Tembi Locke Reflects on Her New Book ‘Someday, Now’ (Exclusive)

The summer after my only child had graduated from high school and before she was set to leave home for college, I felt an indecipherable combination of joy, sadness, mystery, longing, triumph and vulnerability. I was also newly remarried. And I had just begun a new career. I was surprised by how disorienting the moment felt, even though everything was “good.” 

I struggled to name the sense of loss that came with my child leaving home. Many of my friends were talking not only about how to navigate parenting at this monumental inflection point, but they were also experiencing a low simmer of fear about the threshold they were walking through as mothers, as partners and as a family.

I found writing was the only way I could sort through the many feelings. Moreover, I felt pulled to Sicily that final summer between my daughter’s childhood years and early adult years. I wanted to return to a familiar place in a season of great change. Sicily felt like the perfect backdrop for the big questions I had.

In my debut memoir, From Scratch, I explored great love and profound loss — the arc of my personal love, loss and rebuilding. I wrote the book hoping it would make it into the hands of readers who might find solace and inspiration in its pages. As a writer, I wanted to bring the five senses to life on the page and because it was a central theme, I focused primarily on the sense of taste and touch in the writing of the book.

With Someday, Now, the idea to create an audiobook emerged organically from my own love of the format and my curiosity about how layering ambient sounds into a sensorily immersive storytelling experience might inform the writing and the listening. Audiobooks are a beautiful form of storytelling and, when paired with memoir, they can feel like you are listening to a good friend share hard-won wisdom.

That summer I spent in Sicily with my daughter and new husband, I was listening to a changing world. I decided I wanted to return to the genre of memoir, this time to explore a new threshold stage in a mother’s life and in the life of a family. 

Listen to an excerpt from ‘Someday, Now’

That threshold begins a new chapter for parents that I call “re-nesting” — the term is my reimagining of the outdated and, frankly, pejorative concept of “empty nesting.” The word “empty” connotes a kind of physical and emotional void that many American families don’t relate to in the way previous generations did. We are more connected to our kids, some children are staying home for college and beyond.

I use “re-nesting” to refer to the period of time when the family changes as the child leaves home or steps into young adulthood and the parent is reimagining their lives and the home they created. The entire nest changes, the child changes and the parents/guardians change. The experience is far from empty.

As families, we have to reimagine home, our lives, our interests our relationships with each other. Re-nesting is a season of transformation for everyone. It comes with new questions, dynamics, and expansion. We can make space for freedom, joy and grief as we set about a period of rest, reset, and reclaiming.

After my manuscript was written, I sifted through the many hours of sounds I had recorded primarily in Sicily. Listening helped me to better understand hidden textures within the words. Then I had a new creative task, to craft it all into an audio experience designed with both narration and ambient sounds woven seamlessly throughout the story. It is unlike anything I have ever done. I had listened to the world, I had recorded what I heard, and then I wrote what I discovered. Listening first, then writing.

In retrospect, I can see that that creative process was important because in order to truly listen and make sense of what I heard, I had to slow down. So this book is born from my deep listening at the moment when everything was changing, internally and externally. In that way, I think of Someday, Now as a kind of a double memoir, the memoir of a life and the memoir of a place.

I hope that this audio immersive experience of the story transports the listener to a beautiful place. Within the balance between sound and silence, between my words and nature’s songs, the listener may find their inspiration for living, transforming, and re-nesting. Perhaps this will inspire them to listen to the soundscape of their own lives and own history. This book is about listening as a pathfinder to joy, connection, love and navigating change.

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Someday, Now by Tembi Locke hits shelves on Sept. 30 and is available now for preorder, wherever audiobooks are sold.