Epilogue

It is not surprising that a newly widowed woman would be dour; it is surprising that this woman, a writer named Anne Roiphe, would think that a memoir of 214 pages of present-tense dourness is worth enduring. The ham-fisted wordplay doesn't help: "I remember the Ezra Pound poem: Faces on the subway like petals on a branch. But the faces are not like petals, they are more like bicycle pedals, worn, dark, shadowed, concealing their histories behind a veneer of dust and soot."