Memorial Days

Susan Midalia's Review 

The grief memoir as a genre can easily lapse into self-pity, sensationalism or fatuous advice. By contrast, the best memoirs not only avoid such problems; they also move beyond the merely personal to consider the influence of social and cultural contexts on mourning, and the question of what might make for a purposeful life. Acclaimed Australian-born novelist Geraldine Brooks’ Memorial Days is one such book. Written as a series of fragments that move backwards and forwards in time and shifting locations from Martha’s Vineyard to Sydney and Tasmania, it blends the intensity of autobiographical memory with intelligent reflections on the complexities and ambiguities of grief. And it is also, and quite simply, an aesthetically satisfying read.

At the heart of Brooks’ experience of grief is its belatedness. For some years, she has been unable to fully mourn the death of her beloved husband, prize-winning American journalist Tony Horwitz, who despite being seemingly healthy and fit, died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of sixty. For three years after his death, Brooks remains emotionally numbed, unable to release what she calls “the beast in the basement of [my] heart.” She writes of the obstacles to such release: her intense stoicism, instilled in her by her parents, and her desire to protect and comfort her two young children. She must also deal with urgent and inhumane regulations – what she angrily calls America’s “cruel bureaucracy of death.” Because of her status as a woman, she loses medical coverage for her and her children and is refused a credit card. Most humiliating and enraging of all is the legal requirement to prove that after ten years of devoted mothering, she is a fit “guardian” for her and Horwitz’s adopted son.

But Memorial Days is so much more than a litany of personal frustration. For one thing, Brooks places her experience in the context of the widespread suffering that she and her husband witnessed over many years of working as foreign correspondents. Her memoir is also a loving tribute to a thirty-five-year-old marriage: recollections of courtship, parenthood, travels, and an enduring intellectual companionship. Brooks covers the arc of Horwitz’s life, from the big picture of his untiring work as an advocate for social justice to the minutiae of his lilting voice, his gentle hands, and the way he made her laugh “every single day.”

Where does this leave the widow, three years after the death of this fiercely intelligent, larger-than-life man? Literally in Flinders Island, off the coast of mainland Australia, where three years after the event that ravaged her life, Brooks hopes to find solace and peace. The island’s landscape, described in evocatively rendered detail, comes to symbolise a longed-for solitude and the emotionally and existentially restorative power of nature. It also represents the life Brooks might have led had she not acquiesced to her husband’s desire to settle his wife and family in his native America. But Brooks feels neither anger nor regret about the road not taken; instead, she discovers an intense sense of belonging in the beauty of the natural environment, as well as gratitude for a joyful and fulfilling marriage. She also offers, in this search for inner peace, the famously talismanic words of the social activist and Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg: “Do your work. It might not be your best work, but it will be good work, and it will be what saves you.”  

Importantly, however, Memorial Days refuses a facile Pollyanna vision that insists we must always look on the bright side of life. Brooks recalls the barbaric history of Flinders Island: the massacres of First Nations people, the erasure of their culture and the dispossession of their land. She witnesses the encroachment of real estate developers on a previously pristine natural environment. On a personal level, she laments what her husband will miss: the milestones of their children’s lives, the pleasures of becoming a grandparent, more important journalistic work, and the contentment of retirement. 

What also distinguishes the memoir, and which is a mark of respect for readers, is the subtlety of its crafting and its use of spare but resonant language: writing that offers the gift of consolation in the face of seemingly inconsolable loss. Memorial Days reminds us that “we read to know we are not alone.” These are the imagined words, spoken in William Nicholson’s play Shadowlands, of the writer C. Lewis, author of the much-loved memoir, A Grief Observed. Geraldine Brooks’ new book is in my view also destined to become a classic of the genre. It will make you weep without feeling manipulated. It will offer comfort to those who mourn. It will encourage refection on how the experience of profound loss can help us be more attentive to the injustices of the world and to the preciousness of our limited time on earth. 

Publisher's Review 

A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey toward peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse.

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz - just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy - collapsed and died on a Washington, DC street.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, and living in Sydney, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humour, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on the US Memorial Day public holiday of 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to remote Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on the island's pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony and mystery of life.

'Heartbreaking yet hopeful. We're lucky to have Brooks to help us make sense of the world' - WA TODAY

'A well-wrought heartbreaker' - THE AUSTRALIAN