John who is currently a Jones Lecturer of Creative Writing at Stanford University, published his new memoir to much anticipation after having won the River Teeth Book Prize for his first memoir, Young Widower. Young Widower tells the story of John’s struggle and resilience after the unfathomable death of his first wife at the hands of a bear. The Los Angeles Review of Books said of Young Widower: “Evans is one in a long line of messengers from Lewis to Didion to Deraniyagala. And we need them…Thanks to honest and sadly beautiful books like Young Widower, we are at the very least helpless together. We can’t go on, we’ll go on.”
Of his new memoir, Evans’s says: “Should I Still Wish: A Memoir articulates the complicated joys of falling in love again as a young widower. It chronicles my efforts to leave an intense year of grief behind, to make peace with the natural world again, to reconnect with a woman who promises, like San Francisco itself, a life of abundance and charm, and to explain all of that, and much more, to my firstborn son.”
Praise for Should I Still Wish: A Memoir
A profoundly moving memoir of love’s recovery. . . . The brilliance of this insightful book is in its honest articulation of great paradox—love can rise complete and uncompromised even as grief endures, and the human heart can belong simultaneously to both life and death, neither of which triumphs forever.” —Jonathan Johnson, author of Hannah and the Mountain: Notes toward a Wilderness Fatherhood
“…While numerous memoirs about reckoning with the loss of a loved one demonstrate the perils of attempting to circumvent grief, Evans’ self-study proves equally instructive in negotiating guilt…Evans’s poignant, authentically disjointed account offers candid insight into the baffling interplay of love, loss, and the balm of memory.” –Kirkus
“Beautifully observed and unstintingly honest, Should I Still Wish tries to make sense of a world rendered senseless by tragedy. Its real brilliance, though, is in its interweaving of sorrow and joy, its examination of what it means to simultaneously mourn an old life and celebrate a new one.” —Katharine Noel, author of Halfway House
