The Black-and-White Widow

At her husband’s memorial service, one woman finds herself with a new role to play: widow.

The trouble is, no one gave her the script.

Looking for direction, she turns to the great widows of black-and-white cinema—women who seemed to know exactly how to mourn, how to carry on and, most importantly, how a widow was supposed to behave. As she tries their roles on for size, memory and movie fantasy collide with the complicated realities of a thirty-year marriage.

Funny, sharp and deeply personal, The Black-and-White Widow plays with the distance between the stories we inherit and the lives we actually live—and what happens when an unfamiliar role calls for a rewrite.