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“A frank, poignant memoir about an unlikely marriage, a tragic death in Iraq, and the soul-testing work of picking up the pieces” (People) in the tradition of such powerful bestsellers as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Carole Radziwill’s What Remains.
Artis Henderson was a free-spirited young woman with dreams of traveling the world and one day becoming a writer. Marrying a conservative Texan soldier and becoming an Army wife was never part of her plan, but when she met Miles, Artis threw caution to the wind and moved with him to a series of Army bases in dusty Southern towns, far from the exotic future of her dreams. If this was true love, she was ready to embrace it.
But when Miles was training and Artis was left alone, she experienced feelings of isolation and anxiety. It did not take long for a wife’s worst fears to come true. On November 6, 2006, the Apache helicopter carrying Miles crashed in Iraq, leaving twenty-six-year-old Artis—in official military terms—an “unremarried widow.”
In this memoir Artis recounts not only the unlikely love story she shared with Miles and her unfathomable recovery in the wake of his death—from the dark hours following the military notification to the first fumbling attempts at new love—but also reveals how Miles’s death mirrored her own father’s, in a plane crash that Artis survived when she was five years old and that left her own mother a young widow. Unremarried Widow is “a powerful look at mourning as a military wife….You can finish it in a day and find yourself haunted weeks later” (The New York Times Book Review).
- Sales Rank: #1068574 in Books
- Published on: 2015-01-13
- Released on: 2015-01-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.75" h x .80" w x 5.75" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
From Booklist
On the surface, Henderson has crafted a deeply moving memoir of love and grief that takes readers into the life of a military wife turned widow in a way that both embraces and transcends expectations. Shifting back and forth to before and after her husband’s death, she revisits her unlikely romance with a man whom she adored but who nevertheless led her away from the life she had planned and the career options she sought. Henderson fell in love with a soldier but not with military life, and her struggle to fit into his world continued right up until his death in a non-combat-related helicopter accident in Iraq. Her willingness to reveal the complexities of her marriage as well as the raw emotion of her loss makes for a compelling page-turner. Book clubs will find much to discuss here. As much about life as it is about death, Unremarried Widow is a wholly American story that will find broad appeal with every reader who has ever wondered if she made the right choice. --Colleen Mondor
Review
“There are many wonderful memoirs lining the shelves of bookstores today, but how many of these true stories can be deemed so powerful as to move a reader to tears? Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is one that comes to mind, and, more recently, Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala's memoir of immense loss in the 2004 tsunami. Artis Henderson's stunning debut memoir, Unremarried Widow, is guaranteed to join the ranks of memoirs that will be talked about for years to come. . . . Truly unforgettable.” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune)
“A powerful look at mourning as a military wife. . . . You can finish it in a day and find yourself haunted weeks later.” (New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice))
"A frank, poignant memoir about an unlikely marriage, a tragic death in Iraq and the soul-testing work of picking up the pieces." (People)
“Artis Henderson makes her debut with this poignant, deeply felt memoir about the death of her young solider-husband." (ChristianScienceMonitor.com)
"Charm and candor reside in abundance. . . . A singular, transformative account." (San Francisco Chronicle)
“Artis Henderson's grief becomes our gift in her piercingly beautiful memoir. . . . It is exceptional both because Henderson is a fine, spare and unsentimental writer—and because many if not most of us are never this close to the sorrow and upheaval a military loss brings.” (The Buffalo News)
“The book is a brave, unforgettable rendering of a young woman's difficult struggle to let go of one life and slowly embrace another. Not to mention the terrible, human cost of prolonged war.” (Palm Beach Post (Book of the Month))
“Artis Henderson’s book is easily the best memoir I read last year. It’s one of those books you pick up and don’t put down until you’re done. And, believe me, you are done. Henderson underwrites every scene, and, because her writing is so clean and controlled, each sentence tightens her grip on your heart. When she releases you, expect to be blinded by tears.” (HeadButler.com)
“Spanning six years, the memoir includes Artis's eventual move into a successful writing career, but the image that lingers is of the war widow, the sorrow she so eloquently and generously expresses, and the realization that the war that claimed Miles continues.” (ShelfAwareness.com)
“Honest, poised, and graceful . . . There’s profound and hard-won wisdom in these pages.” (Elle)
“In her fluid prose Henderson portrays a moving journey to selfhood that strikes the reader as authentic and emotionally honest.” (Publishers Weekly)
“A beautiful debut from an exciting new voice.” (Kirkus Reviews (starred review))
“A deeply moving memoir of love and grief that takes readers into the life of a military wife turned widow in a way that both embraces and transcends expectations. . . . Her willingness to reveal the complexities of her marriage as well as the raw emotion of her loss makes for a compelling page-turner. Book clubs will find much to discuss here. . . . A wholly American story that will find broad appeal with every reader who has ever wondered if she made the right choice.” (Booklist)
