The Widow's Guide to Dead Bastards
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4.1 • 21 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
After the sudden death of her husband, a woman unearths surprising revelations about the man she was married to for seventeen years. A compulsively readable, darkly funny, posthumous love story about loss, grief, and unresolved relationships.
Jessica Waite’s successful, charismatic husband, Sean, is on his way home from a business trip when he collapses in a Houston airport. Having begun the day as a wife, by noon she is a widow and the sole living parent to their nine-year-old son. The day after Sean’s funeral, Jessica receives a box of his personal effects and discovers the secrets her husband had been hiding—including drug abuse, compulsive spending, infidelity, and a massive porn cache.
Jessica hides these revelations from her grief-stricken son while also trying to erase Sean from her own life. She rids their bedroom of his belongings. She grants herself a “divorce.” She conceives a revenge plan to unleash on Christmas Eve. But when things start happening that Jessica can’t explain—like signs from beyond and strange coincidences pointing her in the direction of forgiveness— she is forced to choose: Endure the bitter aftermath of her old life? Or reconsider her views?
Written with dark humor in the vein of Liz Feldman’s series Dead to Me and Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards is a searing and hilarious memoir that asks the question: Does death signify the end of a relationship, or can there be an afterlife epilogue?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A new widow’s surprising discoveries reset her life in this frank and eye-opening memoir. When her husband, Sean, died unexpectedly in a Houston airport, Jessica Waite was overwhelmed. But as the grieving mom started uncovering her late husband’s horrifying secrets—from affairs to drug use and more—her grief and anger taught her some lessons about the nature of love and marriage that would change her forever. In her unflinching memoir, Waite doesn’t shy away from the devastating nature of her sudden loss, or from the crushing betrayal of discovering her late husband’s hidden life. And yet, in addition to her candour, Waite also brings a sense of poetry to her journey, reconsidering everything she thought she knew about both life and death. Vulnerable and deeply moving, The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards is a beautifully intimate experience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Not for me
Maybe this book would be more meaningful for someone who lost a loved one, a partner, a lover. It left me uninspired and cranky. I think I’ll leave it at ‘I simply don’t get it.’