"Almost Stories”

Jim reading The Drummer's Widow on our Teyssieres terrace

Alice Munro has said that some of her stories are “almost stories” because they are “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.”

Three years ago, when I began writing The Drummer’s Widow, my husband Jim's blood cancer was in remission. And though my chronic fear of becoming a widow had slipped away, I was still compelled to write an “almost” story of how I imagined a widow would reinvent her life after her husband’s death.

Then, abruptly, one month ago, just before the publication date, Jim was diagnosed with a second often deadly cancer, acute large cell lymphoma. I felt like I had slammed into a stonewall: my fictionalized widowhood could actually come true.

I suggested to Jim that we postpone the release date until after his chemotherapy treatments or at least change the title. He had always liked the title and insisted that I go ahead with it.

Nora Ephron learned from her mother, also a writer, how to make the best of what life offers. "No matter what happens,” her mother was fond of telling her, “It's all copy." My understanding of that is that it doesn’t matter what happens to us; what matters is what we do with it.

So I released The Drummer's Widow and my worse possible nightmare didn't happen. Jim survived his second cancer.