Page 13 of Gracie Harris Is Under Construction

Chapel Hill is a small town, according to most people in my life (who nearly all live in big cities), but at home I would never broadcast “Hey, my house is empty—come on in!” like I feel comfortable doing here in Canopy.

Josh seemed sensitive to invading my space and hesitant to keep the key, so this feels like a small token of welcome that I can leave.

The guy is repairing my run-down house, after all.

Initially, I wanted a place farther removed from downtown, but today I’m appreciative that we landed a few blocks from every creature comfort that I need: restaurants, bookstore, gift shops, and, my favorite, an utterly charming coffee shop.

The Drip is a converted single-family home on Main Street, and it’s only a three-minute walk from the house.

The front is a glass-enclosed porch that I assume at one point must’ve been open.

The dark steel frame of the sunroom contrasts against the light-gray paint that covers the rest of the brick house.

To the left, a large gravel patio is filled with tables and chairs of all sizes.

A few early risers have already set up shop with their laptops and books by the time I arrive.

It’s a perfect morning to work outside, with a slight chill still hanging in the air before the day heats up.

My mind, however, wanders in the fresh air, so it’s best if I stay indoors to kick off my summer of writing.

I open the door and walk inside. It’s just as I remember it from over a year ago when I was last here with Ben.

The café has a purposefully mismatched decor style that looks like a loving grandma made every single piece.

Local art and photography cover the walls.

Places like these feel comfortable to me.

The wood floor creaks ever so slightly as I advance toward the register.

It’s so cozy and welcoming in here—perfect for my writing process.

This will be my second home for the summer.

Thirty thousand more words, here we come.

A friendly face greets me at the counter and says, “Welcome in. What can we make for you this morning?”

“An iced Americano with a splash of almond milk, please.” This is my go-to drink. I imagine that by the end of next week I’ll be regular here enough that they’ll start making it when I walk through the door. That’s what I’m hoping for, at least.

I spot a small table in the corner of the shop, walk over, and plug in my laptop, even though it’s fully charged.

A minute later, the barista kindly walks over my drink instead of calling my name and leaving it on the counter.

There is a quiet, unfussy hospitality here that makes me feel welcome and comfortable.

I smile, say thank you, and open the laptop, ready to get to work.

My editor, Jeannie, is giving me wiggle room with the period that the book will cover.

The “first year” of widowhood memoir approach is less of a strict timeline and more of a rough guide.

Whatever it takes for the story to come to a natural conclusion of some sort.

When I got invited to The Maisy Show I imagined it would be the perfect, triumphant end to the tale of my first year without Ben.

Things obviously didn’t end up that way.

I’d like to at least try to end the book on a neutral or positive note, so a bit of summer just might creep in.

The ultimate goal is to construct a cohesive narrative that flows and brings together strong themes around grief, motherhood, and midlife reinvention. Lofty stuff.

That goal line still feels pretty far down the field. I’m supposed to deliver somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty thousand words, and I’ve got fifty thousand “done,” but right now nothing feels complete. The chapters aren’t connected, and there’s no narrative arc quite yet.

Part of what has made my essays in The New York Times so popular is that my writing is raw, real, and unsettled.

Every essay is about grief, and while there are sometimes neat resolutions or clear advice, for the most part it’s me saying, I experienced this new, unexpected aspect of sadness and loss!

Let me tell you all about it! None of my published essays are retrospective.

Everything is written for the here and now. It’s what my readers love.

Writing for the memoir is a bit different.

There is something entirely unique, but similarly special, that happens with my prose if I wait a few weeks to reflect.

I’m able to see events and emotions in my life just a little more clearly and gain a perspective that my essays don’t have—and one that’s important for the tone of the memoir and to set it apart from the column.

For most of the year that approach worked for making progress on the book—wait a few weeks, then write about it—but the fact is that I’m nearly two months behind at the moment.

I didn’t plan for this to happen. I’ve blamed sports banquets, real-life work deadlines, and the end of the school year.

The truth is a little more nuanced. The last thing I wrote about was a date gone terribly wrong in early April, and ever since I haven’t felt the urge to reopen the manuscript.

Until now. I scroll through the document and relive the experience that halted my progress.

It was a first date at one of my favorite restaurants, a cute Thai place a few blocks from the heart of downtown.

Most of my dates come courtesy of colleagues, friends, or even friends of friends.

The thought of installing an app makes me want to hurl, so it’s all word-of-mouth setups or meet-cutes in bookstores for me.

The meet-cute thing hasn’t happened yet, to be clear, but I’m holding out hope.

A colleague connected me with her cousin, and I was happily impressed when a handsome, recently divorced doctor sat down across the table.

He had just relocated for work a few months prior and hadn’t grown up in Chapel Hill or even North Carolina, so there wasn’t the typical small talk to make and no seven degrees of do you know so-and-so.

Instead, we talked about our work, our lives, our kids. It was perfectly lovely. And then.

Right about the time the server came by to grab our plates after the main course, a woman who looked to be in her sixties strolled up to the table.