“Reading Unremarried Widow is like coming across an unexpectedly powerful monument in a cemetery—you stand there imagining someone else’s story, and suddenly you realize that it’s our story, that it connects us to something large and lasting, even as it separates us from an irreclaimable past.” (Rhoda Janzen, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress)
“Unremarried Widow is a beautifully crafted memoir of uncommon candor and power. Everyone should read this book for what it says about our profound capacity for love, and to remind us all of just how much we ask of those who serve in harm’s way—and of the loved ones they leave behind.” (Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club)
“Artis Henderson’s remarkable memoir allows readers into the seldom-seen and unexpected world of the war widow. Henderson’s eloquently rendered grief honors the soldiers lost and the resilient widows who carry on, all while she reassembles her life by pursuing a dream of writing.” (Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone)
“With unflinching openness, Artis Henderson allows us into a world not often explored from the poignant perspective of the unremarried widow. Her personal journey of loss and love is deeply affecting in its honesty and humanity, and her straightforward style is deceptively profound, effective long after the last page is read.” (Marian Fontana, New York Times bestselling author of A Widow’s Walk)
“Artis Henderson’s extraordinary book takes its title from the dry, bureaucratic language of the military. But she invests that phrase with two kinds of soaring passion. One is the love story of herself and her husband Miles, opposites who attract with a chemistry that shimmers off the page. The other is the mourning story of her life after Miles’s death and it is unsparing in its heartbreak. Together, the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of Henderson’s life add up to an urgent act of witness, a saga of what the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have meant to that too-small portion of America that made and bore all the sacrifices.” (Samuel G. Freedman, author of Breaking the Line and Who She Was)
“Artis Henderson’s Unremarried Widow is as engrossing as a good novel, but the story it tells is true and raw. In giving us an intimate, complex glimpse into the culture of military wives, and in writing about charged subjects—war, grief, gender, and our sometimes conflicting allegiances—with honesty and without judgment, she makes us witness to matters that touch all of our lives, whether we dare to acknowledge them or not.” (Leah Hager Cohen, author of The Grief of Others)
“When I picked up Artis Henderson's brave, beautiful memoir about the death of her husband in Iraq, I expected to be devastated, and I was. Unremarried Widow is an unwavering look at young love and young loss, the physicality of grief, and what it means to be left behind. What I didn't expect was to be inspired. Henderson's story is also one of strength—the strength it takes to fall in love, to let it go, to follow your passion, to move on.” (Molly Birnbaum, author of Season to Taste)
About the Author
Artis Henderson is an award-winning journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Florida Weekly, and the online literary journal Common Ties. She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a graduate degree from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. She lives in New York.
Most helpful customer reviews
64 of 69 people found the following review helpful.
The best memoir I read in 2013 --- and refreshingly un-literary
By Jesse Kornbluth
In 2004, in a club in Tallahassee, 24-year-old Artis Chester met 23-year-old Miles Henderson. He was thin and wiry, handsome "with blue eyes that reminded me of the Gulf in winter." She was, she says, "not the kind of girl that men pick up." But he was, to her delight, employed -- he'd stayed in school in Colorado only until his ski lift ticket expired. They danced. She let him kiss her. And she revised her opinion. "I am that kind of girl."
Nine months before he deployed to Iraq, Miles dreamed of his death. He shared his dream with Artis: "Our helicopter crashed. We floated above the helicopter while it burned to the ground." But although she took the dream as a warning, she knew how to neutralize it: "If I loved him well enough, he would come home."
On July 1, 2006, they got married.
Three weeks later, Miles deployed to Iraq.
Four months and five days later, Miles died in a helicopter crash.
"Everything will be okay." Those are her first words when two soldiers come to tell her of her husband's death. But it won't be okay. It may never be. Eight years later, she is still, to use the official Army term, an "unremarried widow."
Artis Henderson's book is easily the best memoir I read last year. It's one of those books you pick up and don't put down until you're done. And, believe me, you are done. Henderson underwrites every scene, and, because her writing is so clean and controlled, each sentence tightens her grip on your heart. When she releases you, expect to be blinded by tears.
But loss is not the only takeaway. Miles is so decent, their marriage is so promising and Artis is so compelling that "Unremarried Widow" has an unexpected effect -- it's a completely fulfilling, exhilarating reading experience.
Artis Henderson said she was willing to answer a few questions. Mine were tough, and one of them -- the last -- was outright brutal. She never flinched or dissembled.
JK: The "grief memoir" is now a publishing commodity. I responded to yours because it seemed different -- it doesn't have literary pretensions. I read it as if it were a letter you wrote to me, just to me. Did you have a memoir you used as a model? How did you decide on a form that seems un-crafted?
