Rebecca Woolf’s powerful new book All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire is a heartfelt account of her tumultuous 13-year marriage to Hal, culminating in his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and death four months later at age 44, and how her personal life transformed afterward. After years of being unhappy, Woolf had been planning to divorce Hal, but in the wake of his diagnosis and becoming his caretaker during the final four months of his life, she discovers nuances to their love and connection. The book delves into not only the ups and downs of their relationship, but also Woolf’s entire sexual and dating history, and the numerous damaging messages she internalized about putting men’s needs ahead of her own.
After Hal’s death, Woolf recreates her intimate life, exploring polyamorous relationships, her burgeoning bisexuality, and casting off the ways society tells her a widow should behave. She also speaks frankly with her four children about the reality of her marriage and her newfound independence. In the process, she forges a path that allows her to explore what she truly wants out of sex and relationships on her own terms. While specific to Woolf’s experience, the ongoing evolution she explores in her pursuit of love, lust and happiness is one readers of all backgrounds will find inspiring. We interviewed Woolf about non-monogamy, bisexuality, marriage and relationships, and truth telling.
Why did you want to document the experience of the end of your marriage, your husband’s death and your intimate life afterward? What did you learn about yourself in the process of writing the book?
I have always written about my life. I don’t know how not to at this point. My work has always been a translation of my experience – most notably – an examination of what challenges me as a person. In terms of learning about myself, it is a very clarifying exercise to write about one’s experiences and then to, draft by draft, dig deeper into them. I have been writing about my life for two decades now and for fourteen years, have written exclusively for an online audience in real time, so in writing this book, I was able to take my time, be more reflective, and explore areas of my life I hadn’t personally or publicly before.
You contrast your experience cheating within your supposedly monogamous marriage with being openly polyamorous afterward. How did the impact of dealing with cheating affect your approach to polyamory?
I never considered myself poly per se and sort of struggle with the term if I’m being honest. I don’t feel comfortable labeling my relationships for one and have never loved more than one person at a time – nor have I ever been interested in deeply exploring TRUE intimacy with more than one person at a time. I think sex is, in many cases is simply sex, and I am open to sexually exploring with other people while loving one person, which is what I spent the months and years after my husband’s death doing. I don’t know that there’s a label for that… for me there isn’t.
I think I’m just a human person who believes in bodily autonomy when it comes to loving relationships. I don’t believe anyone’s body belongs to me or I to them. And I think love and sex, while often intersecting, don’t have to. I’m also not closed off to monogamy. I’m pretty open… to all of it. I just think it’s wrong to default to monogamy without question. We have no imagination, societally. (Which is why I sort of bristle at labels. They feel limiting! Binary! Regardless of how threatening they are to a status quo!)
In terms of my marriage, I was honest with him about SO little that the cheating was almost mundane in comparison to all of the other stories I had told him (and myself) in order to keep us together.
The last four years I have essentially had to unlearn how to perform, how to lie… how to “fake it til I make it.” First to myself and then with partners.
When you’re in a non-monogamous relationship with someone, honesty is a prerequisite and in my experience, it made me realize how dishonest – how performative – I had always been with men.
This is why I felt so pressed to center my own gaze in this book – because it was truly a first for me. This book is not a performance of any kind. I wrote as a sort of antidote to all the times I felt I needed to.
Of your nonmonogamous relationship with Jake, one of the first people you date after Hal dies, you write, “I was a free woman who was also in love with a man. I felt brand new” and that “Jake’s was the kind of love that made me feel safe, enabling me to push and pull in equal measures.” For people not involved in polyamory, those feelings of freedom and safety can seem at odds. Can you expand on why it was so freeing to be part of this kind of relationship?
Openness is freeing. Open communication. Open exploration. Mutual respect for each other’s autonomy. By the time Jake and I met, I knew who I was and what I wanted. And it made me realize that in my marriage I didn’t know either of those things. I married so young – and it was never for love and always for kids and certainly never for me.
Coming out of that experience, I wanted the opposite – I needed the opposite. And I will forever be grateful to have found and to have had that.