Her body posture and confidence made me think that my date must have known her, so I smiled.

But she just stood there, staring directly at me without breaking eye contact.

“You should be ashamed of yourself” was the first thing out of her mouth. I was shocked.

“I’m sorry—do I know you?” I stammered out. “What is this even about?”

Her tone had caught the attention of people at the nearby tables, and I saw our waitress staring at me from a nearby station with a WTF is going on? look. I sure didn’t know.

“I’ve been a regular reader since the beginning, and I just want to say how disappointed I am in you. I didn’t expect to see you out here being a floozy with some random man so soon after your husband died,” she said, gesturing toward the cute doctor.

I just stared. Then glared. Then raged. But I could not find the words to meet the moment. My date across the table looked completely horrified.

My first thought was to tell this woman, Actually, this is probably my tenth date since Ben died, and by the way, it’s all been traumatizing, and even so, I’ve occasionally managed grief sex rather than anything even remotely resembling real connection.

Thankfully, I had the sense to realize that putting my business out like that in public was probably not the best path forward.

This was two months after a dating-related essay that ruffled a few feathers and made me realize some things really should be left private.

But all I could do was sit there in silence.

“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to leave us alone,” the cute doctor said, swooping in to rescue everyone involved and those simply stuck witnessing the moment. “You are being incredibly rude.”

“Well, she’s being a whore,” the terrible woman responded, shocked that she’d been confronted and clearly expecting me to apologize for something . That’s the weird thing about even lightweight fame—people think they know you, that they have a right to you. It’s screwed up, actually.

She was escorted out of the restaurant by the manager as her clearly embarrassed husband gathered up their things and tried to pay the bill. Their server said something to the tune of I would rather die than take your money .

“That…was not normal,” the cute doctor said, trying to rescue what until then had been a perfect first date, knowing, of course, that no good relationship—even a casual one—could ever grow from such a sour start, even if we had nothing to do with it.

That’s the thing about normalcy, though—it can all be swept away in an instant. Trust me, I’m an expert.

Life was just starting to feel manageable when that happened and it made me question, well, everything that I was doing and how public I had made my life.

Just like I ended up doing a month later onstage with Maisy, I hit a roadblock and completely shut down.

So, I tapped a mental pause button and stopped writing the memoir because, of course, it was obviously about so much more than just that one date.

Dr. Lisa is the only one who knows about this.

I conveniently left my little writing hiatus out of my recent lunch conversation with Felicity.

Also, I know myself. Eventually, I always sort things out, and a lot has changed since I last stared at the blinking cursor on this document.

This is my first real day back writing this memoir.

I simply refuse to wallow. Today has the potential to set the tone for all of the writing I need to get done this summer.

It is critical to plow forward and get going again.

So, I make the decision to cheat and skip right past the anniversary of Ben’s death and the bombed interview and head to my sweet spot—a two-week retrospective. I’ll deal with the heavy stuff later.

When I was an English major in college, a creative-writing professor told us that the best skill we could master as creators (he was ahead of his time—the concept of being a “creator” didn’t exist in the early 2000s like we know it now) was the ability to sit down and produce something .

You’re an artist? Be able to sit down and paint.

Photographer? Find a photo to take. Writer?

Create an essay, poem, or short story on demand.

This professor was clear that most of what we created would be throwaway, but you never knew when inspiration would strike or how a bunch of mediocre creations could be pulled together into something more cohesive and shiny.

I’ve spent the last two decades being a marketer and not a writer, but his advice has served me well in my career.

Today doesn’t need to be perfect and it doesn’t even need to end up in the finished book…

it simply needs to say something, anything.

Words on the page. Ideally, heading in the direction of progress.

I close my eyes and think about the ways that most of the month of May was oddly comforting.

There was a long list of to-dos that I was able to prioritize and accomplish—shopping lists for camp, final parent-teacher conferences, spirit weeks, and, after I decided to spend the summer in Canopy, ordering furniture online for the house here.

Retail therapy always helps. I was able to casually slide into a version of life that almost felt normal.

The return to normal, I think. That’s worth writing about.

As I write, I’m aware of people coming and going from The Drip.

The little bell on the door rings out every few minutes.

Friends and neighbors greet one another and start up conversations.

The young barista behind the counter who brought me my drink welcomes more than a few people by their first names.

The quiet hum of the place turns into the background white noise that I need to get the closest I’ve been to a flow state with this memoir in a long time.

I spend the next few hours massaging a chapter about the beauty of mundanity.

When you’ve had a year like mine, boring is a gift.

Predictability feels like a warm hug. The everyday tasks that usually drive parents to insanity at the end of the school year?

A welcome distraction. Returning to routine is essential—at least for me—to finding anything resembling equilibrium.

It’s also what excites me so much about my summer here in Canopy.

I get to dive into the deep end of a routine.

Yes, it’s a new routine in new surroundings, but there is comfort in it.

It’s not my best writing, but even in the moment I know that this will be an important transition chapter that leads to the final portion of the book. The prose can be polished later. Morning number one has been perfectly adequate.