rebecca woolf book review

Rebecca Woolf — All of This (Book Review)

by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 8, 2022 | RELAX: Memoir | 2 comments

Rebecca Woolf creates a complex yet vulnerable tale in All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire . How do these two topics intertwine, you ask? And Woolf answers this question in spades. Her marriage was far from perfect, but they stayed together. Then doctors diagnose her husband with stage four terminal cancer. What follows is as much about the death as how Woolf reconciles her conflicting emotions.

The diagnosis happens just as Woolf considers whether to leave this man—the father of her four children. Instead, she stays and cares for him, putting his intense needs ahead of hers. She attends to the kids physically and emotionally but lets her basic needs slide.

Once her husband dies, Woolf’s pendulum swings to a more balanced place. She and the kids find unique ways to cope. They sing and dance when it helps let their emotions flow. And Woolf figures out how to be a single mom in the world of Tinder. Dates—many of them—become her coping mechanism. She gets back in touch with her womanhood and desire for intimacy and connection, even if just for brief relationships.

My conclusions

Woolf is comfortable oversharing. But it’s endearing and illustrates the genuine complexity of unexpected death after a less-than-ideal relationship. She offers a precious and tender mothering style that’s never saccharin. All of This is a modern take on being a young widow with young kids.

When I started reading, Woolf immediately drew me into her world. I felt the chill of the hospital ward. The vital support of her besties. And each of her acute feelings about events she had little control over. However, this book isn’t a tearjerker. Ultimately, it’s about empowerment and Woolf’s journey to regain her sense of self.

Based on Woolf’s telling, I neither mourned her husband’s death nor the end of their marriage. Instead, I felt hurt for how he forced her into his vision of a wife and caregiver. The book is clearly her way of cleansing the demons of imbalanced marital power. This isn’t the typical way an abusive relationship ends, which makes this memoir compelling.

I recommend this if you love woman-centered memoirs that dive deep into emotions and aren’t afraid to test boundaries of “correctness.”

Pair with Rachel Krantz’s Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy for the shared frank discussion of open relationships. Or try another memoir about the journey of widowhood, like Elizabeth Alexander’s The Light of the World .

Acknowledgments

Thanks to NetGalley, Harper One, and the author for a digital advanced reader’s copy in exchange for this honest review. The expected publication date for this book is August 16, 2022.

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Excellent review, Barbara. I am both a cancer survivor and a divorce survivor. Despite my gender and other differences with the author, it sounds like a compelling memoir that is worth reading, regardless

Hi Jay! Thanks for commenting and reading this review. Given your approach to reading, I suspect you’ll appreciate this memoir!

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Rebecca Woolf writes frankly about widowhood

Former local’s new memoir, ‘All of This,’ is brutally candid about death, sex and single motherhood

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When reading a memoir, there’s always the implicit sense that by the end of the book, the author will have achieved some sort of clarity. That, whatever the crux of their personal journey has been, the book is going to end with some sort of catharsis, one that they now feel compelled to share with readers.

Speaking with Rebecca Woolf about her candid tell-all, “ All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire ,” one gets the sense that whatever readers take away from the book, a sense of tranquility and peace won’t be that feeling. In fact, those feelings still elude the author herself.

“The majority of the survivor’s guilt I have, which is very common for anyone who loses a partner, is that he didn’t get to have a life after our marriage and I do,” says Woolf from her home in Los Angeles. “I have this life that I really love now and I’m happier than I’ve ever been, and I wish he had been able to explore what was on the other side of our marriage as well.”

The “him” in question is Hal Isaacson, Woolf’s late husband who, after nearly 20 years together, passed away in 2018 of stage four pancreatic cancer. He was able to live for only four months after receiving his diagnosis and left behind a 37-year-old widow and the couple’s four children. Woolf recounts all of this in “All of This,” but it’s important to point out that this isn’t the typical book about grief and widowhood. While the title of the book comes from Hal’s request that his wife write about “all of this” (that is, his sickness and death), she admits it’s unlikely that the finished product was what he had in mind. Rather, it’s an unfiltered, unadulterated, uncouth, and often hilarious look at a marriage that was falling apart, but was then upended by illness and death.

