Joyce Carol Oates and Raymond Smith

Yesterday I wrote about the special fiction issue of The Atlantic (May 2010) that is available now. One of the pieces in that issue, as I mentioned in my post, is an essay by Joyce Carol Oates about the painful time following the 2008 death of her husband of 48 years, Raymond Smith. I found this essay heartbreaking and fascinating. Oates describes how she mourned her husband with a kind of stunned grief, and found that the only thing that saved her was her teaching and her efforts to put out what she decided would be the last issue of the Ontario Review, the literary journal she and Smith had produced and edited together for 34 years as a shared labor of love. She did not feel she could continue the Ontario Review without Smith, but she knew he would want her to finish and send the last issue, which he had been working on even in the hospital in the days before his death. This Atlantic essay is a preview of a book on Oates' loss, titled "The Siege: A Widow's Story," to appear in February 2011. I can't help but be reminded of Joan Didion's compelling 2005 book, "The Year of Magical Thinking," written on the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne. Oates and Didion are both such great writers, each in her own way so emblematic of her time and so influential; it is of note that they both suffered their great losses within a few years of each other, and that both have written so openly and so wrenchingly about their bereavement. An interesting postscript is that Oates has very recently remarried, to a scientist also teaching at Princeton, and thus is starting a new phase in her life. One more note: For Oates' readers, I recommend a website written and administered by a librarian at the university where I teach, Randall Souther, called "Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Home Page" (http://jco.usfca.edu/).