A Deep Enough Grief

When novelist Geraldine Brooks received the devastating phone call informing her that her husband of more than 30 years, celebrated nonfiction writer Tony Horwitz, had died unexpectedly while on tour for his latest book, she found herself trapped between warring impulses.

“I paced the room, feeling the howl forming in my chest,” she writes in her new memoir, Memorial Days. “I needed to scream, weep, throw myself on the floor, rend my garments, tear my hair.” But this moment of extraordinary pressure demanded a different response: “I stood there and suppressed that howl,” knowing that “if I let go, if I fell, I might not be able to get back up.”

Rather than grieving her husband, Brooks must weather a crushing series of unwanted obligations, burial arrangements, and traumatizing tangles with bureaucratic obstacles. To cope with these responsibilities and navigate her new role as single parent to her two sons, she creates “a façade that I have hidden behind, a fugitive from my own feelings. It’s heavy and elaborate and it’s taken a lot of energy to haul it around with me every time I leave the house.” For the next three years, her life becomes “one endless, exhausting performance.”

This spare, compelling memoir follows Brooks from the home she’d made with Horwitz on Martha’s Vineyard to a small shack on a remote island off the northeast corner of Tasmania. Brooks, who was born and raised in Australia, has come to this wild place alone, ready to strip away the façade.

Noting that Horwitz died on Memorial Day in 2019, Brooks explains her intentions: “When I get to Flinders Island, I will begin my own memorial days. I am taking something that our culture has stopped freely giving. To shut out the world and its demands. To remember my love and to feel the immensity of his loss.”

Brooks accompanies her experience on the island with reflections on grief traditions from numerous cultures around the world, seeking a space in which she can initiate “a grief deep enough to reflect our love.”

As Brooks explores the beaches and surrounding landscapes of the island, allowing her grief to surface, she weaves in the island’s history, including both the thrilling geological marvels and the devastating abuses toward Tasmania’s Aboriginal population. Brooks alternates the scenes on Flinders Island with chapters that closely follow the aftermath of Tony’s death in candid, moving details. This structure works well, evoking the spare and occasionally elliptical rhythms of traumatized memory.

Memorial Days places Brooks’ marriage at the heart of the book, revealing the mutual generosity and commitment to truthful, vigorous work that propelled them into adventurous lives as foreign correspondents who embraced volatile environments like Khomeini’s funeral in Tehran and Kuwait during the first Gulf War.

Known for her well-researched, expertly crafted novels like Horse and the Pulitzer-winning March, Brooks shared decades with an equally well-regarded writer, and the portrait of their bond offers a rare depiction of romantic love that seems to have elevated both writers’ bodies of work. Brooks includes a touching description of the last evening Brooks spent with Horwitz, which involved an event for his final book, Spying on the South, held at Nashville’s Parnassus Books.

Memorial Days strikes a seemingly impossible balance among all its elements. Brooks may have given herself permission to “wallow” in her grief during her time on Flinders Island, but her account of what happens there never submerges us in extremity of feeling. We willingly follow her through this rite of passage, however dark it gets, knowing at every turn we are in trustworthy hands.