WAY Trustee Emma publishes book based on her award-winning blog

November 2025

WAY Trustee Emma Charlesworth started writing a blog back in 2020. Now she’s publishing her own book. Here’s her story…

“You should write a blog.” “Have you thought about writing a book?”

I would never have dreamt these would be words people would say to me six years ago. Because at the end of 2019, nobody quite expected that within a matter of months we’d be living through a global pandemic, and that I would find myself a widow at the age of 39. But life has a funny way of throwing the unexpected at you. And that’s exactly what happened in 2020. COVID-19 caused devastation, my 45-year-old husband died, and I was left as a solo parent to our then 10-year-old daughter, Rebekah.

The world was shut down at that point. A lot of the support I received was virtual. It was all people could do. It’s why I started writing. My social media posts were the main way I had of keeping people up to date with what we were living through. It was a very conscious decision to be honest on social media, but I never envisaged what my writing would lead to. How could I? I was just someone trying to navigate heartbreak and give a bit of an insight into what our lives were like.

Yet in March 2021, I did launch a blog: Life is a rollercoaster. It was both a nod to my sister who has been my rock since Charlie died (and who is also a huge Boyzone and Ronan Keating fan) and a reflection on my life in general. It felt like the perfect title. And as I’ve continued along the widowhood journey, a rollercoaster is a phrase I’ve heard more and more. I wrote because I found it cathartic. I didn’t write for anyone else. I didn’t even know if anyone would ever read anything I had to say.

It completely took me by surprise that people did read it and that my words resonated with strangers. It will always humble me that I’d receive messages such as “I don’t know if you need to hear this, but you’ve helped a stranger today”. I just viewed my blogs as my musings and my take on life. That it made people feel heard and less alone blew me away.

That feeling was cemented in September 2023 when I won WAY’s Helen Bailey Blog Award for best WAY blogger. I’d been nominated in 2022 and just being nominated had made me incredibly emotional. To go on and win it the following year was overwhelming.

Just a few months later at my work’s Christmas meeting, we went round the room and said what our aims for 2024 were. “I’m going to write a book” was mine. Did I ever really anticipate that I’d do it? Probably not, if I’m being completely honest. But that’s exactly what I did do and in Peckforton Castle, the castle my nan was evacuated to in World War II, on the day after the 2025 WAY AGM in Crewe, I finished writing my book.

And while writing a book was one of the most cathartic things I’ve ever done, I wasn’t entirely prepared for what putting myself back in 2020 and 2021 would feel like. It brought a lot to the surface. I realised that there was so much about my life, Charlie’s death and our life since that day that I hadn’t really processed. And I ended up being referred for therapy again. The book that I’d been so proud of finishing just sat on my laptop, potentially never seeing the light of day. I was OK with that. I’d written it. That was all I’d wanted to achieve.

Yet over the course of 2025, I realised I wanted to achieve more. I wanted to publish this book and share more of my story with the world. Right now, I still can’t quite believe that I’m a published author. It’s the next chapter in my story. For me, chapter 2 isn’t about finding another partner. I actually believe that I’m probably on chapter 4,006 of my life now. Because my life has been made up of so many chapters, before I met Charlie, during our relationship, the period when he was fighting for his life, the immediate aftermath of his untimely death and my life as a widow, a mum and a person in her own right since then. How could all that possibly just be chapter one?

The one chapter that I know will always be in my story is making sure that Charlie doesn’t become a statistic of the pandemic. My book Is Daddy Going to Be OK?, I hope, will in some small way, help me achieve that. While also creating a legacy for both him and Rebekah.