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A Memoir
by Artis Henderson
In this powerful memoir, a young woman loses her husband twenty years after her own mother was widowed, and overcomes two generations of tragedy to discover that both hope and love endure.
Artis Henderson was a free-spirited young woman with dreams of traveling the world and one day becoming a writer. Marrying a conservative Texan soldier and becoming an Army wife was never part of her plan, but when she met Miles, Artis threw caution to the wind and moved with him to a series of Army bases in dusty southern towns, far from the exotic future of her dreams. If this was true love, she was ready to embrace it.
But when Miles was training and Artis was left alone, her feelings of isolation and anxiety competed with the warmth and unconditional acceptance she'd found with Miles. She made few friends among the other Army wives. In some ways these were the only women who could truly empathize with her lonely, often fearful existence - yet they kept their distance, perhaps sensing the great potential for heartbreak among their number.
It did not take long for a wife's worst fears to come true. On November 6, 2006, the Apache helicopter carrying Miles crashed in Iraq, leaving twenty-six-year-old Artis - in official military terms - an "unremarried widow." A role, she later realized, that her mother had been preparing her for for most of her life.
In this memoir Artis recounts not only the unlikely love story she shared with Miles and her unfathomable recovery in the wake of his death - from the dark hours following the military notification to the first fumbling attempts at new love - but also reveals how Miles's death mirrored her father's death in a plane crash, which Artis survived when she was five years old and which left her own mother a young widow.
In impeccable prose, Artis chronicles the years bookended by the loss of these men - each of whom she knew for only a short time but who had a profound impact on her life and on the woman she has become.
"In her fluid prose Henderson portrays a moving journey to selfhood that strikes the reader as authentic and emotionally honest." - Publishers Weekly
"Book clubs will find much to discuss here... A wholly American story that will find broad appeal with every reader who has ever wondered if she made the right choice." - Booklist
"Starred Review. A beautiful debut from an exciting new voice." - Kirkus
"Reading Unremarried Widow is like coming across an unexpectedly powerful monument in a cemetery - you stand there imagining someone else's story, and suddenly you realize that it's our story, that it connects us to something large and lasting, even as it separates us from an irreclaimable past." - Rhoda Janzen, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress
"Everyone should read this book for what it says about our profound capacity for love, and to remind us all of just how much we ask of those who serve in harm's way - and of the loved ones they leave behind." - Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club
"Artis Henderson's remarkable memoir allows readers into the seldom-seen and unexpected world of the war widow." - Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone
This information about Unremarried Widow was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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