A Widow for One Year was published by Random House in 1998, and it is Irving’s most explicit exploration of the writer’s life — how writers use (and exploit) their own experience, how fiction transforms pain into art, and whether this transformation is healing or merely another form of avoidance.
The novel is structured in three parts spanning 1958 to 1995. The first follows four-year-old Ruth Cole and the sixteen-year-old boy (Eddie O’Hare) hired as her father’s assistant during the summer her parents’ marriage collapses. The second follows Ruth at forty-one, now a successful novelist, struggling with her own romantic life. The third resolves the mysteries planted in the first two sections, bringing Ruth to a kind of peace that was unavailable to her parents.
Irving’s characteristic themes are present — sexual violence, loss of children, the writer’s vocation, the redemptive power of love — but the novel’s tripartite structure gives them a longer temporal arc than usual, allowing Irving to show how the damage of childhood manifests differently at different life stages. Ruth at four is vulnerable and bewildered; Ruth at forty-one is armored and successful but emotionally stunted; Ruth at the novel’s end has finally integrated her past into a present that can accommodate both pain and joy.
Collecting A Widow for One Year
First edition (Random House, New York, 1998): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Signed first edition: $50–$120
- Without jacket: $5–$10