Book review: The Alchemy of Loss, by Abigail Carter

As I mentioned last week, I was asked to review a young widow's memoir, The Alchemy of Loss, by Abigail Carter, as part of a virtual book tour hosted by TLC Book Tours.

A free copy of a book I already wanted to read, but didn't want to buy at hardcover prices? Sure--count me in!

I'd already heard of this book before I was asked to review it, either from trolling Amazon.com or Goodreads or from a trail of bread crumbs on other widows' blogs or web sites. From the first months right after my 28-year-old husband died in a bicycle crash, I was ravenous for any books that could tell me what I could expect, what counted as "normal" in this newly widowed world. As someone who was always reading, I turned to books for guidance.

But I found few books that fit for a nonreligious 27-year-old with a 10-month-old baby, who'd only been married for barely 18 months. I wasn't middle aged or retired, wasn't an empty nester, wasn't looking for Bible-based devotionals or New Age-y self-help books. I quickly exhausted the self-help books that I could find at Borders or Barnes & Noble that were directed toward a young widow, but after two other fellow widows at my support group highly recommended two different first-person accounts written by young widows, I found a welcome pot of gold: memoirs written by other people who'd also been widowed at far too young an age. I got to hear all the crazy thoughts and reactions they'd had, the bizarre and painful events they had to face--without any trite, superficial B.S.--and what it really meant to be a young widow. These memoirs became lifelines for me at times when my own grief got particularly overwhelming.

Abby Carter's The Alchemy of Loss would have fit the bill perfectly, had I read it back in the earlier days of grief. 

But there's one distinct difference between her experience and mine: Abby's a 9/11 widow, her 39-year-old husband, Arron, killed in the Twin Towers on September 11. 

A slew of 9/11 memoirs have hit the bookstore shelves in the last year or two. The Alchemy of Loss is actually the third one I've read, and for better or worse, I consciously evaluated my reaction to The Alchemy of Loss against them. I read A Widow's Walk, written by the widow of a firefighter killed in the World Trade Center, six months ago, and Love You, Mean It, written by four 9/11 widows, two years ago; since then I've reread LUMI several times, and it stands as my #1 (or tied for #1) favorite of all the grief books I've read in the last three-plus years. 

And I've read a lot of grief books in that time--well over twenty, not counting the ones I've started but never finished. A few have been pretty good, many just okay, and a few nauseatingly, offensively awful. But with Love You, Mean It as the sparkling diamond at the top of the pile for me, The Alchemy of Loss had some pretty big shoes to have to fit into, solely because of its closely related subject matter.

And by and large, Abby's book competes very well. I didn't cry while reading Alchemy, as I did with both Love You, Mean It and A Widow's Walk...but my lack of a reaction could be due more to where I'm at in my own grief--at a more stable, unemotional level of healing--than anything integral to Abby's work. But at the same time, I didn't get emotionally invested and drawn into her story as much as I did the four widows in Love You, Mean It, nor did I marvel to myself, "Omigosh, I absolutely love, love, LOVE this book," when I finished it like I did with LUMI. However, Abby's book was a far, far better, more complete narrative of all aspects of a widow's experience--both in the immediate aftermath and in the long term--than was A Widow's Walk. There's no comparison. But did I think Alchemy was as good as Love You, Mean It? No...not really. But it was still one of the best grief books--and certainly one of the best young widow memoirs--I've read in the past three years, and I was very, very impressed...and relieved that I was asked to read a book I genuinely really liked and enjoyed--and moreover, that I respected. 

For someone who wasn't a writer before her husband's death, Abby writes cleanly, adeptly, and powerfully. I've started--and subsequently put down, unfinished--too many widow memoirs lately where they were poorly written or, even worse, horridly edited. And The Alchemy of Loss was blissfully free of those flaws--a real treat. The organization of the book--into three parts that followed Abby's larger "levels" of healing, and then into chapters that were thematically linked more than they were a mere chronological retelling--was a welcome change of pace from other memoirs I've read and gave it a little something extra. I have no idea whether the structure was an inspired choice on Abby's part or due to the careful, calculated guidance of her editor(s), but it was brilliant move. Instead of just getting slogged down in the logistics and facts of what was being relayed, I could also see the message, larger point, and connection that Abby was trying to make about that particular aspect of her experience.

