Memorial Days

Memorial Days ~ Geraldine Brooks

Fiction writer Geraldine Brooks was married to non-fiction writer Tony Horwitz for 35 years when, on Memorial Day in 2019, just before his 61st birthday, he suddenly collapsed on a sidewalk in Washington, DC and died in the middle of a tour for his most recent book. Memorial Days is her memoir of his death and the time following, and mostly alternates between the confusing and horrible days just after his death, and a trip she takes in 2023 to a tiny Australian island in order to grieve his loss in her own way, away from Western culture and its constructs. She is heartbroken, tired of pretending to be okay when she isn’t. She wants to cry when she feels like crying, to be melancholy when that suits her. She wants peace.

Memorial Days is beautifully written, such a sad, lovely book, full of memories of their life together, of their early life together as foreign correspondents, of their time as new parents of their two sons. She tells of the harsh realities of such a sudden loss. Of the coldness of the doctor who informed her of his death, of the bureaucracy that kept her from seeing his body for days, of her credit rating tanking because all of their credit was tied together and in his name, as was their health insurance. All of this, even though she is a successful, celebrated, Pulitzer Prize winning author.

I have loved every book of hers that I’ve read, and this one is no exception. Highly recommended.