I Miss Who I Was In Early Grief

Promoting a memoir while feeling like a fraud.

Advanced Reader Copies in the Little Free Library boxes.

My book launches May 5th. I should be excited. Instead, I feel like a fraud.

Widow in the City is a memoir about reclaiming desire after devastating loss. About dating apps and questionable decisions and finding myself again. I wrote it from a braver place than I’m standing in right now.

Here’s what I didn’t understand about grief when I was living the book: I felt better early on because I had hope. Not the vague, inspirational-poster kind of hope. A specific hope—that I would re-partner, resume my life along the same trajectory, pick up something close to what I’d lost. The dating, the hookups, the reclaiming of myself, all of it was fueled by that belief. That this was a detour, not a destination.

It will be five years in August since Steven died. I know now that I’m not resuming anything. Life isn’t going back to its old shape. It’s becoming something else, something I can’t fully see yet. That’s not bad, exactly. But it’s scary in a way the early grief wasn’t.

People think of grief as linear. They imagine it as distance—that the farther you get from the loss, the better you feel. My experience has been the opposite. I felt almost hopeful in the beginning, untethered but alive, lit up by possibility. Now the possibility has narrowed into something quieter and I understand, maybe for the first time, that this is just my life.

Someone left a Goodreads review saying my book is “another exercise to garner attention.” And here’s the thing, she’s not entirely wrong. My husband died and all of a sudden I had zero attention. I lost the one person who witnessed my life, who knew I was in the room. Of course I reached for visibility. Of course I needed to be seen.

But I’ve been sitting with something harder than that. Feeling better has always felt like a betrayal. To feel good is to move away from Steven, from what we had, from the version of my life that made sense. My book is, in some ways, a record of feeling better. And now, promoting it, I wonder: am I supposed to be better by now?

I’m not. I’m just further away. And that turns out to be its own kind of grief.

I wrote this book because I needed to. I’m publishing it because other women need to know they’re not alone in the mess of it—the desire and the guilt and the shrinking and the reaching. If you’ve ever felt like two completely different people at the same time, this book is for you.

Even if the person who wrote it is still figuring it out.

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If you’ve been meaning to order and haven’t yet, now is the moment.

Pre-orders matter enormously for a debut memoir. They affect first-week rankings, which affect visibility, which affects whether this book finds the readers it was written for — the women (and men too!) navigating grief and desire and reinvention who need to know they are not alone.

And if you’ve already ordered — thank you. From the bottom of my heart ❤️. You are the reason something is happening here.

Widow in the City: A Memoir of Heartbreaks and Hookups drops May 5, 2026.

We’re almost there. 🥰

With love,

Amy