Author: Geraldine Brooks
Year published: 2025
Category: Adult nonfiction (memoir)
Pages: 224 pages
Rating: 4 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA (MA, MD, Washington DC), Australia
Summary: 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.
Review: Two memoirs in a row! I have really enjoyed Geraldine Brooks' novels (link to my review: Horse, People of the Book, March, and Years of Wonder, which may be my favorite) and had heard good things about this memoir. Within the first few lines, I learned that Brooks was married to the journalist and author Tony Horwitz. I had no idea.
In alternating chapters, we read about the events of and after Horwitz's death, including how Brooks felt at the time, and three years later, when she took time out on a remote Tasmanian island to process her grief. Brooks' writing is fantastic in her novels, and it's the same here in nonfiction. She captures the scene, the emotions, the impact so well.
Throughout the book, she is doing a number of things: processing grief; telling the story of her relationship with her husband; sharing the story of their shared careers; and showing how she began the healing process. The book is thoughtful, sad, and uplifting all at once.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Bookish--author writes about diaries and journalism
- Nonfiction
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