Ghosting: A Widow's Voyage Out

by Barbara Ascher

Overview

Winner of Pushcart’s Editors Book Award,Ghosting is a love story that is as much about life as it is about death.

Married at a young age to an older man , neither he nor she doubted that he would predecease her; but she discovers that there is no preparing for the loss a beloved. Their marriage was a passionate 35 year love affair, as if the odds against its longevity engendered a rare intensity. She discovers that love has no boundaries, grief is not eternal and her husband’s motto “Life is a love story” is so very true.

Ascher writes passionately about her unlikely marriage, her husband’s illness and death and her ensuing sorrow. A witness to the insanity that grief visits upon its victims with a seeming determination to destroy, she gazes straight into the eye of grief and does not blink. In time she moves beyond that grief - her voyage out. 

Ghosting is, by turns, moving and funny, tender and brutal .

The wonder of Ghosting is that Ascher, like Montaigne, calls forth Everyman. 

About previous books:

Pat Conroy on Dancing In The Dark:
“One of those books that wakes you up to the life you have failed to live,…What a wonderful book.”

Publishers Weekly on The Habit of Loving:?
”With her sharp, unflinching eye, she discovers wonder and truth at our very doorsteps.”

Boston Globe on Landscape Without Gravity:
“Her honesty touches the reader’s heart, opens the scars of old wounds, and helps heal them…wrenching, insightful…compelling”

Eudora Welty on Playing After Dark:
"Barbara Ascher has a serious mind and the gift of a light touch."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780960097760
Publisher:	Pushcart Press
Publication date:	12/07/2021
Pages:	265
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Barbara Lazear Ascher is the author of four nonfiction books: Playing After Dark (Doubleday), The Habit of Loving (Random), Landscape Without Gravity (Viking Penguin), and most recently Dancing In The Dark: Romance, Yearning and The Search for The Sublime (Harper Collins). She has been a columnist for The New York Times and Elle Magazine; and a book reviewer and contributor to NPR, The Yale Review, The Washington Post and many other newspapers and journals. She lives in Springs, New York on Long Island’s East End.

Editorial Reviews

"Love is as strong as death’ the Song of Solomon says, and Barbara Ascher’s powerful story, brilliantly told, dives headlong into both, taking the reader on a breathtaking adventure — yet one that , in the end, discovers that love may be even stronger than death."

Elaine Pagels

"So much tenderness resonates in this remarkably frank book about loving and living and dying. You will be gripped by the joyous care and superb telling here."

Naomi Shihab Nye

"A lovely, deeply felt account of that crucial passage we all hope we will never have to go through — losing a life partner."

Adam Hochschild

"A beautifully written memoir of marriage, love and death…a contemporary classic that people will give to each other for years to come."

Amy Hempel

2021-09-21
A journal of grief and healing following a beloved husband's death.

Ascher, a memoirist and travel writer, met her older psychiatrist husband, Bob, when she was a college student. After 35 years of enviable closeness, in 2002, a cancer diagnosis ended his life at 77. Like Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates in A Widow's Story, Ascher revisits the practical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of Bob’s death, her loss, and the bewildering period that followed. Her often lovely writing freshens familiar observations: "Morning is among grief's cruelties because sleep swallows reality and then releases you to the news. You have to do this again and again before it’s no longer a surprise.” A list of sailing terms she learned in her many years as her husband's first mate, "once vital,” were now "relegated to the language of longing. A torch song." The author also writes about how her relationships with her adult children and their spouses—her daughter and Bob's children by a previous marriage—were consolidated during Bob's illness, offering strength and comfort. But after he was gone, she and her daughter became "a splintered girl group." Like many other bereaved people, Ascher often feels that Bob is present and sending her messages, usually via various avian appearances. She interprets these less as magical thinking than "cosmic winks.” Though her editor reminded her she was "not woo-woo,” she replied that she was “getting more so every day.” Many times, the author has thought about a comment made by a neighbor who had also lost a husband: "You'll think you're sane, but you're not." Though she had various gentlemen callers during the early days of her widowhood, it was more than 10 years later when she was called again to love's table. Did Bob show up in the form of a bird to express his opinion? You'll have to read the book.

An elegant, frank, and tender memoir.

Kirkus Reviews