On the back of the beautiful hardcover edition of her memoir MEMORIAL DAYS (Hachette 2025) by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks, are the words: ‘This day, any day, could be the last day. We all know that. Now I feel it.’ This powerful summation depicts the body of her memoir – a pained, loving, precious, angry, bereft, sorrowful, hopeful and grateful story of the sudden loss of her husband in 2019.
Tony Horwitz, noted journalist and author, and husband to Geraldine Brooks for 35 years, died of a heart attack in the middle of a book tour, far from home and family. The story of Brooks’ grieving is explored in two parts. One section begins from when she receives the first phone call from an exhausted resident in a US hospital, to deliver the awful news, and follows with the subsequent days of shock, anger, disbelief and confusion as she and her children must deal with inexplicable bureaucracy, endless paperwork and the realities of a broken system.
The alternating chapters are set three years later, when Brooks realises that for a variety of reasons, her grief was not allowed the time and space it deserved in 2019, and so she travels to Flinders Island to spend extended time in near isolation and contemplation, surrounded by the wildness and beauty of the tiny island off the coast of Tasmania. This is where she writes this book, in honour of her beloved husband, and their extraordinary marriage of loyalty, adventure, risk and humour.
Brooks’ style is entirely accessible and relatable, and she depicts the days, weeks, months and years following Horwitz’s death with tenderness, compassion, wit, occasional flashes of rage, love, passion, gratitude, frustration, appreciation and tradition. She examines her own reactions, and those of her children, and the couple’s mutual friends and colleagues. She recalls those first dark days of shock and disbelief in a mixture of fragmented memory and ambiguous sequences of events. She describes her time on Flinders Island, her work in writing this book, as a self-imposed sweet release, an opportunity for her to grieve in private and to be attuned to nature, and to allow herself to fully contemplate all she has lost, all she has been given, and all she must accept and embrace to continue to survive her husband’s loss.
This is not a long memoir – I read it over two days. And it is not an overtly sad book – although of course there is sadness between each line. But it is a hopeful book, a memoir of gratefulness for friends and family, and a story of rediscovering her own identity without her husband physically beside her. And of course, it is constructed with skilled and lyrical prose that sings off the pages. Amidst anecdotes of their journalistic and authorly lives (often in dangerous, conflict-ridden parts of the world), stories of Horwitz’s audacity and humour and charismatic charm, tales of her own younger self and touchstone points from her life, is the process of grief that takes hold of her on Flinders Island and demands she put aside other concerns and give it the attention she has avoided.
It is a book about love and death, about nature and institutions, about grief and loss, about gratitude and acceptance, about fear and anger and history and music and writing and survival and joy and wisdom and the long goodbye. MEMORIAL DAYS resonated with me, and I adored every page.