Widowed: My Husband Is the Hero of My Next Book

Jon is the hero of my next book.

I’ve been working on it for some time. It’s a collection of the columns I wrote for the Oakland Tribune back in the 20th century, when Peter and Christina were little kids and Jon and I were a two-paycheck couple trying to make it all work.

When I was in the throes of writing those columns, between 1987 and 1992, I thought of myself as the driving force in the liberated drama that was our family. I was a pioneering woman, after all, a second wave feminist who hoped to — intended to — have it all: husband, children and a meaningful career.

Widowed: My Husband Is the Hero of My Next Book

But a few years ago, when my Tribune editor friend, Lisa Wrenn, and I began putting those columns into a book and I read them with a fresh eye, I realized that the hero of the book — the hero of my journey as a liberated woman wanting it all — was Jon.

These past few weeks, I’ve been writing footnotes to some of those columns. And in one of them, I’m pointing out that it was Jon’s generous, fun-loving, liberated personality that made the life I wanted possible.

It was Jon who, uncomplaining, shared the housekeeping and child care duties. It was Jon who supported my writing career, once going so far as to cheer me on when I accused him — in print — of male chauvinism.

The book is pretty much done. Lisa will give it another read. Then I’ll send it off to agents and publishers. If it finds a publishing home, I’ll take some credit and pass some on to Jon.

More about the writing life at “Noah Lukeman on the Colon, That Most Majestic of Punctuation Marks.”  More about Jon at “Widowed: A Love Letter Arrived From Jon This Week.”