Grace Notes: A Musical Memoir

A tune with familiar strains…

For Katie DeBonville, music begins with a flute at age ten—and becomes the thread that shapes a life. Through decades of change, from 1980s Top 40 to a career rooted in music beyond the stage, she turns to melody to make sense of who she is and where she belongs.

In this debut memoir, Grace Notes, she reflects on the quiet, defining moments that shape identity, relationships, and purpose. As she approaches fifty in a world that feels increasingly uncertain, Katie finds herself in a season of reckoning and renewal.

Both intimate and universal, Grace Notes is a life composed—imperfect, evolving, and ultimately, a melody all its own.

About the Author

Katie M. DeBonville’s work has been published in Stonecoast Review, Sad Girl Diaries, Quibblelit, Fauxmoir, and other publications. A flutist with three decades of arts fundraising experience, DeBonville often writes about being a single woman in Boston, music, and relationships. She has participated in readings with GrubStreet, Cambridge Common Writers, the International Women’s Writing Guild, and the Dylan Thomas Summer School in Lampeter, Wales. A Massachusetts native, DeBonville holds degrees in music from Bucknell University and New England Conservatory and earned her MFA from Lesley University’s low-residency creative writing program. When not writing, she enjoys attending concerts, browsing in independent bookstores, and sipping a good glass of wine. Grace Notes is her first book.

Praise for Grace Notes

“Katie DeBonville’s remarkable debut, Grace Notes, takes our common connection to music as a springboard from which to dive into the deep waters of memory, family relationships, questions of ability, identity and ambition.”
—Pamela Petro, author of The Long Field – Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir

“Katie DeBonville’s captivating essay collection, Grace Notes, is a love song to love songs, a compelling ballad celebrating music as the joyful, intriguing, consistent thread woven through the story of a life.”
—Cindy House, author of Mother Noise