The afterlife of Anatole Broyard illustrates the law that writing has an irresistible tendency to multiply. Mr. Broyard, who produced many thousands of words as a critic, memoirist, and journalist – most notably during his long stint as a book reviewer for the New York Times – has, since his death in 1990, been the subject of many thousands more.

His memoir “Kafka Was the Rage” appeared three years after he died; his elusive racial identity was explored in a penetrating essay by Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Passing of Anatole Broyard”; his romantic adventures in the Village in the 1950s were remembered by Anne Bernays, one of his many lovers, in her memoir “Back Then”; his daughter Bliss testified to his charisma in the autobiographical stories of “My Father, Dancing.” And now his widow, Sandy, adds another chapter to the story of Broyard’s afterlife, with her memoir “Standby” (Alfred A. Knopf, 212 pages, $24).

In fact, “Standby” is not really a book about Anatole Broyard, though he is its provocation and its presiding ghost. Rather, it is an extended journal of his wife’s mourning in the years after his death, from prostate cancer, at the age of 70. As a literary subject, the grief of the widow is as old as Hecuba, and Sandy Broyard graphs its familiar phases: misery and numbness, despair and nostalgia, loneliness and a longing for new beginnings. As a document of such experiences, “Standby” cannot but be humanly affecting, a reminder of the sickness and sorrow that life has in store for all of us. “I don’t want to write a comforting book,” Ms. Broyard declares, “or a consoling book. I want my words to be strong, to ring true, to reverberate with the pain and the hardness and the stink, the putrid stink of death.”

Ms. Broyard’s theme may be venerable, but the idiom in which it is expressed changes from generation to generation, and the idiom of “Standby” is that of post-Freudian psychology, New Age division. Ms. Broyard, a former dancer, is now a psychotherapist on Martha’s Vineyard, and her purpose in “Standby” is not so much literary as therapeutic. She affirms the current reverence for stories and storytelling as instruments of healing: “Being alive means telling one’s story, be it to a friend, a priest, a therapist, or a journal. Writing at the beginning of a day is how I have become aware of where I am, where I have been. … These words have kept me breathing.”

Ms. Broyard’s tight focus on herself means that her memoir has little to say about the man and the marriage she is mourning. This seems a shame, since marriage to Anatole Broyard must have been a fascinating and complicated experience. One common theme in memoirs of Broyard is his legendary womanizing – Ms. Bernays said that “with women, he was just like an alcoholic with booze”- but Sandy Broyard has almost nothing to say about what intimacy with such a man is like. We hear that their relationship was extremely close – “Losing my husband is like losing who I am,” Ms. Broyard writes – but we are left to wonder about the demurrals that crop up more and more often as the book goes on: “I wasn’t always happy with Anatole. He could be selfish, insensitive, unkind, impatient.” Ms. Broyard also neglects the matter of her husband’s concealment of his African-American ancestry, about which she had some sharply perceptive things to say in Mr. Gates’s article.

Instead, “Standby,” like the journal it is, keeps a close focus on the daily fluctuations of its author’s mood. Some readers may find their sympathy with Ms. Broyard’s obvious suffering clouded, however, by her fondness for the quilted cliches of psychotherapeutic language, and by her taste for some of the more outre manifestations of New Age culture: the past-life regressions, the yoga retreats, the spirit guide named River.

What comes across most clearly in these passages is the self-love enshrined at the heart of so much American psychotherapy. There are countless exhortations directed at the author, by herself and others, to take it easy, to feel good, to pay attention to her own needs – in short, to be more selfish.(“My obsession now is with expensive underwear and having silk next to my skin. I want to treasure and take care of my body.”) The appeal of such a message to a soul in agony is understandable. But it is not a recipe for literary objectivity, or for deep moral understanding.

“Standby” is really addressed to readers flailing in the immediate wake of a terrible loss, and such readers will find consolation in sharing Ms. Broyard’s griefs. For others, however, “Standby” may seem like one of those books that was more rewarding to write than it is to read.