very little detail on the secrets discovered. Waite tells us that her husband had an affair with two co-workers and had a history of hiring escorts, that he had a porn addiction that was categorized on the hard drive of his computer, that he went over their overdraft, that he was addicted to marijuana, that he had bi-polar disorder and at what point threatened to kill her, but these are all things that are just mentioned. Waite doesn’t go into detail about any of these things except to just mention them, to mention that one of her friends helped clear the hard drive of the computer, another helped come up with a financial plan for her and her son, another helped her clean some of her late husbands rooms. But Waite doesn’t speak about how this stress has effected her mentally and emotionally, except for a passing mention of STI testing she doesn’t talk about the concern for that. But despite the summary, that didn’t seem to be the focus of Waite’s memoir. It was about complicated grief, not about the other fears and revelations the summary made it out to be. This doesn’t make the book disappointing, only if reader’s are expecting more insight into how Waite dealt with these revelations they will go away disappointed.

Waite offers an honest, complicated look at grief that isn’t always talked about. Grief is expected to look one way but it can be experienced in a variety of forms and I’m glad Waite shared her own experience with grief. While the last chapter is a bit repetitive (and not really needed, I suspect it’s from an essay Waite implied she’d written in the prior chapter) The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards let’s widow’s/widowers know that their grief is valid whether it fits the expected mold or not, and I’m sure many reader’s will find comfort in that.

Publication: July 30 2024
Publisher: Atria Books
Pages: 285 pages (NetGalley)
Source: Simon and Schuster Influencer Program
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Grief, Biography
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤⛤
Summary:

In the midst of mourning her husband’s sudden death, writer Jessica Waite discovered shocking secrets that undermined everything she thought she knew about the man she’d loved and trusted. From uncovered affairs to drug use and a pornography addiction, Waite was overwhelmed reconciling this devastating information with her new reality as a widowed single mom. Then, to further complicate matters, strange, inexplicable coincidences forced her to consider whether her husband was reaching back from beyond the grave.
With her signature candor and unflinching honesty, Waite details her tumultuous love story and the pain of adjusting to the new normal she built for herself and her son. A riveting, difficult, and surprisingly beautiful story, The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards is also a lyrical exploration of grief, mental health, single parenthood, and betrayal that demonstrates that the most moving love stories aren’t perfect—they’re flawed and poignantly real.