The Substack Widow
My husband likes to joke that since I started my Substack last year, he’s become a Substack widow.
It’s a funny line, and one that usually earns a laugh. Like most good jokes, though, it’s funny because it’s at least partially true.
When I started writing my memoir two years ago, neither of us had any idea where it would lead. Every day, for one year, I wrote almost exactly one page, then returned to my life. By the end, I had a completed manuscript, and at no point did the project feel particularly intrusive.
The trouble started after I finished.
When I found myself with a manuscript on my hands but knew nothing about the business of publishing a book, I sought advice from a literary consultant. She read my proposal and delivered the news that many aspiring memoirists eventually hear: selling a memoir without a platform would be extraordinarily difficult. So I started a Substack.
At the time, I told myself it was a small experiment. I simply wanted to know whether anyone besides my family and closest friends wanted to read the kinds of stories I was writing.
What I hadn’t counted on, though, was falling in love. I loved the feeling of sending a story into the world and discovering that something I thought was uniquely mine resonated with someone halfway across the globe. I loved the relationships that emerged from comment sections and message exchanges. Most of all, I loved realizing that writing didn’t have to be a solitary act.
Before long, the experiment had taken on a life of its own. These days, even when I’m not writing, part of my brain is paying attention in a different way. A conversation with a friend, a moment with one of my kids, something funny that happens at the grocery store, a comment made during a morning run, almost everything now arrives with a second question attached: Is there a story here?
Substack has given me a kind of split-screen existence. One part of me is living my life. The other part is watching it unfold and wondering how to put it into words. While I gained a creative community, a sense of purpose, and so many interesting people I never would have met otherwise, my husband gained a wife who is never entirely off duty. A wife who, despite her best intentions, is sometimes physically present but whose mind is elsewhere.
The irony is that the very thing helping me become more engaged with life sometimes pulls me away from the people living it beside me.
Here’s the thing my husband may not fully appreciate, though: he is one of the main reasons any of this exists.
Over the almost twenty-five years we’ve known each other, I’ve had three relapses of the anorexia I first developed at sixteen. The thing about anorexia, if I can oversimplify a very complicated illness, is that restricting allowed me to avoid feelings that felt too difficult to face. The less connected I was to myself, the less available I became to everyone around me.
The truth is, my husband and I didn’t always navigate that well. There were years when he was simultaneously frustrated by me and scared for me. Years when he was angry. Years when I felt misunderstood by him and years when he felt shut out by me. Like most couples who stay together long enough, we’ve spent decades bumping into each other’s blind spots, each convinced at times that the other person just wasn’t getting it.
What I see more clearly now, though, is that underneath all of that complexity was a recurring theme: he often wanted more honesty from me than I knew how to offer. To be clear, he wasn’t some enlightened guru of vulnerability. He has his own struggles, blind spots, and defenses. Still, he had an uncanny ability to sense when I was disappearing behind competence, perfectionism, productivity, caretaking, or the thousand other ways I learned to avoid showing people what was actually happening inside me.
For much of our relationship, I mostly experienced his desire for more of me as deeply uncomfortable and often frustrating. I tried to be honest, but looking back, I can see that honesty wasn’t always my strong suit. Anorexia and shame don’t survive in the light. They survive through minimization, omission, and sometimes outright lies. There were things I couldn’t admit to myself, and there were things I wasn’t willing to say out loud even when I knew they were true.
Looking back, I think he could often see the gap between the person I was presenting and the person I actually was. He frequently knew something was wrong long before I was willing to acknowledge it myself. And even when I acknowledged something privately, I wasn’t always willing to share it. Sometimes I wasn’t ready. Sometimes I was paralyzed by shame. Sometimes I was afraid of what would happen if I stopped pretending everything was fine. We didn’t always handle that well, but he rarely stopped pushing for something more real.
What neither of us knew back then was that writing would eventually become the way I learned to let my guard down. The essays I write now are often about the very things I once would have kept entirely to myself: fear, shame, grief, uncertainty, and the countless moments I spent trying to convince myself and everyone around me that I was doing better than I actually was. Every time I write honestly about something I once would have hidden, I am practicing the very thing my husband spent decades asking me to do.
Over the past year, he has listened to nearly every essay I’ve written. Some of them he has loved immediately. Others have landed on old wounds, bringing us back to periods of our lives we would both rather leave in the past. More than once, a draft has led to a conversation neither of us was particularly eager to have. The stories have a way of resurfacing things we brushed past the first time around, asking us to linger in places that remain sensitive. One essay reopened a wound so old and tender that it sparked a conflict neither of us saw coming (From Collapse to Repair: A Relationship Story Told from My Closet Floor).