AH: I'm glad to hear the book doesn't have literary pretensions. I think it's because I don't have any. I'm pretty insecure about my literary pedigree. I don't have an MFA, I didn't study literature in college. Growing up, I loved to read--but I liked books and authors that were more popular than literary: Stephen King, James Clavell, Jean M. Auel.
The form of the book was more intuitive than deliberate. At the very beginning, when the proposal sold but I hadn't started to write -- when I was in a general panic -- I asked a mentor where to begin. "Just tell the story," he said. And that's what I did.
JK: When you were five years old, your father -- a former commercial pilot -- took you for a ride in his Piper Cub. It crashed. He died. It took doctors six weeks to repair your spine. Months of recovery followed. Two decades later, you met an Army helicopter pilot. If I had been in that situation, I like to think I'd run the other way. You married Miles. How was his risky job not an issue for you?
AH: You wouldn't have run the other way.
I've met many guys in my life, plenty of nice guys, lots of smart guys. I've met men who will listen, who will talk, who will make me laugh. But there was something about Miles, an ease, a genuineness, an unquestionable self-assurance, that let me know he was worth looking past his risky job.
JK: As Miles is about to board the bus with his unit, you write: "Fear filled me then, hot and raw, and swept through my body, leaving me shaken and hollowed." Did you expect that he would be killed?
AH: No. Other than the moment before Miles boarded the bus, I never thought for a second that he would be killed. It was inconceivable to me, largely because of my father. I had this idea that my family had paid its dues in tragedy and that it was too improbable for both my father and my husband to die in avian crashes. When the soldiers came to notify me, other than disbelief, I was sure it must have been an IED blast or a sniper shot.
JK: You write that you were "all hurt." You "wail." You say: "It would have hurt less if I had been cleaved in two." And more like that, much more. What was it like to type those sentences?
AH: It was a rough experience to write the book. I wept a lot. When I was near the end, my mother made a comment in passing about me having a nervous breakdown. I thought she was joking, but when I looked at her I could tell she was serious. I think I may have lost my mind in a sort of low-grade way during the writing. Or maybe I lost my mind when Miles died, and writing the book was my way of putting it back together.
JK: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has described five stages of grief. What's your experience?
AH: I think she got it right, even when we can't see it for ourselves. I remember saying about a year in that I had skipped the anger stage, and my mother just looked at me. Two or three years later, I realized that I had been angry all the time. Not at Miles, but at everyone else.
JK: After Miles dies, there's knocking in your house at night. The microwave turns on by itself. The lights go dim. Your thoughts?
AH: What can I say? I was haunted. One thing I left out of the book -- when Jimmy Hyde came for a visit, the microwave went crazy. I finally had to unplug it. When Miles's mother came for a visit, too. I let go of a lot of rational thoughts after Miles died.
JK: On the first anniversary of your marriage, you remove your ring. This, it strikes me, is the bottom. You begged for help, chanted a wordless prayer, felt "pure grief." And then?
AH: And then, God damn it, I had to get on with living my life. I kept thinking I would strike some unbelievably low point and the heavens would open up and Miles would come back. Or I would be taken away. This was the moment when I realized that was never going to happen.
JK: After his death, you wrote to Miles: "I'm afraid I didn't love you enough to save you." What would "loving you enough" have involved?
AH: I wish I knew. On some deep and hurtful level I try not to examine too often, I still believe his death was a personal failure. If only I had done something -- what? -- I could have saved him.
JK: Are you still unremarried? If so, could you describe your current interest -- or lack of -- in being a wife again?
AH: I haven't remarried. Being a wife takes certain life compromises, and I'm not sure if I still have that in me. For a while after Miles died I fantasized about remarrying and starting a family. Now I wonder if perhaps that just isn't in my cards.
JK: You mention that you opposed the Iraq War. But you don't go on to say what I would have: "The war was a fraud. At the ultimate level, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are responsible for my husband's death. My husband died for nothing." Is that what you think? If so, why didn't you say that in the book?
AH: This is an important -- and difficult -- question. If I say the war was for nothing, then I dismiss the sacrifices of the men and women who fought and those who died. Miles didn't think the war was based on deceit. Most of the soldiers I've talked to didn't, either. In fact, many of them were strong Bush supporters. Some have said to me that we can never know the complex reasons for going to war and that there were benefits to the Iraq conflict that most of us will never see. I have to believe this. Because if I don't, if I let myself say that the war was a mistake, that my husband's death served no purpose, that men who had no real concept of combat sent soldiers to fight and die for a cause they could barely define, then I would carry nothing but hate in my heart.
28 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
Heartbreaking, which isn't the same as depressing
By Nathan Webster
I embedded in Iraq several times as a photojournalist, and met a variety of young soldiers (plus I was in the Army myself during Desert Storm), and was always amazed by how many were married with children. One of the often overlooked experiences from these wars is the story of young widows (and widowers) who go on living, in just their early 20s, after their spouse has died.
