Virgin Wife Widow Whore, by Erica Johnson Debeljak, a memoir about the sudden and shocking death of her husband in Slovenia, the country where she has made her home since her marriage more than two decades previously, the trauma and grief that ensues, and her rite of passage from wife to widow.
Virgin Wife Widow Whore is a dramatic story of loss. Erica’s famous literary husband is struck by a truck on a road side. It is not clear what he was doing there, not clear why this terrible event occurred. At the time of his death, Erica and two of her three children are far away from Slovenia, Erica visiting her mother in California. She must make the harrowing translantlic journey, from night into night, in the company of strangers. She returns to a maelstrom, the whole country mourning its golden son and also in a frenzy of speculation about what happened. In the first week, she must plan a public funeral. In the months that follow, she must deal with the bureaucracy of death in the foreign country she calls home: the police report, the center for social services, that fact that her husband died without a will. She finds comfort – release from the unrelenting emotional pain and access to memories of her husband which have eluded her – in the arms of a young man who was his student. She eventually finds a way to say goodbye to the love of her life and a way forward to a new life and understanding of herself.
Virgin Wife Widow Whore belongs to the bereavement genre but also transcends it. More than just a personal memoir, it is a book about the power and endurance of women throughout history. Erica widens the canvas by weaving through her own experience the enthralling stories of widows past: Tamar and Judith from the bible, Hecuba and Penelope from mythology, the last sati widow, Roop Kanwar, from India, and from literature, the “wretched queen” Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, and a reimagined widow Gertrude from Iris Murdoch’s novel Nuns and Soldiers. Erica also confronts the taboos of death and widowhood in our society: the stigmatization, medicalization, and bureaucratization of bereavement, the struggle for material survival typically viewed as a crass consideration in comparison to the emotional loss but central to the experience and definition of widowhood today and through history, and finally the dangerous sexuality of widows and post-menopausal women.
