A Widow's Guide to Becoming a Handyman

The Widow's Guide to Becoming a Handyman is part grief memoir, part immigrant story, and part how-to-guide. This is a story of premature death and emotional wreckage that uses the narrator's old house as its foundation. Grief is as palpable as a hammer hitting a nail and doesn't come at all the way a reader might expect as the narrator methodically cares for her quirky old farmhouse's many needs following her husband's sudden death: a leaky roof, rotten windows, mold and frozen pumps and pipes. The narrator repeatedly tries and fails to order grief into a linear process with five distinct stages, but instead finds grief to be as disorganized and messy as the garage and sheds full of tools left by her deceased husband.


About the Author
Susan Huehn was born in a sleepy German town in south central Minnesota at the confluence of the Minnesota and Cottonwood Rivers. The town was home to my immigrant parents where I was raised speaking German and a love of German culture was imbedded in me at a cellular level. At a music festival in my home town, I met a German singer and after a three year transatlantic relationship (before email, Facebook and WhatsApp!) I moved to Germany, where I lived for three years. We got married during those three years and then returned to live in Northfield, Minnesota on a small hobby farm.