Unremarried Widow: A Memoir by Artis Henderson

(Simon & Schuster, $25)

Unremarried Widow is “guaranteed to join the ranks of memoirs that will be talked about for years to come,” said Meganne Fabrega in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Author Artis Henderson was just 26 and had been married only four months when her aviator husband, Miles, was killed in a 2006 helicopter crash while serving in Iraq. Not long before, Artis had worried whether she and Miles were compatible enough for marriage; now she was thrown into a world of grief. “There is no greater hurt than knowing you have been loved and the source of that love disappearing,” she writes, in a sentence that’s “so plain and so true that it is impossible to continue reading without feeling your heart break a little.”

The story Henderson shares here is both “as old as the hills and uniquely of our times,” said Karen Brady in The Buffalo News. Many of us need to hear it now again because we’re “never this close to the sorrow and upheaval a military loss brings.” Henderson hardly expected to face such loss herself. An aspiring writer who had been “vehemently” against the war, she wound up falling in love with a conservative Texan who felt the call of duty, and she followed him into a life among other military families. Her chronicle of their time together captures the challenges of being an Army spouse: the moves, the constant uncertainty. “Henderson sugarcoats nothing,” and remains matter-of-fact even when the news of Miles’s death reaches her midway through the story.

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If anything, Unremarried Widow feels “a little distant,” said Lily Burana in The New York Times. Though the book “unfurls into a powerful look at mourning,” we experience the depth of her emotion mostly through clipped accounts of the investigation into the crash and of her interactions with other widows. Still, it would be hard to name another memoirist “so committed to detail,” so engaged in close observation. And Henderson’s stoicism ultimately serves us well. It’s as if she chose to hold back her emotions “so the reader’s own feelings could flood in and finish the job.”