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MY WIFE SAID YOU MAY WANT TO MARRY ME

Name: MY WIFE SAID YOU MAY WANT TO MARRY ME
Author: Jason Rosenthal
ISBN: 978-0-06-294059-9

A MEMOIR

by Jason Rosenthal ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

A memoir filled with advice and support for anyone else going through similar circumstances.

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An essay gone viral leads to this memoir about deep loss and navigating profound grief.

In March 2017, on the eve of her death from ovarian cancer, bestselling author Amy Krouse Rosenthal published a piece in the “Modern Love” section of the New York Times. Titled “You May Want To Marry My Husband,” it read like an expanded dating-site post extolling the virtues of the man who would soon become a widower. It generated millions of views and plenty of responses, including a few marriage proposals, but also numerous messages of support from well-wishers who had experienced similar tragedies. This book contains the entire original column as well as a follow-up column, written by the author, titled “My Wife Said You May Want To Marry Me,” excerpts from many of the responses he received, and passages from notes and letters he and his wife exchanged during what seemed like an idyllic marriage. “If he sounds like a prince and our relationship seems like a fairy tale, it’s not too far off,” she wrote in her essay, and this memoir corroborates that account. Yet her death wasn’t the turn a fairy tale is supposed to take, and the author’s coming to terms with it is easily the most moving and useful part of the book. As he writes, he discovered that “grief as a process is unique to everyone, and there is no right or wrong way to flow through it.” He takes us through that process and shows us what kinds of support were particularly helpful. He doesn’t have any desire to let go, but he found that he was able to move on, even to fall in love again, perhaps partly because his late wife encouraged him to do so.

A memoir filled with advice and support for anyone else going through similar circumstances.

Pub Date: April 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-06-294059-9

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020

Categories:

BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
DEAR BOY,
by Paris Rosenthal & Jason Rosenthal ; illustrated by Holly Hatam

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.