Reviews

The Brooklyn Rail – The Last Mona Lisa

    I met Jonathan Santlofer at the Yaddo artist residency in Saratoga Springs, New York. We were housemates, and got on well. After we’d left, he offered me his spare bedroom in Manhattan, if I was ever passing through town. A few months later, returning home after a trip to Africa, I was doing just that. Poor Jonathan Santlofer! I had contracted malaria in Uganda. I’ll leave the rest of that story untold … by J.C. Hallman READ MORE HERE

Pop Matters – Compassionately Explores How Men Are Allowed to Grieve

  It’s a tough balancing act when an artist enters the realm of grief, especially when it’s a true story. Suppose that the real lesson of life is that it’s a logically sequenced collection of losses: innocence, money, possessions, or (in the case of this book) partners we chose for our life who suddenly slip away by design or the random chaos of the universe. Is the fact that we choose to testify about our stories of loss the first step to irrelevancy? The question is not about “why” we are telling the story. That doesn’t need to be asked. The question should be who are we to tell the story and what new elements to the universal feeling will we add to the literature of grief? If our memoir won’t realistically detail and provide a new element to this narrative, how should it serve the reader? Christopher John Stevens Pop Matters Read More Here

The New Yorker: Briefly Noted

“The Widower’s Notebook, by Jonathan Santlofer (Penguin). In this memoir, a novelist and artist contends with the sudden death of his wife. Santlofer adds new insights to the familiar genre of the grief memoir by exploring the ways in which men are expected to handle loss and sorrow. “ ‘Men do not write books about grief’ was something I heard a lot and even told myself,” he notes. Between tender recollections of his wife and attempts to return to a version of his routine, the author realizes that he has been culturally conditioned to divert his energy into pretending to be strong and moving on quickly, and he struggles to discuss his anguish openly, even with his daughter.” The New Yorker Briefly Noted READ HERE

Signature Reads: The Language of Grief

I measure every Grief I meet With narrow, probing, eyes – I wonder if It weighs like Mine – Or has an Easier size.” Emily Dickinson, #561 The English word “grief” is derived from the Old French verb “grever,” which means “to burden.” Implicit in the word is the idea that it is a weight to be borne; as Dickinson alluded to in her poem, “I measure every grief I meet.” And yet the notion of a weightiness to grief does not cover the morass of emotions that accompany this profound sense of loss. While Elizabeth Kubler Ross stamped order onto grief by describing the five stages a person moved through on the way to what we now call “closure,” my experiences of grief have been anything but orderly. I remember moving through all five stages in the space of an hour, not in the order she delineated, and then repeating the process in a … Read more

NYCity Woman – Six Books to Read in August

  “The Widower’s Notebook by Jonathan Santlofer. How do men grieve? Santlofer, a noted crime writer, teacher and artist, answers with this intimate memoir written after the sudden death of his wife, Joy, after 40 years of marriage. He conjures her through exquisite drawings and an anguished but often humorous text that ranges from shock and disbelief to a growing closeness with his daughter and new adventures in dating.” NYCity Woman Roberta Hershenson Read more here

The Washington Post – Do men and women experience grief differently?

“Five years ago, Jonathan Santlofer’s wife, Joy, died unexpectedly following a routine outpatient procedure. In the days and months following her death, Santlofer kept a “widower’s notebook” — a collection of thoughts and drawings he polished and bound into a memoir of the same title. Reading Santlofer’s “The Widower’s Notebook” hit fairly close to home for me. I am also a widower. Heck, I even kept a “widower’s notebook” of my own for a while. “The Widower’s Notebook,” by Jonathan Santlofer (Penguin) Santlofer’s book is an affecting read and not entirely heavy, despite the subject matter. My wife, who died of cancer at 39, wrote a memoir, “The Bright Hour” about her own experiences with mortality, so I recognize the challenges of the dying-death-grieving genre. It is hard to present an untimely death without making it maudlin, or to convey the humor and absurdity of everyday life that persists even amid terminal illness and loss.” … Read more

Lit Hub Bookmarks: The Best Reviewed Books of the Week

“Santlofer’s book is an affecting read and not entirely heavy, despite the subject matter … Santlofer’s book, which shines most brightly when it focuses on his grief for his wife, is not a pedagogical tool and does not advance our understanding of grief in an appreciable way. It is the testimony of Jonathan Santlofer about the loss of his beloved wife … Viewed in that more limited lens, the book has perhaps less literary or cultural merit, but it still offers a moving portrait of one widower with a notebook.” The Washington Post John Duberstein Read More Here

Entertainment Weekly – July’s Must Reads!

  Need some new reads to throw into your beach tote? There are plenty of hot new books hitting the shelves this month: Here are the 20 you need to know about…. “In this sensitive memoir, a man wades through grief by remembering his marriage in intimate, devastating detail after his wife dies suddenly.” –Entertainment Weekly Read Full Review Here