As a widow over three years out from my own husband's death, I have long "outgrown" the usefulness of most grief books, which rarely give any information past a year after the death. I'm always searching for how widows felt after the first year, after the second, and the third, and I'm usually disappointed in most grief books I try to read anymore. I feared that Abby's book would have the same unsatisfying short-term tunnel vision, but I'm vastly relieved that it did not. I would have preferred a few more obvious date-marked reference points in the last portions of the book (and more weight given to those later years), but Abby continues her story through at least three (if not four) years after 9/11--a choice that helps her book stand out over most of the other widow memoirs I've read. In fact, the proportion of Abby's book spent on the first year of grief vs. all the subsequent years--200 pages out of the 286 total were spent on the first year alone--is the main drawback for me and why I prefer Love You, Mean It; in contrast, LUMI doesn't really start its narrative until almost one year after 9/11, and instead focuses on years two through four--a timeframe that is much more useful to me in my own long-term journey through grief. But Abby doesn't just end her story at a year, as most widow writers do, and I have to give her big kudos for it.

In the end, I felt I really knew Abby after reading her words, as much as I do other young widows I know in person in real life or those I read daily in the blogosphere, and more than other published widows I've read--an impressive feat for a printed memoir from someone I've never met. Perhaps my reaction to her book is helped by the fact that she feels pretty real and reachable to me: I've read her current words on her blog, she's read mine (even if only once =)), I'm reading her book because she (or her tour agent, if nothing else) asked me. She doesn't feel like just a stranger "celebrity" out there in Manhattan (and maybe it helps that she lives "only" 250 miles away now). 

Or maybe it's because she feels less like a 9/11 widow and more just like a "normal" widow to me. Who knows? Two of the things I really appreciated in her book were how she discussed her reaction, her thoughts on being "a 9/11 widow" versus a "normal" widow (my words, not hers) and how her private grief for her husband was usurped by the public grief for a national tragedy.

She also included a lot of other brutally honest aspects of widowhood that I haven't seen (or rarely see) in other widow books: her prolonged anger; the ugly fights with her two young children; the power struggles between her parents and her mother-in-law due to their shared yet individual grief; her guilt and anger over all the money; the giggles at Arron's memorial service; the overwhelming nature of her relationship with Arron's mother; the fights and resentments in her marriage; that Arron wasn't a perfect saint; her psychic (for lack of a better word) connections to Arron after his death; intimate details about her ventures to reenter the dating world, to having sex. They're the details and topics of conversation that have come up over the years of friendship in my widowed support group, and I think her inclusion of these details were what helped me to better relate to her on even ground, to feel that we were united by a common experience--the deaths of our husbands--rather than held apart by the "celebrity," disparate nature of her being a 9/11 widow. As Abby says at one point, "But I failed to see how [Arron's death was different]. Arron was dead. Dead is dead." Ironically, despite how much I like Love You, Mean It, I've never felt I had much in common with those urbane, Manhattan-dwelling women, yet I could see a lot of my own widowed experience in Abby's.

Ultimately, The Alchemy of Loss is a solid, well-written narrative detailing one woman's journey through widowhood and, eventually, healing. It offers a lot of meat that's lacking in other widow memoirs, and I highly recommend it, particularly to those interested in the personal, real-world experiences of one 9/11 widow, or to other young widows--especially those within the first year, those who have no body, who experienced their own "public widow" tragedy, who feel overwhelmed by their children, or who have mixed feelings about the charity and money associated with young death. It's one of the better young widow memoirs that I've read, and it gets a firm seat near the top of my Favorite/Most Useful Grief Books shelf. 

(And thanks, Abby and Lisa, for including me in your book tour! It was fun!)

Grade: A or A-

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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Note: You can visit Abigail's web site here. I already include her blog in my blogroll at left, but you can quick-link to it here. For the book's listing on Amazon.com, see here.

See Abby's TLC Book Tours schedule here.

To see the ratings and reviews of other grief books I've read, see my shelf here on Goodreads, or see this post here for my short-list recommendations.