Please tell us a little about yourself and widow— widower— widowest—. 

After my wife Polly died, we wrote a book together. It interleaves my writing (about grief, being a solo dad) with Polly’s journals (about being an artist, our kids, marriage) to form a kind of mosaic of her life. 

I’m originally from Louisiana, though I’ve been living in Colorado now for almost 20 years. I met Polly in the Peace Corps (she was a fellow volunteer). After we finished, we moved to her home state, got married, started a family, and had three kids. 

I write software for a living, not words, so despite having a book published (and reviewed by Kirkus!) I still have a strong case of impostor syndrome about being “a writer.”  

What made you want to write about your life? 

My wife’s sudden death in our 40s was so outside my frame of reference that it was nearly incomprehensible. No one we knew had ever experienced anything like this. Most widow(er) resources are directed at the elderly, or possibly those left behind by cancer, so I didn’t have any language for how to think about it: Is this really something that can happen—your spouse can be taken away, just like that? I wanted to convey the interiority of grief, what it feels like. 

What sparked your idea for widow— widower— widowest—? 

In the months after Polly died, I would go on these long, long hikes while the kids were in school. My thoughts [while I was] on those hikes turned into writing. At the same time, I was reading through Polly’s journals, finding drafts of her letters, stumbling across her old emails. I don’t know when the idea came to me, but at some point the concept was just there like it had always existed: Our writing needed to get together in a final posthumous collaboration. 

How did you research your book? 

I read piles and piles of grief books and widower memoirs. The widower genre follows a pattern: before (when everything’s great), death (when things get bad), and after (suffering, getting over it). They would often end with the widower getting married, which would make me want to throw the book across the room. My (our) memoir doesn’t follow this pattern at all. It’s scattered and broken apart in time, in the way that grief feels. It has an emotional arc, not a plot arc. I don’t get married in the end. 

How did you create/acquire the cover art? 

All the art in the book is Polly’s, including the cover, which is a close-up of a four-foot-square tile mosaic she made for my mom. It was in storage for a while after my mom moved, so when she brought it out, I hadn’t seen it in a few years and had nearly forgotten about it. I already had the book title figured out, so when I saw Polly’s mosaic, I thought, Oh wow, there’s the cover. 

Portions of this Q&A were edited for clarity.