“I don’t think this is the book he thought I was going to write, because from the very beginning of our marriage, I was writing about our life,” says Woolf, who has been working as a writer for various publications and blogs for over 20 years. “But I was doing so in a way that was protective of him, our kids, and everybody. I was prioritizing everyone’s feelings over my own. Writing truthfully but in a way that was safe.”

She goes on to say that, at some point when she was writing the initial notes for “All of This,” she realized she needed to try a different approach.

“I sat down to write that book and just realized I couldn’t. I didn’t. It wasn’t working,” says Woolf, who grew up in Encinitas. “The experience of navigating his death, there was already so much that I had to do while he was dying that felt performative, but I did it for everybody’s sake and for my sake as well. I had to go back inside myself and find this love for him that I didn’t feel anymore. I have to find a way to navigate this death and honor him as best I can when the last thing I wanted to do was honor him.”

“There was so much anger between us when he got diagnosed, and we were about to split up,” Woolf continues. “We were looking for separate houses. So there was a lot that I had to suppress while he was dying and the months after just so everyone else felt safe and OK with it. And I eventually got to a point where I felt like my head was going to pop off my body if I didn’t tell everyone how I feel.”

And Woolf does tell readers how she feels with an aplomb rarely executed so well in a memoir revolving around death and grief. With “All of This,” Woolf joins the recent ranks of writers who are telling harsh truths in hopes of conveying a unique sense of fellowship (Keri Blakinger’s “Corrections in Ink,” Isaac Fitzgerald’s “Dirtbag, Massachusetts,” and, most correspondingly, Jennette McCurdy’s “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” to name a few). One of the many distinctions in “All of This,” however, is Woolf’s ability to spin a page-turning confessional while interweaving remembrances from her entire life, and her own issues with sex, pleasure and fidelity.

“I don’t feel ashamed of being a human, and I don’t feel ashamed about having human experiences and feelings,” Woolf says. “I think a lot of the reason why people feel they can’t speak honestly is that there’s shame there, whether it’s personal shame or societal expectations. I think that we keep ourselves from our truth out of shame and guilt, and I don’t feel that way.”

Before telling her truth in “All of This,” Woolf made a career from, as she puts it, “writing about my life, my whole life.” She began writing personal essays about her life as early as her teens while attending La Costa Canyon High School and, after moving to L.A. in 1999 and marrying Hal in her early 20s, she made a career writing for publications like the Huffington Post, Parenting and her own blog, Girl’s Gone Child.

“I think with a lot of memoirs, there’s this question of what came first: the story or the storyteller,” Woolf asks. “I think a lot of memoirs come from the story rather than the storyteller, and for me, it was the reverse. I was always going to write this book, because I’ve been writing it my whole life.”

Still, she says she was surprised to learn that there weren’t many books like the one she wanted to write. She recalls going to widow support groups shortly after Hal died and feeling indifferent to the type of counsel that was offered.

“I was being given all these grief books and not a single one was relatable to me,” says Woolf. “What was relatable to me were books and stories from divorced women who were writing about getting out of their marriages. Those were the women I was identifying with, and I realized my experience was very similar to that of a divorced person who is out of a marriage and is free, but of course you can’t say that when someone dies.”

As much as Woolf says she felt a sense of “relief” when her husband died, there are still heartbreaking recountings of love and tenderness in “All of This.” It will be difficult for any reader not to openly weep at Woolf’s recollection of Hal telling their children that he only had a short amount of time before he would die.

“He was glowing. The most beautiful man I had ever seen. Father of my children, love of my life. The crack in his exterior had found its way to mine,” she writes in the book. “It is possible to hate a person with your entire body and also love him with the whole of your heart.”

