And just like that...Carrie risks ruining her widow novel by not being chipper and sexy enough

OH MY LORD THIS SHOW.

If I keep watching this show, I’m going to have to drink more. Because damn.

My first column about the death of my husband, which was heartfelt, bittersweet and incredibly sad (BECAUSE DEATH) ran about three months after his passing. Before we’d gotten together six years earlier, a lot of my Palm Beach Post writing had been about being single, hanging out with my girls and navigating bad rounds of speed dating. After our wedding, it had been mostly sweet and hopeful - our first road trip as a married couple, organizing the museum gallery-volume of Ravens jerseys now living in my home. People had gotten invested in our love story and couldn’t wait to read what was next.

Death, obviously, was not what I’d hoped would be the next plot twist. And I guess I wasn’t alone.

“Leslie,” a reader wrote a few days later, “your love story ended so tragically. It was disappointing.”

It was a terrible, dumb thing for someone to write, but I remember chuckling out loud and showing it to people as I chuckled some more. Because the fact that she was reviewing my very real tragedy like it was the third act in the “Twilight” saga (“I liked it till all that blood!”) was not only delusional, but hilarious. I mean, I wish it had a different ending, too, Myrtle. I’ll get right on that.

Myrtle, or whatever the hell her name was, popped into my mind just now as I watched “Sex and The Widow,” the most recent episode of the “Sex and the City” reboot “And Just Like That...” Imagine if that letter writer disappointed that my husband’s death ruined the romance had actually been my book editor. And imagine that editor, like Carrie’s, had decided that the best way to fix the plot and make Oprah happy was to, you know, date again, as to not bum out the readers who’d fallen in love with my writing back when I was younger and going on bad dates.

Y’ALL.

This was only the second episode of the reboot I’ve watched - I wrote a pretty definitive explanation of why I had been avoiding it until this point, mostly because both my husband and Carrie’s died of a heart attack, and I just didn’t want to.

But at a friend’s suggestion, I started way into the series, past the funeral and all, picking it up with the previous episode. It was about Carrie dropping millions of dollars on a new, soulless apartment that overlooks the water, after presumably getting millions for selling the penthouse with the orgasmic shoe closet where Big died, before she sells THAT and moving back into her pretty single girl apartment that’s probably worth a couple of million, too. That was not super-relatable for me or a lot of widowed people. Hell, when my husband died, we were renting, and my mom moved in to help raise our toddler, and about six months later my landlord decided to sell the house and initially gave me 23 days, until the end of the month, to move, memories, grief and all. That date would have been my 6th anniversary, because God enjoys drama. (I negotiated to 30 days, and we were actually out in 21. But still.)

All of this is to say that my situation was way different than Carrie’s, but very similar in that we both wrote a raw memoir about widowhood. Hers appears to have been very heavy and sad, which is allowed, as her damn husband died. Mine was all of that but also funny, because that’s the way I process stuff. And I will tell you that not once did anyone I dealt with at Little, Brown, who were all aware that widowhood inherently means that you are not perhaps in the most upbeat season of your life, suggest that I do something different in my actual life to affect the ending.

“I mean, why are you so depressed? Leslie! Sure, the word ‘widow’ is right there in the title, but could you be at least a little peppy so the readers that voluntarily picked up a widow memoir don’t want to stab themselves in the eye with their bookmarks?” SAID NO ONE BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT MONSTERS.

Now, did I tell my editor that the memoir, which follows the first year of my widowhood, would include a chapter about the first crush I had after Scott died, a crush that went nowhere at all because he wasn’t interested and I’d have dissolved into mist if he had been because I was still deeply in mourning? And did I decide that even considering that one day I might be snuggling someone in bed instead of sobbing in it was hopeful that I had not died along with him? Yes. But that was what happened. That’s where my life went. That’s where my hope went. I didn’t purposely manufacture that so I wouldn’t be such a downer.

Not once did anyone suggest I change the ending of my life to make sure that the ending of the book was happy. Because widowhood is not happy. I know that my survival and recovery has given people hope, and I took on the mantle of telling that story, in part, to do that. But it is not my job to be happy for other people. It is not my job to manufacture a date to pretend that I am the old Leslie, because I am not. She’s still in there somewhere, but she’s older, and wiser and also her husband died. Maybe you’ve heard?

In fact, what are the chance that Carrie’s readers who have followed her over several decades don’t know this about her, and that some of them aren’t widowed, too? And that they might relate to her having matured and grown as much as Carrie Bradshaw is capable of - last week, when she was invited to the Diwali celebration, she actually asked if it were appropriate for her to wear a sari as a non-Hindu person, and didn’t even try to call it “Di-Wowee!” and be all wacky about it! Growth!

I know that part of this show was always going to be about her getting back into the dating world - It’s a “Sex and the City” reboot, so they didn’t kill off her husband for nothing. This thing has always had a patina of fantasy about it, with the revolving door of hot men and the huge apartment and wardrobe on a columnist’ salary. Of course she was going to heal at a faster rate that real widowed people, although some of us bounce back faster than others. Not here to judge.

What I’m judging is a world that’s written where an editor would suggest that a widow who is clearly not ready to date do so to rig the ending of a book, for sales and Oprah purposes. And that the widow would not tell her to go to Hell. (The editor. Not Oprah.)

Predictably, (SPOILER ALERT!) Carrie goes on a date, and he turns out to be a hot widower, and it goes well until it doesn’t, but then she meets him again and he rescues her from a mortifyingly embarrassing situation, and they might date again. Does it burn a little because Life doesn’t assign widows another hot widowed person like they’re hot buddies on a field trip? Sure. But it’s a TV show. But..if the show is going to deal with a subject like this, I just want them to have some sensitivity about it. Carrie never imagined she’d be writing about her husband dying, because she didn’t expect her love story to end that way.

But it did. And it’s hard to write your way out of that one.