Should I Still Wish: A Memoir

by John W. Evans

Overview

In this candid and moving memoir, John W. Evans articulates the complicated joys of falling in love again as a young widower. Though heartbroken after his wife’s violent death, Evans realizes that he cannot remain inconsolable and adrift, living with his in-laws in Indiana. Motivated by a small red X on a map, Evans musters the courage for a cross-country trip. From the Badlands to Yellowstone to the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, Evans’s hope and determination propel him even as he contemplates his vulnerability and the legacy of a terrible tragedy.



Should I Still Wish chronicles Evans’s efforts to leave an intense year of grief behind, to make peace with the natural world again, and to reconnect with a woman who promises, like San Francisco itself, a life of abundance and charm. With unflinching honesty Evans plumbs the uncertainties, doubts, and contradictions of a paradoxical experience in this love story, celebration of fatherhood, meditation on the afterlife of grief and resilience, and, ultimately, showcase for life’s many profound incongruities.

John W. Evans is a Jones Lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University. He is the author of Young Widower: A Memoir (Nebraska, 2014), winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize; The Consolations, winner of the 2015 Peace Corps Writers Best Poetry Book; and two poetry chapbooks.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803295223
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	01/01/2017
Series:	American Lives
Pages:	156
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 16.10(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

John W. Evans is a Jones Lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University. He is the author of Young Widower: A Memoir (Nebraska, 2014), winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize; The Consolations, winner of the 2015 Peace Corps Writers Best Poetry Book; and two poetry chapbooks.
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Leaving Indiana
Badlands
Crossing to Safety
Yes
Signal and Noise
The Big House
Unanswered Prayers
Not So Much
The Lake
Mountain Rain

Editorial Reviews

"A poignant meditation."—Georgia Rowe, Mercury News

Mercury News - Georgia Rowe

“Should I Still Wish is a profoundly moving memoir of love’s recovery. . . . The brilliance of this insightful book is in its honest articulation of great paradox—love can rise complete and uncompromised even as grief endures, and the human heart can belong simultaneously to both life and death, neither of which triumphs forever.”—Jonathan Johnson, author of Hannah and the Mountain: Notes toward a Wilderness Fatherhood
 

Jonathan Johnson

“Beautifully observed and unstintingly honest, Should I Still Wish tries to make sense of a world rendered senseless by tragedy. Its real brilliance, though, is in its interweaving of sorrow and joy, its examination of what it means to simultaneously mourn an old life and celebrate a new one.”—Katharine Noel, author of Halfway House
 

Katharine Noel

"Very moving."—Terri Schlichenmeyer, Wisconsin Daily Citizen

Wisconsin Daily Citizen - Terri Schlichenmeyer

2016-11-15
A slim but probing biography of grief and happiness.In a follow-up to his debut memoir, Young Widower (2014), Evans (Creative Writing/Stanford Univ.) explores his next stages of life following the death of his wife, Katie. Married just three years at the time 30-year-old Katie was killed by a bear while walking in the woods near Bucharest, Romania, the author sketches the rippling wake of that experience, including finding new love and his resulting paroxysm of guilt mingled with grief. He felt afraid to own the right to renewed, even greater happiness than he'd found before. The title of the present account reflects the author's moving existential—almost ethical—question posed now nine years out from Katie's death: "Shouldn't I still wish you hadn't died?" Immediately after the fact, this thought wasn't even a question, but less than a year after witnessing his wife's traumatic end, it became a powerful dilemma for Evans when he found new love with longtime friend Cait, a woman he'd met in the Peace Corps at the same time he'd met Katie. While numerous memoirs about reckoning with the loss of a loved one demonstrate the perils of attempting to circumvent grief, Evans' self-study proves equally instructive in negotiating guilt. The author examined survivor's guilt in his debut. Here, as Evans tries to come to terms with his new relationship with Cait, which led to their marriage and the births of three sons, it seems he's attempting to write himself into a place of forgiveness for having moved on. In a soliloquy to his young son, Evans clandestinely reveals, "I want you to know that I have been happy in my affection," and later goes on to admit, "part of what I mean to describe here is not grief at all, I think, but forgetting." Evans' poignant, authentically disjointed account offers candid insight into the baffling interplay of love, loss, and the balm of memory.

Kirkus Reviews