All of This: a Memoir of Death & Desire, by Rebecca Woolf
I began following Rebecca Woolf in her mommy-blogger days. I felt as if she were a kindred spirit, a tattooed-writer-rebel slammed into motherhood at a young age. When I first began this book, I didn’t realize it was the same mother I used to turn to for baby name inspiration and jewelry recommendations. The book, All of This: a Memoir of Death and Desire, had crossed my path because it is the memoir of a widow but from the first pages, I was sucked in to Woolf’s story.
The first half is a fresh perspective on facing death as the partner of someone suddenly dying in their 40s. Woolf’s blunt and bold accounting of her husband’s swift decline (one of the first times a death doula has appeared in a grief memoir!) felt as tender as it was tough. Often times memoirs paint a rosy picture and the dead person becomes venerated by their early death; this is not the case here, Woolf’s husband is angry, shocked, grieving and selfish as he dies. In truth, most of us are but those parts of the story are rarely recalled. Woolf does not only turn a candid eye toward her husband but also to herself, as a widow she is enraged, full of sexual desire and ready to burn down the patriarchy. Where the first half of the book is the story of a dying man, the second half is of a woman reborn.
Death and desire are both tagged in the title but feel paradoxical. Woolf seamlessly connects the two, her experience with death igniting a desire to feel alive, to live for herself. At times, her sexual experiences felt like oversharing and her raw hurt felt slightly unhealed, as if maybe she wasn’t quite ready to write this book. But maybe I’m just not quite ready to read it. Though I did, and I’d recommend it to anyone whose relationship with widowhood involves divorce/abuse. I also recommend it for women who are uncovering the self that lies beneath the world’s expectations of us. A fascinating read, deeply raw and vulnerable, Woolf perfectly captures the contradiction of grief in complicated relationships.
