Jonathan Santlofer

Harvard Book Store welcomes acclaimed writer and artist JONATHAN SANTLOFER for a discussion of his new memoir The Widower's Notebook. He will be joined in conversation by award-winning writer JOAN WICKERSHAM, whose memoir The Suicide Index was a National Book Award finalist.

About The Widower's Notebook

Written with unexpected humor and great warmth, The Widower's Notebook is a portrait of a marriage, an account of the complexities of finding oneself single again after losing your spouse, and a story of the enduring power of familial love.

On a summer day in New York, Jonathan Santlofer discovers his wife, Joy, gasping for breath on their living room couch. After a frenzied 911 call, an ambulance race across Manhattan, and hours pacing in a hospital waiting room, a doctor finally delivers the fateful news. Consumed by grief, Jonathan desperately tries to pursue life as he always had—writing, social engagements, and working on his art—but finds it nearly impossible to admit his deep feelings of loss to anyone, not even to his beloved daughter, Doria, or to himself.

As Jonathan grieves and heals, he tries to unravel what happened to Joy, a journey that will take him nearly two years.

Praise

“The Widower’s Notebook, Jonathan Santlofer’s searingly truthful chronicle of mortality, is, among its wonders, a book about the preciousness of life and love, rendered all the more heart-wrenching, and all the more vital, by a loss almost beyond imagining. It’s a true, tragic beauty.” —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours

“The Widower’s Notebook is a searing rendition of the complex relationship between men and grief—an intense despair that is too often starved for words. This chronicle of devastation is itself devastating, a deeply powerful and unflinchingly honest report of how painfully and strangely life continues in the wake of a sudden, tragic death.” —Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winner

"The Widower’s Notebook is an intimate, honest, heart-wrenching, and at times even funny account of grieving as well as the memoir of long, satisfying, loving marriage. This is an important and welcome addition to the literature of loss and grief from the male point of view. I will be giving this Notebook to friends reeling from loss but also to old and new couples who need models of how to weather the many little deaths and losses that occur as they journey a life together. Santlofer has given us a brave, beautiful gift, heartfelt and invaluable." —Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and Saving the World