And yet, the book never feels overly sentimental or nostalgic, and it’s a credit to Woolf’s skill as a writer that her particularly heartbreaking passages are quickly supplemented with funny memories, such as when she plays a rather ridiculous song (The Misfits’ punk classic, “Die, Die My Darling”) while Hal is literally on his deathbed.

“Someone I know read it recently and they told me they weren’t expecting me to be tender toward Hal,” Woolf says. “People are so binary when it comes to this. That if you’re writing a book about how you have a really tough marriage, that I was going to villainize him through the whole book. There are so many things to him and so many different versions of him, just as there are many versions of me.”

In addition to writing a new bi-weekly column on dating ( “Sex & The Single Mom” ), Woolf is already planning a follow-up to “All of This.” For now, however, she says she’s content in that she’s told an honest story of love, loss and freedom, one that she hopes inspires others to live in their own truths. What’s more, she wants them to know that those truths can be both painful and celebratory.

“I think that I’m very similar to a lot of people in that my feelings about this, his death and my marriage,” Woolf says. “These things are very universal and just because we don’t talk about them doesn’t mean they aren’t happening. The more of us who are willing to talk about it, the more we can normalize a more human, more nuanced experience when it comes to death, love, marriage and all these things that we filter out.”

“All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire” by Rebecca Woolf (HarperOne, 2022; 256 pages)

Warwick’s presents Rebecca Woolf

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ALL OF THIS

A memoir of death and desire.

by Rebecca Woolf ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 16, 2022

A provocative and memorable work of autobiography.

A successful writer and blogger explores how her husband’s untimely death forced a confrontation with her unfulfilling marriage and undefined sexuality.

By the time Woolf’s husband, Hal, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, their marriage was “in relative shambles—backs turned to each other in a bed big enough to keep us from touching.” Hal resented Woolf for her financial success, and Woolf resented Hal for the lies she felt compelled to tell him to keep the marriage “stable.” However, his illness made the author desperate. Rather than seeking a divorce, she found herself wanting Hal to live. For the remainder of his life, the author swore she would never leave his side, “the only marital vow I didn’t break.” The tumultuous mixture of love and hate complicated a difficult grieving process that began even before he died. As she revisited their shared past, she mourned her “inadequacies as a wife, as a partner” while also excoriating herself for passively accepting what she knew was a “toxic relationship.” After Hal’s death, Woolf found herself “performing” widowhood for others while gnawing on a powerful desire to “get fucked”—less to satiate her desire and more to fill the emptiness that had carried over from her marriage. An affair with a friend she’d met at Hal’s funeral provided some release. Then she signed up for Tinder and fell into a pattern of “one-night standing,” which eventually included both male and female partners as well as experiments in polyamory. In the process, Woolf learned that however traumatic, Hal’s death had actually prepared her for the short-term relationships she realized were what made her feel the most free and alive. By turns disturbing and profound, this intimate book about one woman’s path to personal liberation also reveals the sometimes-labyrinthine nature of the bonds that unite people in love and marriage.

Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-063-05267-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: HarperOne

Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022

BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | HEALTH & FITNESS | SURVIVORS & ADVENTURERS | WOMEN & FEMINISM | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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I'M GLAD MY MOM DIED

by Jennette McCurdy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2022

The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.

The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.

In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.

Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022

ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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SEEN & HEARD

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

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Under the Bridge review: A truly depressing true-crime drama

Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone star in this adaptation of Rebecca Godfrey's book about the murder of Reena Virk.

Kristen Baldwin is the TV critic for EW

In the first episode of Under the Bridge , Hulu ’s relentlessly grim new true-crime drama, writer Rebecca Godfrey ( Riley Keough ) comes home to Victoria, British Columbia for the first time in 10 years. She’s flown in from New York to research her next book, about the “misunderstood girls” of her gorgeous but gloomy coastal town. Growing up, Rebecca was one of them — a rebellious kid who hid pot under the floorboards in her bedroom and partied with friends at an abandoned warehouse. She never really wanted to come back to Victoria, but the muse of her past misery beckons.

