Lori Tucker-Sullivan knew from a young age that she wanted to write about pop music and musicians. Lounging with friends in the basement of her parents’ Detroit bungalow, music blasting on the turntable, posters taped to the walls, and reading that month’s Creem or Rolling Stone, music was a part of her teenage DNA. Concerts at Cobo Hall or Olympia Stadium were a near-weekly outing. As a college student, she got a job at the Hyatt Regency Hotel front desk just to meet many of the rock stars that played concerts in early -80s Detroit. Like many young women of her generation, she felt the pull of “having it all” after falling in love with a co-worker at the hotel. With her future husband Kevin, she set aside plans to write about musicians and instead married and bought an abandoned farmhouse in a rural Michigan town. Over the next twenty years, she and Kevin rehabbed the house, had two kids, and made a beautiful, if conventional, life.
Realizing the need to have writing in her life, Lori returned to school to earn a Master’s degree in writing in 2008. Shortly after completing her first semester, Kevin was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma, an aggressive cancer that required the family’s full focus. Despite a courageous two-year battle, Kevin died on September 7, 2010, making Lori promise she would complete her degree and become a writer. Within five years, Lori also lost both her parents, two close friends, a writing mentor, the minister that had guided the family through Kevin’s diagnosis and loss; she sold the farmhouse, sent her children off to college, started a new career, and moved back to her home city of Detroit which was going through its own troublesome rebirth. During this time, she felt as though she had lost every way in which she previously identified—wife, mother, daughter, and more. She longed to talk to other women who had suffered such breadth of loss, but she didn’t know where to find them.
Driving to class one day, Lori heard a story about Yoko Ono on the radio. She realized she had a new feeling about Yoko—admiration. She also thought that there must be other women like Yoko, married to the rock stars she had once hoped to interview, but now grieving their losses as she grieved hers. It didn’t take much research to find that yes, there were several such women, and Lori knew then she had found something that would become her new life’s purpose. The result is her new book, I Can’t Remember if I Cried: Rock Widows on Life, Love and Legacy, which features the profiles of fourteen women who lost the loves of their lives and what they taught Lori about grief.
In addition to her book, Lori’s writing has appeared in various magazines and journals, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Manifest-Station, Motherwell, Now & Then: The Magazine of Appalachia, Passages North, The Sun, The Cancer Poetry Project, Midwestern Gothic and others, as well as the anthologies Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook, 100 Words of Solitude: Writers on the Pandemic, and Red State Blues. Her essay, “Detroit, 2015” about her decision to return to Detroit after Kevin’s death, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed as a Notable Essay of 2015 in Best American Essays.
She now lives in a renovated Jeep factory and teaches at Wayne State University. She continues to blast music, attend concerts at every opportunity, and even read Creem and Rolling Stone.
