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“Brooks tracks the geography of grief with patience and grace as she comes to terms with the ongoing nature of outliving the ones you love most. ... Her memoir is certainly a testament to her own unique loss, but it’s moreover a lifeline to others who will find themselves in this familiar, shattered landscape of grief.” —Los Angeles Times
“A rich account of marriage and mourning.” —Washington Post
A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey towards 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, D. C. sidewalk.
After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at the beach. But all of this ended abruptly when, on Memorial Day 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 a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a 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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 4, 2025 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780593653999
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780593653999
- File size: 3197 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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September 1, 2024
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Brooks (March) writes about the sudden death of her partner, the bestselling author Tony Horwitz. Faced with the overwhelming demands that follow a death, she had no time to process her grief. Three years later, she finally was able to mourn and write this memoir of love and loss. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2024 Library Journal
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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December 15, 2024
Finding an island for grief. On Memorial Day, 2019, Tony Horwitz, Brooks' 60-year-old husband, collapsed on a street in Washington, D.C., and died. In the days and months that followed, Brooks found herself hiding behind a "heavy and elaborate" facade, "a fugitive from my own feelings." Finally, in February 2023, she traveled to a remote island off the coast of her native Australia to allow herself to mourn. In alternating chapters, Brooks creates an absorbing memoir of shocking loss and protracted grief as she reflects on her marriage, her driven, Type A husband, and her future alone. She and Horwitz met at a party when they were graduate students at Columbia Journalism School. A bit shy, she couldn't help but notice the "tanned, tousle-haired blond in overalls and red sneakers, regaling the small group on the balcony with the woes of living with his brother in Alphabet City," a rough section of Manhattan. They both went on to successful careers as journalists, including working as foreign correspondents with posts in Cairo, London, and Sydney, where she had hoped they would settle as a family. But Horwitz needed to be in the U.S., preferably within walking distance to a newsstand and coffee shop. After their son was born, when she no longer wanted to go on risky assignments, he encouraged her to try to write fiction. She was in the middle of her novelHorse when he died. Brooks pays homage to the loving, gregarious Horwitz, lashes out at America's flawed medical system, and deftly conveys the ongoing reverberations of her shattering experience. Like other widowed writers (Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates), Brooks both relives the trauma of her husband's death and keeps his cherished memory alive. A graceful and moving meditation on bereavement.COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from January 1, 2025
Brooks was working on her novel Horse (2022) when her fit and vital husband, writer Tony Horwitz, died on Memorial Day in Washington, DC, while on book tour. She was alone in their home on Martha's Vineyard when she received the shocking news, the start to a long, anguished, sometimes surreal, often infuriating ordeal with the bureaucracy of death. After several years of concealing her sorrow in "one endless, exhausting performance" of normalcy, Brooks finally asserted her "right to grieve," embarking on her own "memorial days" by returning to her home country, Australia, and retreating to remote, wild, and haunted Flinders Island. In this rinsed-clean memoir, Brooks tells her story leading up to her meeting Tony and after as they "vagabonded as foreign correspondents" in war zones in the Middle East and Libya, then settled down to raise their two sons and write books, intricately entwined in every aspect of life. On Flinders Island, Brooks discovers another side to Tony as she reads his journals. Reflecting on mourning rituals in various traditions, while chronicling the dramatic, lonesome, and restorative beauty and spirit of the island, Brooks, with arresting precision, sensitivity, and candor, takes deep soundings of her grief and evolving perceptions and feelings in a generous and resonant remembrance.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Brooks' many fans will want to learn more about her, while ardent memoir readers and those looking for books about grief will also reach for Memorial Days.COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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