ABSTRACT
Joyce Carol Oates's portrayals of terror-stricken individuals and explorations of the darkest human impulses constitute much of her best fiction. Four grief memoirs have been analyzed in detail to illustrate the issues: C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Lindsay Nicholson's Living on the Seabed: A Memoir of Love, Life and Survival, and Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story: A Memoir. A Gothic trait explored in grief memoirs is the relation between an alienated, often socially and culturally disenfranchised, individual or group and society. Like many Gothic texts, bereavement narratives provide "a voice for silent or repressed concerns and disenfranchised groups, offering implicit critiques of accepted institutions and behaviors". The haunted place is another characteristic linking bereavement memoirs to the Gothic. All the memoirists of spousal loss discussed here admit that they received a lot of support from their family and friends at different times of their bereavement.