Early on in her visit, Rebecca hears about Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta), a local 14-year-old girl who went missing after going to an outdoor party. Sensing a hook for her story, Rebecca begins chatting up a band of teenagers — including Josephine Bell (Chloe Guidry) and Dusty Pace (Aiyana Goodfellow), who live at the Seven Oaks foster care group home, and Kelly Ellard (Izzy G.) and Warren Glowatski (Javon Walton) — who were among the last people to see Reena alive. Rebecca’s informal investigation pushes her into an awkward reunion with Officer Cam Bentland ( Lily Gladstone ), who was her best friend until about a decade ago, when a mysterious falling out ended their relationship.

Jeff Weddell/Hulu

Over the course of the season, Under the Bridge jumps between past and present timelines, chronicling Reena’s final days — including her clashes with her mother ( Archie Panjabi ), a devout Jehovah’s Witness — and the investigation into her murder, as Rebecca and Cam sort through the rumors and lies to uncover who killed her, and why.

The more we learn about Reena and the Seven Oaks girls she so desperately wanted to impress, the clearer it becomes that the most terrifying thing about this story is its underlying mundanity — that fleeting mean-girl squabbles and adolescent angst could lead to an utterly senseless death. But writer Quinn Shephard ( Blame ), who adapted Godfrey’s book for the screen, clutters Under the Bridge with several half-formed plots that dilute the powerful narrative about sad, mad, and lonely kids channeling their pain into violence.

Darko Sikman/Hulu

The real Rebecca Godfrey, who passed away in 2022, wrote Under the Bridge from the perspective of the kids and investigators involved. The series, however, makes Rebecca a key protagonist. It’s an understandable impulse, given Godfrey’s ability to put the teen subjects at ease, which allowed them to tell her things they wouldn’t admit to other adults. Still, the show can’t decide if it's Rebecca’s — and to a lesser degree, Cam’s — story, or the story of Reena and the kids who ended her life so callously. From the outside, it’s clear the focus should be on the latter, but that poses a more practical problem: Would Hulu really gamble on a character-driven drama starring a group of mostly unknown young actors, excellent as they are? Probably not.

So, Keough and Gladstone loom large on the poster, and Under the Bridge is obligated to place a clumsy emphasis on the strained, vaguely defined relationship between Rebecca and Cam. Even six episodes in, when the two have a blowout fight over their conflicting interests in Reena’s case, it still isn't clear what the precise source of their pent-up anger and frustration actually was. The confrontation is well-acted but unearned.

Despite the uneven writing, the performances in Under the Bridge are consistently superb. The young actors are particularly impressive. Gupta, whose cherubic face belies an underlying intensity, vividly conveys Reena’s impotent teenage anger, while Goudry reveals the fragile spirit under Josephine’s wannabe-gangster bluster. Izzy G. brings a chilling edge to Kelly’s teenage insouciance, and Goodfellow is sweet and sympathetic as Dusty, who can’t summon the courage to do the right thing. Walton, who used his babyface to such discomfiting effect as Euphoria ’s Ashtray, is absolutely heartbreaking as Warren, a soft-spoken, neglected kid grappling with anguish he just can’t process.

Keough plays Rebecca with a kind of dreamy and alluring reserve, though her interactions with Warren veer uncomfortably close to flirtation. (If that was the intent… um, okay.) Gladstone elevates Cam beyond the character’s stern-yet-concerned cop framework. Though a subplot concerning Cam’s Native ancestry — she was adopted into a white family as a baby — feels shoehorned in, it at least gives Gladstone another emotional avenue to explore. Panjabi is reliably affecting as Reena’s shattered mother, Suman, and American Idol contender-turned-actor Anoop Desai is a standout as Reena’s kind and understanding uncle, Raj.

