Anne Roiphe: Epilogue

Being a designer, I sometimes buy books based on their cover design and typesetting. I picked up this book last year at a library book sale for those two reasons. I love the way Christine Van Bree incorporated various shapes and colors of the moons with the title of the book, which set in a sans-serif typeface. For the interior pages, Leah Carlson-Stanisic and Emily Taff had done a great job of setting Bembo as a pleasurable reading text.

The memoir itself is poignant and beautiful. Anne Roiphe shares her story of being a widow. She dates other men, including widowers, but she always misses her husband. She writes about her daughters and grandchildren, but the memories of her husband are too hard to hold back her tears. She doesn’t want to be alone, but dating in your seventies is not a walk in the park. She also writes about sex or the imagination of it, which is fascinating considering her age. The honesty and devastation in her writing show that the person that died first had it easier. The one that is still living would suffer more. It’s an enlightening and hopeful read.