UNREMARRIED WIDOW

In the tradition of "The Year of Magical Thinking" and "What Remains", this breathtaking memoir by a young Army widow offers a devastatingly candid story of moving on after losing the love of your life. Every page of this gorgeous memoir is a testament to love and resilience. It will make you weep, but it will also make you cherish your own family all the more.

Artis had dreamed of moving abroad after college, teaching, and one day becoming a writer. She had never wanted a relationship with a conservative, Texan soldier—until she met Miles and true love led them to build a life together, even in the face of the unexpected challenges that came with army base living. Artis stopped writing, stopped dreaming of travel abroad, but she never stopped loving Miles, even in the worst of times. They were married only three months when he deployed. Six when the chaplain came to her house to tell her he was dead. On November 6, 2006, twenty?six?year?old Artis Henderson’s husband Miles crashed his apache helicopter in Iraq, leaving her—in official military terms—an UNREMARRIED WIDOW. Artis gracefully and fearlessly traces the arduous process of rebuilding her life after this loss, from the dark hours following the military notification, to the first fumbling attempts at new love. For all its raw emotion and heartbreaking, candid reflections on losing the love of her life, this is not a grief memoir. Delivered in breathtaking prose, it is a celebration of the unlikely love between two very different people, a compassionate critique of the military life, and a story of mother and daughter bonding over tragedy, as Artis finally reconciles her anger at her mother over the loss of her own father when she was five years old, finding solace in their shared experience of widowhood.

UNREMARRIED WIDOW is a work of extraordinary literary depth and a nonpolitical look at the emotional consequences of war that speaks to the universality of both grief and love. ARTIS HENDERSON is an award?winning journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Florida Weekly, and the online literary journal Common Ties. She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a graduate degree from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. She lives in New York.