Rebecca Woolf was supposed to be a divorcée. The author and award-winning Girls Gone Child blogger already had one foot out of her failing marriage when her husband Hal was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Four months later, he was gone, and among the numerous feelings Woolf found herself newly saddled with, there was relief. In widowhood, there was freedom.
In her exhilarating, fiercely frank "All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire," Woolf steers the reader through the complicated waters of caretaking and grieving through mixed emotions. Prior to Hal's illness, the marriage had already become "toxic." After his death, Woolf felt a pressure to perform sadness while she longed for sexual liberation. And there was no road map for such an ambiguous bereavement.
