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If the name Mattie Jackson Selecman sounds familiar, it’s no surprise.
Although she is the daughter of country music icon Alan Jackson, the Nashville native has created a legacy all her own. She received her degree in creative writing from the University of Tennessee; became a certified sommelier; owned a Nashville wine bar; and co-founded the philanthropic merchandise brand NaSHEville, dedicated to helping orphans, widows, and trafficked women.
Now, with the release of her first book, Lemons On Friday, Selecman is giving readers a deeply personal glimpse into her life, told with vulnerability and authenticity. Just three weeks shy of their first wedding anniversary, her beloved husband Ben Selecman suddenly and tragically passed away from a traumatic brain injury. Widowed at age 28, Selecman was forced to navigate a new future she never could have imagined. With this book—and a new song she wrote with the help of her superstar father—she takes readers through her early days of grief, the questions that accompany heartbreak, and how her faith and hope helped guide her through her darkest days.
Lemons to Lemonade:
Lemons On Friday is truly an elaborated version of what started as journals with me processing my grief, my questions, fears, anger, just everything that is the torrent of emotions when you lose anyone, much less your spouse, very unexpectedly. About a year and a half after Ben died, I started feeling like I could really put it together into something that could be helpful for other people dealing with any sort of loss. It is truly just my heart over the last three years, and the way that [the book] is set up, each chapter asks a pretty life-changing question that I had to deal with. Everything from, ‘Who am I now?’ and how my identity changed to, ‘Where is God in my suffering and how do I move forward?’ and things of that nature. The framework is through my experience as a young widow but my biggest hope is for anybody who had plans that were taken away, or lost someone or something that was tragic: how do you deal with how painful that is really honestly without trying to push past it or gloss over it but also not be weighed down by that pain and keep your eyes fixed on hope.
Healing Through Writing:
It started very organically truly with no plans or agenda for it to be a book. I think it goes without saying that I’ve been very blessed in my life and lived a very privileged life and have had a lot of amazing experiences with my family. I really hadn’t had anything tragic happen, so I was so unfamiliar and so overwhelmed that I had a hard time even vocalizing what was happening emotionally. All I knew how to do in these moments of internal chaos was [write]. That was how I just spilled it out; there were no real intentions, nothing was eloquent. After about a year and a half having conversations with a lot of people grieving, and a lot of young women especially who had been widowed, I realized a lot of us have the same questions, the same doubts, and a lot of us are scared of the same things. I went back over some other things I had written down and had conversations with loved ones about actual experiences and little anecdotes of my own over the years to fill in here’s the question, here’s what I learned, and here’s a real snapshot of a moment that happened where I either had to deal with not knowing the answer or take a scary step to further understanding.
Family Ties:
After the COVID lockdown happened I sat out on the porch and I was like, ‘I wonder if I could write a song?’ I’ve been around it my whole life. I had an idea of what the structure and format of a song was like, just being a bystander for 30 years, and of course the first thing that came to mind was this loss. I just imagined the story of this young woman who lost her husband and it’s not mine and Ben’s story, but I think what is so close to my heart about [the song] “Racing the Dark” and the story it tells is all those moments I wanted to run away from. I thought it was decent so I gave it to Dad and said, “Hey this may suck but if it makes any sense would you mind putting a melody to it? I would love to hear what it might sound like.” From there he played it for me and then went into the studio to record it and really generously said, “You tell me what you want it to sound like.” I’ve been in the studio with him before, but to be an active participant and for him to have really given me the reins and to value my thoughts on the final product was not something I ever imagined I would be able to do with him because I’m not incredibly musical.
The Power of Hope:
If you have lost someone very close to you I think there’s such power in hearing someone else’s story and seeing the little ways it aligns with yours because you don’t feel isolated. I tell a story about breaking down at the grocery store because I walked past the little Halo oranges I used to get Ben to take to work with him and those things make you feel like the only person in the world that feels that way until you hear somebody else say, “I did the same thing.” I hope people read the book and say, ‘She’s not glossing over how devastating this story is. She’s being very honest about how she was angry, how she was hopeless at times, and how she did things wrong, but she also held the hope of everything that she knows her life can be and that she knows God can make beautiful again.’ Unfortunately, there’s a lot of beauty, growth, and richness in my life that I wouldn’t have right now if I hadn’t walked through something like this. I think joy and pain happen at the same time, in the same moments, and that’s OK. You don’t have to fake where the pain is; the joy can always break through; it just takes time, faith, and people to do it with you.