I won’t pretend that’s always easy. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it creates conflict, and sometimes it forces us to sit with different versions of the same memory and acknowledge that we didn’t experience it the same way. Vulnerability doesn’t always lead directly to connection.
Which is part of what makes his support mean so much to me. He doesn’t just show up for the essays he enjoys. He shows up for the ones that challenge him, the ones that reopen old conversations, and the ones that ask both of us to look more closely at ourselves. More than that, he champions my work. He shares my writing with friends because he wants them to understand me better. He wants them to understand us better. Time and again, he has chosen to let the stories open doors rather than close them.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean he loves every minute of it. I suspect he’d happily trade a few essays for a little more of my undivided attention.
The funny thing is that while my husband occasionally jokes about being a Substack widow, the writing has also given him something he spent years asking for: more of me. Not the polished version, the real version: the one who admits she’s struggling, the one who says the hard thing out loud, and the one who is still figuring things out but no longer feels compelled to hide it.
And if my husband occasionally pays the price for that, I think he’d also be the first to tell you the payoff has been worth it.
I try so hard not to let this app consume my presence, but it does seem to demand it to be "successful" on here!
I love that that an unintentional outcome of your work here has been greater emotional intimacy with your husband. He sounds like a real keeper. 😊
“Substack widow” is one of those phrases that sounds ridiculous until you sit with it for half a second and realize it belongs in a black-bordered Victorian newspaper announcement: Beloved spouse lost at sea, presumed taken by the comments section.
There is something gloriously absurd about the domestic life of a writer. One minute you are sitting at the kitchen table like a normal citizen of the republic. The next, your spouse says something mildly interesting about the dishwasher, and somewhere behind your eyes a tiny editor in suspenders whispers, “There’s an essay here.” This is how writers become dangerous household appliances. We appear still. We appear reachable. But inside, there is a committee meeting, three metaphors, one childhood wound, and a draft title forming against everyone’s consent.
But beneath the comedy is the thing that feels most true: writing is not just self-expression. It is self-retrieval. It is the long, strange process of going back into the locked rooms of ourselves and coming out with evidence. Evidence that we were scared. Evidence that we were hiding. Evidence that we were surviving by becoming polished, competent, agreeable, productive, and emotionally laminated for public safety.
And love, real love, often notices the locked room before we do. That may be the most maddening part. Someone can stand beside us for years and sense the distance between the person we are performing and the person who is actually trapped backstage, eating crackers in the dark. Which is romantic, yes, but also deeply inconvenient. Nobody wants to be accurately perceived before breakfast. It feels unconstitutional.
That is what makes the husband in this piece so compelling to me. Not because he is perfect, not because any spouse is sitting around dressed as the patron saint of emotional maturity, polishing a halo between errands. Please.
Marriage is mostly two flawed people trying to love each other while misplacing the scissors and developing conflicting theories about thermostat morality.
But there is something profound about a person who keeps asking for the real version of you, even when the real version is harder to live with than the polished one.
And then writing arrives. That rude little miracle. That crowbar with Wi-Fi. That spiritual excavation device with a publish button. Suddenly the truth he may have been asking for all along is not arriving in one neat conversation over tea.
No, no. It is arriving serialized. With drafts. With comments. With subscribers. With the possibility that a fight from 2011 may suddenly reappear wearing italics and asking to be processed in public.
This is the strange bargain of creative honesty: the people closest to us often pay the first tax. They lose some attention. They lose some privacy. They lose the right to say something poignant in passing without the writer freezing like a hunting dog who has spotted meaning in the underbrush. But if the writing is doing its real work, they may also gain something rarer: a person who is less hidden. Less defended. Less expertly arranged to avoid being known.
That feels like the sacred comedy at the heart of this: love says, “Please let me see more of you,” and then, years later, finds itself trapped under an avalanche of vulnerability with a newsletter attached. Congratulations to all involved. The truth has arrived. It has a posting schedule, a comment thread, unresolved childhood material, and absolutely no respect for date night.
But maybe that is the miracle. Maybe the person who disappears into the page is not always leaving the marriage. Maybe, at her best, she is trying to come back to it more whole.
A terrible inconvenience, obviously. But also, inconveniently, beautiful.