What is All of This about?
“Beautifully written, complex, provocative, painful, genuine...an unforgettable memoir.”—ROXANE GAY
“Wonderfully lyrical and uncomfortably honest in a way that is so rare, yet so needed.”—JENNY LAWSON
“Disturbing and profound, this intimate book also reveals the sometimes-labyrinthine nature of the bonds that unite people in love...A provocative and memorable work.”—Kirkus Reviews
After years of struggling in a tumultuous marriage, writer Rebecca Woolf was finally ready to leave her husband. Two weeks after telling him she wanted a divorce, he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Four months later, at the age of forty-four, he died.
In All of This, Woolf chronicles the months before her husband’s death—and her rebirth after he was gone. With rigorous honesty and incredible awareness, she reflects on the end of her marriage: how her husband’s illness finally gave her the space to make peace with his humanity and her own.
Stunning, compelling, and brilliantly nuanced, All of This is one woman’s story of embracing the complexities of grief without shame—as a mother, a widow, and a sexual being—and emerging on the other side of a relationship with gratitude and relief.
This unflinching memoir explores the messy, untethered truth of what comes after:
- A Tumultuous Marriage: An unflinching look at a relationship that was breaking long before a terminal diagnosis changed everything.
- Grief Without Shame: The provocative and freeing truth about mourning a man you were ready to leave, and finding relief on the other side of loss.
- A Widow's Rebirth: An exploration of identity after tragedy—navigating motherhood, solitude, and sexuality with raw honesty.
- Brutal Honesty: A memoir that refuses to sanitize the past, telling the whole, messy story of a person, not a saint.