Was there a learning curve for polyamory for you, or did you find it easy to navigate any boundaries and rules you made within those early relationships?
Again, I never really felt like I was learning to be anything. I was merely going into a relationship knowing what I wanted this time around and being able – for the first time – to articulate it. In my experience, that’s all one needs to know how to do. To communicate well with someone who can communicate well back. Equity is important when navigating boundaries and setting rules – and I don’t think one can navigate a healthy relationship – open or not – without it.
You also write in the book about exploring your bisexuality and dating and sleeping with women for the first time. How did embracing bisexuality change your perception of yourself as a person and sexual being?
Having sex with women is – for me – a uniquely different experience than having sex with men. Sex with women made me realize how much my sexuality has always centered the man’s experience. Like, I know what to do with a dick, you know. I’ve lived my whole life mastering the art of pleasing men – centering their pleasure over my own. Being with women helped me reexamine sexuality as a whole.
You explore the common perceptions of how a widow should feel and act, and how your experience defied that. Why do you think there’s still such a narrow idea of what a widow should be?
We don’t have a range of societal examples of what widows look like. If you look at the ways widows are presented in the stories we have been told – especially young widows – you get the same version every time. Sad woman pining over dead man. Societally, we love to feel sorry for people who are grieving the right way and don’t know what to do with people who go on with their lives – often times, with more joy than before. Death is supposed to bring us down, not lift us up, but for many people who lose people they love – especially when the relationships are complicated – there is rebirth and relief in the aftermath of loss. Societally, we do not know what to do with that, I think, because we’re afraid that if we die, people will respond similarly. Because, for the same reason we are obsessed with the idea of monogamy, we are obsessed with the idea of love and marriage being FOR LIFE.
I also believe that there is a performative aspect to grief that no one wants to talk about but it exists because it is far more socially acceptable to define oneself by her loss than it is to move on.
You’ve been in touch with many other women who’ve wanted to leave their marriages to men but haven’t yet. What advice do you have for women in that situation?
I don’t think I am in any position to give advice since I never left mine. I almost did – I would have (finally) but I did not. I do know that there is a better life on the other side of a toxic marriage and I want to break every woman out of her bad marriage now that I have experienced an aftermath. I will also say that children are better off in a house without two parents if those two parents are miserable together. (Even when one of them is dead.)
You are very clear in the book that you have no desire to get married again and that “marriages are complicated and not for everyone.” What has the intimacy you’ve experienced after the confines of marriage taught you about human connection?
For me, human connection without obligation and love without commitment means that two people can come together – whether briefly or for years – and when it doesn’t feel right anymore – let each other go. The idea that we must work and compromise and shrink ourselves in order to be lovable to a partner as opposed to allowing ourselves to grow out of relationships is so backwards to me. It’s cliché as f**k but life is short. I cannot imagine spending one more day let alone a lifetime with someone that made me feel bad about myself. “Making it work” is not the flex one thinks it is.
You’re a mom of four and write in the book that you’ve been open with your children about your dating life as well as the fact that during your marriage you wanted a divorce. Why is that openness important to you as a mom?
I am not just my children’s mother and I think it’s important for them to know that. I think many parents feel it is their job to protect their children from the truth because the truth is painful and complicated and often dangerous and we’re supposed to – as parents – make our kids feel safe. But the world is not safe. Our homes are not safe, either. Speaking honestly about feelings and experiences as a parent allows our kids to feel like they can do the same. When we model shame and secrecy and lies to our children we are modeling shame, secrecy and lies to our children. And its baffling to me that its somehow controversial to tell ones children the truth.
Is this something you’d recommend to other single parents when their children have questions about their personal lives, and do you have any advice for parents who want to talk about it with their kids but don’t know how to start?
Answer their questions. There is nothing to be ashamed of. You are a human person and so are they.
What message do you hope readers take away from the book?
I hope readers feel seen.
In the end, that’s all I want. My experience is not unique, I don’t think. It’s just a story seldom told.
I want to normalize stories like mine.
All of This is available from Amazon and Bookshop.
Read an excerpt from All of This about polyamorous dating.