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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tenderberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I have as my guest, Joyce Carol Oates, who's written a memoir called A Widow's Story.

It's an extraordinary book.

It seems nearly impossible to imagine it being written

because it comes close to an experience that is painful

to every experiencer of widowhood, of the death of a loved one.

And the things that one experiences seem simultaneously monstrous and unbelievable

and yet at the same time trivial.

And it seems as if to immerse oneself in this material, one would have to undergo the kind of

suffering that one's hoping to escape. How did you write it? Well, that's very beautifully put,

Michael. I didn't, in a sense, write the memoir.

The only two or three chapters were written in a conventional way,

providing background information about Ray and me in our marriage and living in Detroit.

But basically, the memoir that you have is an assemblage of journal entries written in a kind of breathless

way by someone who didn't know what was going to happen the next day.

...