Widow for One Year

The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of John Irving'sA Widow for One Year. We hope they will give you a number of interesting angles from which to consider this entertaining and remarkable novel. Irving gives us a novel about a family marked by tragedy. His central character, Ruth Cole, is a complex, self-contradictory character - a "difficult" woman. Ruth is a bestselling novelist whose writing is more imagined than her own life experiences. A Widow for One Yearis Ruth's story, told in three parts, each focussing on a critical time in her life. The first time we meet Ruth is in 1958, when she is only four years old. The second is in 1990, when Ruth is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. The novel closes in 1995, when she is a widow and mother. Along the way Ruth must deal with the demons of her past - two dead brothers, a grief-stricken mother who disappeared from her life when she was only four, and Ted Cole, her sexually promiscuous father whom she finds in bed with her best friend. Ten Cole is a beloved writer of children's stories, a loving father bearing up under the nightmare of his sons' premature death. A Widow for One Yearis a moving, erotic, richly comic novel about the passage of time and relentlessness of grief.Irving, John is the author of 'Widow for One Year', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345469014 and ISBN 0345469011.