Ann’s second memoir, THE SWEET PAIN OF BEING ALIVE (Austin Macauley), was published in January 2024. Her previous memoir, DARING TO DATE AGAIN was published in 2014 (SheWrites Press) and medaled in all the contests where it was entered: International Book Awards, NextGeneration Indie Publishers Award, and Independent Publishers Awards. Not the National Book Award, but not bad for a first book.
Her books are about women who think their way through rich and challenging lives. DARING TO DATE AGAIN is the story of what happened she began to date again at 62, after two divorces and twelve celibate recovery years. The old rules for romance hadn’t worked, but what were the new ones? She figures it out as she goes along. Her encounters take her from Texas to Zimbabwe.
THE SWEET PAIN OF BEING ALIVE is the story of Ann’s marriage to Terry, her third husband, whose life ended in suicide. Why had he done it? She discovered there wasn’t really a “why,” but he did suffer from gender dysphoria and probably would have become transgender had he grown up in more modern times. He never sat Ann down and said, “Either I die or you become a lesbian,” but that was the truth of the situation. She and Terry loved each other deeply and each made allowances for the other, but some problems cannot be resolved.
Ann’s path to becoming an author runs back to fifth grade, when a short story won town-wide recognition in her home town, Montclair, New Jersey. Two marriages and two children intervened and it took several decades for her to get back to writing. By the time she met Terry, her third husband, she had begun writing again.
She has a BA in French and Spanish and an MA in English from New York University, and has acquired at least functional fluency in six languages, sometimes at the dinner table and sometimes in a classroom. She later received an MA in Linguistics from Montclair State University, where she taught freshman writing for many years. She loved teaching this course because everyone was required to take it. She enjoyed engaging budding physicists, soccer players, and veterinarians …everybody in the romance and satisfaction of writing down their stories and their thoughts. Even college freshmen have a story to tell, if not about themselves, then about their grandmother.
She has a presence on X, but the strongest plank in her platform is Facebook, where she has 19.4K followers and friends on her personal and professional pages. She posts almost daily and many of her Facebook Friends pay attention to what she posts. LinkedIn is also a source of connection, where she around 1600 interested parties. She also has an active blog (at annandersonevans.com) and posts regularly, and recently began posting on Substack.
In connection with DARING TO DATE AGAIN she was the cover girl for ELDR Magazine’s Sex over 60 issue, and was featured on the Discovery Channel’s Sex in America special. I appeared on The Authors Show, ArtistFirst, KGUA Radio in Gualala, California, Jenningswire, Author’s Corner, the Kim Power Stilson Show, the Donna Seebo Show, and the Michael Dresser Show. She has been on panels at the Tucson Festival of Books, and the Bookstock book fair in Woodstock, Vermont.
Since the release of THE SWEET PAIN OF BEING ALIVE, she’s appeared on podcasts Authors on the Air/Launchpad, Good Grief/Voice of America, Women Over 70, and Women Writers, Womancake Magazine, Women’s Books (print and interview), Our Path, and The Life Shift. Other appearances and workshops are scheduled.
She has proven her worth as a public speaker in conference appearances where she presented academic work. Her controversial article “Linguistics in the Classroom” appeared in the Duke University journal Pedagogy, and she presented its findings at the University of Zimbabwe. A paper How Should We Evaluate Endangered Languages was presented at the International Macedonian-North American Conference on Macedonian Studies at Ohio State to a standing ovation.
Short stories have been published in Pulse, The Raven’s Perch, Forge, Words and Images, Ozone Park Journal, Under the Sun, Phantasmagoria, and Phoebe.
Many book reviews have been published in Midwest Book Review, The Laurel Review, and PANK.
In 2020, she moved from Hoboken, New Jersey to Vermont, where it is quiet during the day, dark at night, and there is no traffic. Her housemate is an adorable Sealyham Terrier, Gus, who helps her in the garden, most recently by digging up a blueberry bush (subsequently rescued) and establishing a tunnel halfway to China in the far corner of the back yard.
“In Evans’ memoir, the author grapples with the gender identity of her deceased spouse... Evans writes in clean, orderly prose, which highlights how her personality contrasted with that of the disorganized, slightly dreamy Terry. The work is a remarkably realistic portrayal of a marriage, in part because the book largely works around the great tension at the center of it rather than addressing it head-on... There is a novelistic quality to the memoir in its unwillingness to resolve things cleanly and in its narrative voice; the author is unafraid to come across as inflexible or unsympathetic. The book is an exploration of the many things a marriage can be: a source of companionship, yes, but also a hiding place—and, even if only posthumously, a place to finally be seen.
A fascinating and deeply human story about living with a spouse hiding a mysterious inner life.”
– Kirkus Reviews
BOOK REVIEW
THE SWEET PAIN OF BEING ALIVE
BY Ann Anderson Evans • POSTED ON Jan. 5, 2024
In Evans’ memoir, the author grapples with the gender identity of her deceased spouse.
When Evans’ husband, Terry, ended his own life 14 years into their marriage, she was taken completely by surprise. They had moved to Vermont only a few weeks before, and she knew almost no one there—her own adult children lived far away. After the initial shock had worn off, the author tried to understand why it had happened—to “follow the breadcrumbs,” as one of her friends said at the time. The couple met when both were in their 60s, at a time when Evans believed she would never marry again due to the breakups of two earlier marriages. She was in her “Hedonistic Period,” dating mostly for sex, something Terry wasn’t great at. (She knew about his Catholic upbringing, an influence to which he credited some of his sexual hang-ups.) Even so, the author decided to roll the dice and take a chance on marriage once again. It was three years into the union when she discovered a box of women’s clothes—blouses and dresses in the styles of decades past—hidden underneath the bed. Terry panicked when Evans asked him to explain them. “‘I didn’t mean you to find them this way,’ he reached down to push the box back under the bed. ‘It’s nothing.’ He reacted like a man with a mistress who’s trying to keep the letter in the lavender envelope with the flowery writing on it from his wife.” It turned out that Terry had enjoyed dressing in female clothing ever since childhood, though he had hidden it from everyone except for a few romantic partners who approved of the idea. Evans didn’t like it—she found something offensive in the concepts of cross-dressing and transgender identity—but she had no intention of leaving Terry over it. Their lives together continued for years after her discovery until his death, leaving her to question if Terry had taken his own life because he couldn’t be the person he had always needed to be.
Evans writes in clean, orderly prose, which highlights how her personality contrasted with that of the disorganized, slightly dreamy Terry. The work is a remarkably realistic portrayal of a marriage, in part because the book largely works around the great tension at the center of it rather than addressing it head-on. Much more space is given to the mundane activities and annoyances, such as here, where Evans describes her frustration with Terry’s unwillingness to do housework: “[S]lowly, I became resentful, irritated, because of all the little tasks, outside the more general assignments, that I had to do if I wanted to live in an orderly house…Instead of remonstrating with me, Terry acknowledged the unfairly apportioned ratios of housework and suggested we hire a housekeeper.” There is a novelistic quality to the memoir in its unwillingness to resolve things cleanly and in its narrative voice; the author is unafraid to come across as inflexible or unsympathetic. The book is an exploration of the many things a marriage can be: a source of companionship, yes, but also a hiding place—and, even if only posthumously, a place to finally be seen.
A fascinating and deeply human story about living with a spouse hiding a mysterious inner life.
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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