wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Joyce Carol Oates, if ever brave, was so at the start of her career. Now, long since the lost days, Oates has authored what I currently consider a vanity. This memoir, or any reflective musings, are best practiced and penned by anyone other than a fiction writer.

It adds nothing to a life lived reading subjective­, plodding texts, inclusive of every cankering slight, life shift, the unfortunat­e death of a spouse or a sudden awareness that the entire populated earth has experience­d. Leave the author to her niche, though indeed unrecogniz­ed by the larger awards, her short stories and the dentist to his legitimate­ly earned memoir.

I was widowed suddenly and unexpectedly after 2 years of marriage, and so was interested to read both JCO's memoir and Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" About the sudden death of her husband. As someone who, like most women, was forced to returned to work two weeks after my husband's death, I was struck by how much time and money both Ms. Oates and Ms. Didion were able to dedicate toward grieving. I was also impressed by the number of friends who came to their aid and (despite a lot of complaints about signing documents) and basically nursed both women for months. Widows-to-be.....trust me, this is not the usual way things go. And it does make a difference that JCO had only 6 months as a widow truly alone, and then met her next husband at a dinner party. That was slightly alluded to on the very last page of her book, but as critics have pointed out, should have been mentioned a little less coyly---one of the fears many widows have is that they will never find anyone again, and to have any supportive man on the horizon is a wonderful thing. If all this sounds like JCO criticism of her life, it is not meant to be--and for heaven's sake, she and her new bridegroom are in their 70's--I wish them all the luck and love in the world!

Wow, what a wasted opportunity. JCO is a declared humanist or atheist. Instead of asking about the hospital and what kind of pneumonia her husband had, it would have been much more interesting if Leonard had asked if her husband's death had in any way changed her worldview. Don't be afraid to go deep -- the surface stuff tends to be quite dull. Thank you

hard to see her at a fight so incongrous she's interesting for sure

One wonders if Ms. Oates married Dr. Charles Gross as JCO or as Joyce Carol Smith. It is almost as if Joyce Carol Smith died when Ray Smith died, or perhaps that aspect of her personality just fled.

twhaat a waste of time on the radio

Not let you husband know you're being stalked? How would he have felt if you had gotten killed? Strange.

After reading Ms. Oates's crushing account of her husband's death in the New Yorker I don't think I could get through a book-length account without running out of the house and drowning myself.