{"id":39757,"date":"2024-09-14T00:01:48","date_gmt":"2024-09-14T07:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=39757"},"modified":"2026-06-05T10:04:22","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T10:04:22","slug":"widowed-ive-been-writing-a-memoir-in-essays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/widowed-ive-been-writing-a-memoir-in-essays\/","title":{"rendered":"Widowed: I’ve Been Writing a Memoir in Essays All This Time"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"widowed<\/a>
Widowed, I’ve been writing a memoir in essays in the years since my husband died in 2021. Here’s Jon — not<\/em> posing for my camera in 2000, after an active day with our teenaged kids. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It’s been three and a half years since Jon died, and I’ve had a lot to say on these pages about that sorrow.<\/p>\n

Just before his death, I had been thinking about cutting back on the weekly posts I was writing for this website. The deadlines had become onerous, the posts were taking time away from my “real” writing, and I had run out of things to say that felt worth taking up my readers’ time.<\/p>\n

Some Words From My Social Media Guru<\/strong><\/h5>\n

But a few weeks after Jon’s death, a conversation with my social media guru, Cheryl McLaughlin, convinced me to keep on going with the posts.<\/p>\n

Write about your life without Jon, she said. Let your posts — your writing — go in that direction.<\/p>\n

I took Cheryl’s advice and I committed to posting here once a week on deadline, without fail, no excuses.<\/p>\n

The regimen did wonders for my writing process. Grief was — is — not easy to write about. The heart does not want to go there. It wanders off to more comfortable topics: the yellowjackets burrowing in the front yard. The prickly thistle growing out back. Posting here — and being read here — has kept me honest and on task.<\/p>\n

Starting With Jon’s Obituary<\/strong><\/h5>\n

The first post about Jon went up on February 27, 2021. It was his obituary<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Others followed, with titles like:<\/p>\n

“My Husband Passed Away and Took the Encyclopedia With Him”<\/a><\/p>\n

“Her Stolen Car Came Back. My Husband Didn’t”<\/a><\/p>\n

“Widowed. Or How to Wrestle a Christmas Tree Into Its Stand Without Calling a Neighbor for Help.”<\/a><\/p>\n

“Marriage Mistakes. If I Could Have a Do-Over, Would I?”<\/a><\/p>\n

Widowed: I’ve Been Writing a Memoir in Essays<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Whether I felt like it or not, the writing got done. And now, three-plus years later, the essays have piled up, dozens of them. Together, they could — with some heavy-duty editing — pass for a book. I’m thinking, a memoir in essays.<\/p>\n

A memoir in essays — it’s a genre<\/a> several writers I admire are experimenting with. People like Maggie O’Farrell, Maggie Smith, Abigail Thomas and Maggie Nelson.<\/p>\n

More about those writers and their books on another day. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n

\"blog-analytics-graph\"<\/a>
Meanwhile, my regular posting habits have kept the Internet search engines happy. According to this graph on my website,\u00a0 a steady flow of readers has come my way in recent years. (The 2020 readers came for my “Sheltering at Home”<\/a> posts during the pandemic lockdown.)\u00a0 Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"memoir<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

For three-plus years, I’ve been writing blog posts about being widowed. Do I have the makings of a memoir in essays?\u00a0 Read more.<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48692,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,14],"tags":[134,34,191,29,2863,488,2419,575],"class_list":["post-39757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-on-writing-reading","category-widowed","tag-books","tag-dont-miss","tag-grief","tag-jon","tag-memoir-in-essays","tag-the-writing-life","tag-widowed","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39757"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48695,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39757\/revisions\/48695"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}