by Jessica Waite
ATRIA BOOKS
2024/$29.99/320 pp.
The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards is a step-by-step survival guide for a waking nightmare. Jessica Waite’s husband unexpectedly dies in the Denver airport on his way back to his family in Calgary—and as if that weren’t bad enough, what happens next is truly shocking. Waite unpacks in excruciating detail the hidden life of her husband she discovers piece by painful piece in the months following his death: all manner of major and minor betrayals relating to adultery, drug use, financial deception, addiction and mental health struggles.
Waite’s memoir is not for the faint of heart. Writing a highly personal story set in a big-small town such as Calgary is a brave and sometimes unfathomable project. While giving herself space to mourn the premature death of her husband, comfort her young child and maintain relationships with her in-laws, she also unwittingly unlocks a Pandora’s box of secrets that her husband has kept from her, in the process upending everything she thought about her marriage.
When I read Karl Ove Knausgård’s epic series My Struggle, I thought he was digging himself a deep hole, naming names in Norway’s small literary community. But Knausgård’s got nothing on Waite’s delving into her traumatic discoveries while trying to maintain the reputation of her former partner for the sake of her family and his. The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards is a tightrope walk that Waite manages masterfully.
To the reader’s relief, the second half of the book turns the focus from terrible discovery to patient and painful reckoning. Waite finds a new community of support from therapists, various healing philosophies and a small but loyal group of people who have experienced something similar. The strength of the book is her often shocking honesty. She doesn’t shy away from the nuance and complexity of her situation. She shares tender memories and fits of rage. She revels in petty revenge against one of her husband’s mistresses. She finds herself on dating apps approaching first dates and trying to figure out how to explain her unique brand of widowhood. She makes a “fuck you, Sean Waite” playlist and plays it loudly and often.
Waite’s book is not a trauma dump, and she avoids clichés and easy answers, delivering a clear-eyed memoir that looks trauma straight in the face and finds solutions both petty and profound. She does all of this while mothering a child through the grief for the man she is learning too much about. The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards avoids being all about the trainwreck simply because the author pops out of the derailed car and starts fixing the track herself. This is a book about healing, complicated relationships and moving forward.
Megan Clark is a writer and librarian from Lethbridge.
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