I'm not saying we've 'forgotten' these 'left-behind' men and women exist, but I don't think we know what really goes on after the funeral and folded flag, and the perfunctory 'sorry for your sacrifice.' We feel sad, and we sympathize, but we've held them on such a pedestal that it's impossible to empathize. They're martyrs, not normal people.
Artis Henderson's story does as good a job of relating the other side of that experience as I've ever read.
A few other reviews of "Unremarried Widow" point out what they perceive as a "lack" of emotion that Henderson shows. That might be a fair point, but it's what I consider the book's strongest trait. Henderson isn't resorting (and I'm not saying other men/women have) to melodrama or pleas for sympathy, or patriotic martyrdom - instead she's relating about as awful a story as there is with an honest and blunt dispassion that pulls the reader closer to her experience. I never found myself saying "oh, poor Artis," from a detached point of view, but instead my heart was breaking along with her, because the story was so straightforward, detailed and expressive - but never telling me how I should feel. The events did that, not any demand from her. I guess it's hard to explain exactly what I mean, that "less emotion is more emotion," but that was how I felt.
She alludes to problems and challenges in her young marriage, enough to make me think it might not have lasted if her husband Miles had returned - and many, many marriages fell victim to exactly the problems she describes. So why not hers? I think her honesty in showing these potential problems makes this a story of a real marriage, not a fairy tale of a too-perfect romance.
It also shows the often unpleasant nature of soldiers, and the judgmental attitudes and selfish scheming they often display; from experience, I know it's accurate.
As I read, at first I didn't like her inclusion of a fellow widow whose husband died in the same helicopter crash. She was presented in a bitter fashion that seemed exploitative at times - but, in the acknowledgements I discovered that this woman was one of Henderson's readers and resources, and it's clear that's how this woman intended her story to be portrayed. That changed how I viewed those parts of the story, and I respected both women for showing how each worked through their grief in a different way.
This was a book that has stuck with me after reading it, in a way few books do. It doesn't go for high swooping cascades of melodrama, and that's because it doesn't need to - the true story is all it needs. Maybe some civilian readers need an extra layer of "emotion" that some felt Henderson doesn't provide, to better connect with a military lifestyle that's certainly difficult for most to relate to. But I don't think that should be necessary. I think Henderson's clear-eyed storytelling approach does the job.
The book and story is heartbreaking, which isn't the same thing as depressing. I wish civilian audiences would be interested in a book like this, because when we're talking about "Iraq" we're talking about hard stories like these. I think about that star-crossed country, and all its associated fates, all the time.
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
One of the most powerful and heartwrenching memoirs I've read, recommending it to everyone I know
By Kcorn
I hesitated to read a book where I knew a significant part would focus on grief. But that initial reluctance disappeared quickly as I was drawn into this memoir, one written with unflinching honesty and depth by Artis Henderson. It isn't a watered down or rosy portrait of a military wive's marriage.
Even though Henderson sometimes chafed at the rules and regulations - and frequent moves - which were integral parts of her life, she also loved her husband, Miles, deeply and passionately. For me, that love shone even more brightly when set against the challenges Henderson and Miles faced, long before he was deployed to Iraq.
I'm grateful I was able to read an early copy of this book. It is one of those finely wrought books which allow readers to be totally immersed in the author's life. Henderson vividly describes how she lived before meeting her husband, working 40 hours a week for a U.S. senator, feeling so lonely that she often spent her weekends in the library reading travel guides. But then there is the night she goes out dancing and meets Miles. And even though he seemed far different from the man she imagined marrying, it also seemed instantly natural and right that they would end up together.
At this point, you might be thinking, "Cue the violins and romantic music". Lonely young woman meets handsome man and romance saves the day. But Artis had been against the Iraq war and Miles was determined to serve his country. How on earth could two people with such different backgrounds make a relationship work?
Rather than being a strictly chronological account of her relationship with Miles, Henderson adds an extra dimension to this memoir by including sections focused on her childhood and teen years and her difficult relationship with her mother. There is a tragedy Henderson suffered early in life and it took me by surprise. There was no hint or foreshadowing of that moment and I won't spoil that section by going into more detail.
I will only add that there isn't a wasted word in this book and it moved me to the core. I probably received plenty of stares as I cried openly while reading it in coffee shops and doctors' offices. I was awed by the author's willingness to open her heart and not turn away from the truth, recounting her painful moments as well as the great joy and love she experienced.
Not since reading The Year of Magical Thinking has a memoir struck me so deeply. Even if readers don't know someone who married a soldier - or had a friend or relative who served in the military - I can't imagine anyone finishing this book without having a deeper understanding of the lives of the men who serve their country - as well as the deep concern, love, and hope felt by those who wait for them.
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