The photographs of the handsome boys had preserved the memories of a once happy family.

(Years later, Eddie writes a novel about this summer called Sixty Times.) Marion is angered by Ted’s duplicity, and leaves him one day by surprise, taking all but one of the photographs of their dead boys. The novel opens with Ruth’s discovery of Eddie having sex with Marion, one of sixty times that summer that they performed the act. Ted counted on Marion wanting sex with Eddie because of the resemblance, and that Eddie, for his part, will be tempted by Marion, whom at age 39 is described by Irving as possibly “one of the most beautiful women alive” (30) Ted chose Eddie because of the sixteen-year-old’s resemblance to the dead boys. In the summer of 1958, when Ruth is four, Ted decides he wants to end the marriage, so he hires Eddie O’Hare as his writer’s assistant. Ted and Marion conceive Ruth soon after, but it is clear by then that the marriage is already over. We are told that the Coles’ lives are shattered when their two teenage boys are killed in a car accident (as in Irving’s World According To Garp). The Coles are a family of writers: Ted Cole, the father, is a writer of very successful children’s books his daughter, Ruth, becomes a popular novelist Marion, the mother, becomes a mystery writer years after divorcing Ted. John Irving’s A Widow for One Year chronicles the history of the Cole family over a period of 37 years. An imaginary review of Irving’s The Third Leg

A widow for one year