Terri Schlichenmeyer The Bookworm Sez
The face you woke up next to this morning is as familiar to you as your own.
Every eyelash and curve of the cheek, the tip of the nose, the wrinkles that bracket the smile, you can't get enough. You adore that face -- but as in the new memoir "The Widow's Guide to Dead Bastards" by Jessica Waite, how much do you really know the person behind it?
It was just an ordinary day, a bit chilly, and Jessica Waite was lunching with her mother and a friend when she went outside to check her voicemail. She picked up the first missed call -- and her life changed in an instant.
Waite's husband, Sean, had dropped to the floor in a Houston airport, unconscious. Efforts to revive him failed. He was forty-seven years old.
Where once Waite kept secrets from their respective families, she now had to call everyone to tell them Sean died. Despite marital problems, he'd been a good father, but now she'd have to raise their son alone. She once thought about divorcing him, or at least demanding that he get help, but now she only wanted him to come home. He had anger issues and a mercurial temper, and as she cleared his possessions, paperwork, and his computer, she learned that he also had a dual life.
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Sean, as Waite learned, betrayed her with a collection of adult entertainment on his laptop and an escort service appointment on his calendar. He had at least one regular girlfriend. He'd also been spending lavishly, and was tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
Waite was stunned and angry, but she still loved Sean, deeply, fully. But did he ever really love her? She couldn't forget their travels, the laughter, so many special moments. But she also couldn't forget epic fights, or this other life he'd cultivated.
"How," she asks, "does a devastated spouse forgive a dead one?"
If you're cringing right now -- whether from experience or imagination -- you're right to do so. "The Widow's Guide to Dead Bastards" is that kind of book -- at least at the start. The ending, on the other hand, is quite a surprise.
In author Jessica Waite's world, the trapdoor was set nearly a decade ago, and readers aren't spared the fall through it. What quickly becomes obvious, though, is that the door in the floor leads to a chasm where readers become privy to a curiously hateful love story precipitated by a man with two vastly divergent sides. Waite uses the resulting chaos to bat readers' emotions around inside a profane haze of therapy, disbelief, disillusionment, and new-age classes before taking us to an ending-not-ending that will poke at what you believe about an afterlife. It's graceful, grateful -- but also so galled.
"The Widow's Guide to Dead Bastards" is the kind of tale you might find in a whodunit, but it's all true. It's also perfect for anyone who's grieving, for New Age practitioners, and for anyone who's wisely, cautiously mindful that death is something we'll all face.
"The Widow's Guide to Dead Bastards" by Jessica Waite c.2024, Atria Books $29.99 311 pages
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