“It’s with Maisy,” she blurts out, her eyes wide. “She’s launching a podcast and wants you as one of her first guests. It sounds like a cool show, and it’s certainly another great opportunity to expand your reach, but…”
There is never anything good or fun or ego building that comes from someone saying “but” like this, drawing out the word as long as possible while they desperately search their brain to find a kind way to say something difficult.
“Just be honest with me,” I say, giving her permission to be direct.
“Your last visit with Maisy wasn’t great—it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great. Something about the two of you just doesn’t seem to click. As your publicist, I never want to put you in a situation again where you can’t be successful, and honestly, I can’t decide how I feel about this.”
“Does she think I’m a glutton for punishment or something?” I ask.
“Who knows what she thinks. But let’s be clear on one thing: Maisy doesn’t care if this goes well or badly for you. She wants to repeat the ‘magic’ of the last interview—a big social media moment that gets the full attention of a particular corner of the internet. That’s why she wants you back. If you decide to say yes to this, it needs to be for reasons as superficial as Maisy’s: eyeballs, follows, sales. Period. She expects you to do that exact math—frankly, Ineedyou to do that math.”
“I have done a lot of practice this summer,” I muse, uncharacteristically speaking before I think, “and there haven’t been any real fumbles.”
I pause. There was onenearfumble late last week that I haven’t told Lucia about. A parenting magazine was doing a standard “guiding your kids through grief” interview. This was such a slam-dunk topic that I put my phone on speaker and started styling the kitchen island for fun while I chatted with the journalist. Things were going well. Then in the final minutes, she shifted to a different line of questioning.
Do you feel guilty for using your loss for financial gain? What do you think your kids will think about the book down the road? Will they get a final say on what makes the book?Just like my last visit to Maisy, I got flustered. And fast.
Josh came in from the dining room when he heard things start to go sideways. Just as my leg twitch was starting, he held up a hastily written message on the back of an envelope.You don’t have to answerstupid crazyrude questions. His scribbles across a couple of words made me smile. I took a deep breath and started giving answers completely unrelated to her questions. Eventually, she got annoyedand time ran out. The article posted online yesterday, and it was completely normal. Crisis averted, thanks to Josh’s quick thinking.
“Do you think I’m ready for something like this again?” I ask her.
“It’s a little soon,” she says, acknowledging the truth of things. “But it is a podcast and not TV. That would certainly take some of the pressure off.”
“What are the rest of the specifics?” I ask, needing the very precise details.
“One hour, in her Nashville studio. You’d be paired up with someone else, so you wouldn’t be completely on your own. No studio audience or anything, but she is streaming the first five episodes live before pivoting to a traditional prerecorded format. You’d be live. No do-overs. No editing out bad moments. Live.”
I can’t tell if Lucia is trying to sell me on it or against it. She seems genuinely conflicted. The last Maisy interview was tough on so many levels. If I’m honest, getting the nickname “queen of grief” was the most annoying part of the ordeal. Noweveryonecalls me that. Even Felicity and Jeannie have latched onto it.
The appearance on her show also generated an astonishing one hundred thousand visits to my website in the days after it aired. I had fifty thousand more followers on social media and people telling me very directly, “I’m following you because of Maisy!” I know this is the right thing for my brand. Plus, my confidence is bolstered again, thanks to the summer of interview practice with Josh and the professionals.
“There’s more, Gracie,” Lucia says tentatively, looking directly into her computer camera. “Maisy wants to know that you’re willing to, and I quote, ‘go deep.’ She wants to be able to ask youquestions and get answers that you haven’t discussed before. I told them we wouldn’t say yes unless I could get that commitment from you.”
“What’s your honest professional advice?”
“If you say yes, it needs to be because the outcome—the exposure—is worth whatever might go down during the interview itself,” she says. “That’s my advice. If you’re willing to ‘go deep’ and the outcome is worth it to you, do it. If you’re not one hundred percent sure, don’t do it.”
“Wow—this is a lot to consider,” I say. “I’ll think about it and talk to some trusted friends to get their opinions. How long do I have to decide?”
“Not very. The interview is in four weeks. You need to let me know within two.”
With that, Lucia and I say our goodbyes until the next meeting. I’ll definitely need an answer about Maisy by then.
—
The grind oftoday has been truly relentless. I’ve now been at the coffee shop for three hours, and as expected, the late afternoon of writing has been a slog. I am not built for creativity at this time of day and probably should’ve saved my book shopping spree for now, but desperate times and manuscript deadlines call for grit and perseverance.
There may only be five hundred new words in the document, but at least I can admit that they are solid. Now that I’m caught up chronologically, I’m weaving back through every chapter to fill in gaps and add stories that I missed on the first pass. Today, Irevisited an important theme: what it means to take care of people in your life and your community. More specifically, it dives into the unexpected ways you can support people. The kindness of strangers and strangers who become friends, like Josh, really matters.
I’ve added a few additional paragraphs to a chapter that covers the lead-up to the one-year anniversary of Ben’s death, when an acquaintance from church reached out to ask me to coffee. Marley is a sweet lady in her seventies who lost her husband of fifty years five years prior.
“Everyone in my life built up the one-year anniversary as this big dramatic day and completely overwhelmed me,” she shared with me, sipping her latte. “Everyone who tried to help actually made it all so much worse. I ended up sneaking out of town and taking myself to the beach.”
“I’m already getting one or two texts a day from people asking what my plans are to ‘honor’ and ‘celebrate’ him,” I responded. “It’s so much pressure.”
“I figured as much. I know we only see each other periodically at church, and generally speaking, it’s not my practice to dole out unsolicited advice, but I wanted to give you permission—if you haven’t already given it to yourself—to do whatyouneed to do on the anniversary. If it’s having a normal workday, do it! If it’s playing hooky and taking your kids somewhere, do it! If it’s sobbing into a carton of ice cream, that’s fine, too!”
Marley and I talked about a great many other things that morning, but we never got coffee again. She waves at church, but her effort to take care of me was in that single moment when I really needed it. It made me think about the different ways a village of people can impact your life. She’s the reason I bought those planetickets and took the kids to Chicago. She’s the reason we spent the anniversary in the exact right place for us.