“You poisoned our life, and I need it to stop,” Suman tells one of the accused killers. “I forgive you… It’s the only way out of all of this.” It’s a devastating scene, and one that underscores the difficulty of watching the terrible story of Reena Virk's death unfold. True-crime shows — whether scripted or documentary — are almost always depressing, but seeing the perpetrators caught and held accountable can make the experience more bearable. With Under the Bridge , though, the justice is yet another tragedy — more young lives destroyed to pay for one so pointlessly taken. Grade: B- Under the Bridge premieres Wednesday, April 17, on Hulu.

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Police officers in Atlanta detained demonstrators today on the usually serene campus of Emory University , where pro-Palestinian protesters had erected tents. It was the latest in a series of clashes in a protest movement that has spread across American campuses.

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Haiti: Prime Minister Ariel Henry signed his resignation letter, allowing a transitional council to take power .

Italy: Venice is trying to mitigate overtourism by charging a fee of five euros to visit its fragile historic center on busy days.

France: The blades came off the windmill at the Moulin Rouge in Paris. But the show will go on: The cabaret is still open.

TIME TO UNWIND

‘challengers’ tests zendaya’s star power.

Zendaya has been quite famous for a while, first as a teen on the Disney Channel and later as a star of an Emmy-winning show (“Euphoria”) and in big movies (“Spider-Man” and “Dune”). But “Challengers,” a Luca Guadagnino film about a love triangle between three tennis stars that arrives in theaters tomorrow, will test Zendaya’s box-office draw as a solo star .

In a review , our critic called it “a fizzy, lightly sexy, enjoyable tease of a movie.” The costumes, a rare collaboration with a major fashion designer, caught my colleagues’ attention .

The Chicago Bears are on the clock

The N.F.L. draft begins tonight, and much of the intrigue surrounds this year’s crop of quarterbacks. The Chicago Bears are widely expected to select U.S.C.’s Caleb Williams with the No. 1 pick, and it’s quite possible that second and third choices will be quarterbacks as well. Here’s what to expect , and who your team might be drafting .

One thing to watch: There’s a good chance teams will set a record this year for the most draft picks traded .

Dinner table topics

She vanished from Hollywood: “The Shining” star Shelley Duvall is back acting after two decades away. We talked to her about what happened .

Decks with a motive: Prisons in Mississippi are handing out playing cards featuring unsolved murders on their faces .

Dainty eating: Unlike most online food reviewers, Keith Lee avoids the mess. It’s a crucial part of his charm .

Is New York still funny?: Our comedy critic went on a one-week improv binge to find out .

WHAT TO DO TONIGHT

Cook: These sheet-pan quesadillas are quick and satisfying.

Read: Our crime columnist recommends four mystery novels .

Listen: These are five great classical music albums to listen to right now.

Plan: Here’s what to know before booking a trip to a national park .

Watch: Check out an indoor soccer match, where the game is at its best .

Be aware: The U.S. is flooded with fake Botox. Here’s what to look for .

Hunt: Which Atlanta-area house would you buy with a $450,000 budget ?

Play: Here are today’s Spelling Bee , Wordle and Mini Crossword . Find all of our games here .

ONE LAST THING

Some adults love stuffed animals, too.

Hollis Tuttle was given a stuffed bear puppet for her seventh birthday. She named it Ogen and kept it by her side until a week before her wedding at age 33, when she brought it to her parents’ house because her fiancé didn’t want to share a bed with the puppet. That was 14 years ago; she has since gotten a divorce and found new stuffed animals to fall asleep with.

We talked to several adults who continue to enjoy the companionship of a stuffed animal, as well as psychologists who said that the comfort offered by such an item doesn’t necessarily need to end at a certain age .

Have a cuddly evening.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back tomorrow. — Matthew

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