The widow's guide to dead bastards A memoir

Review by Booklist Review

As shockingly forthright as its title implies, this memoir from a young widow explains how the author uncovered a cache of shameful secrets about her husband after he passed away unexpectedly. In 2015, Waite was notified that her husband had collapsed in an airport during a business trip. In sorting through his affairs, she made many disturbing and devastating discoveries about the man she thought she knew. Her depiction of pre- and post-death events provides context for and analysis of how she repeatedly failed to interpret now-obvious clues. Consumed by grief, she cycled through an exhaustive list of sources, including traditional avenues, alternative healing, and mysticism. Waite's journey is consistently riveting as it moves from grief to rage and searches ultimately for acceptance. She holds nothing back, despite the risk of personal embarrassment and rejection by her husband's family. Her disclosures will leave readers gobsmacked and empathetic for her righteous fury. Those who have experienced a significant loss either through death or extreme betrayal will glean comfort and courage from her moving account.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (July)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A complex memoir about mourning, mental illness, and shocking revelations. In her debut, fueled with anger and grief, Waite recounts her husband's sudden death from a heart attack at age 47; her stunned discovery of his secret past of infidelity, drug use, and credit card debt; and their marriage, which was roiled by the recurring symptoms of his bipolar disorder. Sean had struggled with manic episodes, depression, and OCD, but his symptoms, rather than appearing in long cycles, were "rapid-cycling," seeming more like unpredictable mood swings than an illness that required medical intervention. Without therapy and medication for Sean, she and their son were at the mercy of his volatile eruptions, which sometimes left her wondering if the marriage could last. Waite acknowledges the complexities of grieving when the relationship had been so rocky and after discovering that the husband she loved betrayed her with prostitutes, affairs, and an addiction to online pornography. She sought help from a therapist and grief counselors, went to Camp Widow, met with a death doula and a psychic, and tried drum circling, art journaling, shamanic healing, yoga, and massage, all in an effort "to recalibrate to my new reality." Grieving was complicated, as well, by recurrences of "unusual-seeming" encounters that convinced her that Sean was trying to contact her from the beyond: lightbulbs in her house burned out; in the library, suddenly feeling faint, she saw through blurred vision only one book, whose plot exactly mirrored her life at that moment. "I wasn't the only member of the Waite clan whose television turned on by itself," she admits, "nor the only one whose 'normal life' was interrupted by unexplainable phenomena." Other mourners, she suggests, may find solace in the uncanny possibility of a "reciprocal nurturing relationship between the living and the dead." A candid, raw chronicle of bereavement. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1. Four Missed Calls FOUR MISSED CALLS The soup is everything I'd hoped from a homestyle place like Guy's Café & Bakery in the mountain town of Cochrane, Alberta: translucent onion, garden peas, resolute carrot rounds, hearty golden stock. Earnest, nourishing goodness in a stoneware bowl. My hands have been cold since this morning, waiting with Dash, our nine-year-old son, for the school bus lights to pierce the purplish November morning. I cradle the stoneware, breathing in steamy chicken broth, warming my icy fingers, but the heat intensifies faster than I can-- ouch. The bowl clatters onto the table. Soup sloshes over the edge. I blow on my reddened fingertips. Across the table, my mom, Bonnie, and her friend are planning their golf trip for next summer. Their conversation doesn't involve me, but I don't want to be rude, so I peek at my phone under cover of the oak tabletop. The number 4, in a scarlet circle, glares up from the home screen. Shit . My stomach lurches. Something must have happened to Dash. We're more than an hour's drive from his elementary school. But the four missed calls share a Houston area code. Shouldn't Sean's flight be wheels up by now? I tap Mom's shoulder, in the black-and-white knitted sweater she borrowed from my closet this morning. She only ever packs summer clothes on her way through to warmer climes for the winter. "Sorry to interrupt. Someone from Texas is trying to reach me." "Oh, good. They must have found Sean's jacket," Mom offers, having overheard me on the phone with Sean, just before we left Calgary for Cochrane. A sigh of relief. Yes. The security manager of Sean's hotel, calling to arrange the return of his lost jacket. I button my coat as I slip outside to make the call. Sean had phoned from the airport shuttle, tetchy that his leather jacket had gone missing from his hotel room. He'd wanted the security manager to question housekeeping about it, but the guy had refused. "Their loss policy guarantees the customer is gone before they investigate the claim," Sean fumed. "It's bullshit." Odd that he gave the Marriott security guy my number. Sean must have anticipated being in airplane mode. I can already imagine the grin and the pat on the butt I'll get when I meet him at the airport. He spent a fortune on that black leather bomber. Wearing it with a scarf is one of his favorite things about autumn in Calgary, when the weather turns chilly, like today, November 4, 2015. I step out in front of the café to listen to the voicemail. A woman, who identifies herself as the ER charge nurse at Memorial Hermann hospital, drawls, "Cawl me back right away. Ms. Wa-ite." Oh, no. Sean's hurt. The Wi-Fi's not strong enough to scan headlines. Mass shooting. Airport bomb . I sit down on a pine bench near the entrance to the café and, with an unsteady hand, tap the number into my phone. The nurse says, "Ma'am, are you alone right now?" I say I'm with my mom. The nurse asks if I have a pen. I'm going to need to write some things down. But I'm not really with my mom, am I? Because I'm out here, and Mom's all the way inside the café, so actually I am alone and this nurse is very, very wrong . She's emphasizing the Vincent, saying "Sean Vincent Wa-ite." I mean, she doesn't even know his name, so what she's saying can't be true, and how dare she call and say these lies and demand that I write down the case number, but the numbers are coming so I draw them onto my notepad and repeat them back to her. Then, the call is over. I tuck my phone, notepad, and pen into the zippered pocket of my black leather purse. The slats of the wooden bench are hard and cold beneath me. I stare at the hood ornament on a red Dodge pickup in this strip-mall parking lot. The noon sun gleams off the ram's horns and makes my eyes twinge, but I don't reach for my sunglasses. I don't look away. I just stare. When the roar in my head quiets, I stand and walk through the doors, back into the smell of soup and cinnamon and coffee, past the lunching ladies, to the table where my mom and her friend are just finishing up. My chicken soup must have cooled enough to eat, but I don't sit down. "They said he died." A concerned frown behind my mom's glasses. She doesn't understand. I say the name to the pinched lines between my mom's brown eyes. "Sean." I put my hand on the back of a chair to steady myself. "They said Sean died. A heart attack, they think." Someone must have paid the bill because we're back in my van. I'm in the passenger seat. Mom pulls over to drop off her friend, and then we're on the highway back to Calgary. I watch the line between the shoulder and the road. I'm not crying. "Sean was an organ donor. I have to talk to those people. They gave me a case number. I'm supposed to call them right away...." If Mom answers, I don't hear her. Thoughts are rushing; I blurt them out as the pavement rolls by. "Why wouldn't they let me talk to the doctor? They said he never regained consciousness. Do you think the paramedics will talk to me?.... "Sean's work people in Denver. I don't even know them there. I'll have to look up the number on the website.... "How? How? He just had a full physical, ECG and everything. He was fine. Perfect health.... "So, what, I'm a widow now? No. That's not right. I'm just a wife." Bless my mom for keeping her eyes on the road and her hands on the wheel even when the sharp geyser of pain cuts its way up from my belly to my throat. Tears burst through, and I press my fingertips into my forehead as I choke out my dread, "Oh, God, Mom. How am I going to tell Dash?" Excerpted from The Widow's Guide to Dead Bastards by Jessica Waite All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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