In 2019, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks received a phone call. She was halfway through her new novel, Horse, and had settled into a period of intense work while her husband, fellow author and literary luminary Tony Horwitz went on a book tour. The phone call was abrupt: Brooks’ apparently healthy and vital husband of 37 years had collapsed and died on a Washington DC street. He was aged just 60.
So begins Brooks’ highly anticipated Memorial Days, a memoir of the days and years following her husband’s dramatic death. The work flicks between the bewildering immediate aftermath and, three years later, Brooks’ eventual retreat to Flinders Island on the Tasmanian coast to properly process her grief.
Memorial Days joins a list of literary grief memoirs that can bring comfort, awe and heartbreak. There is no getting around the heaviness of the subject material, but Brooks approaches the material with a stroke of genius. First, she calls out her peers – within days of arriving at the Flinders Island retreat, she pulls out a pile of grief memoirs given to her by well-meaning friends. Among them is an advance copy of one of the best known: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. She is thrilled to find Horwitz’s notes spread throughout, and it’s obvious he was less than thrilled with the book. Brooks is kinder.Â
Regardless, it is clear that Brooks is intent on creating something that is her own. The result is a richly braided book combining a triplicate of strands: the breathless aftermath of loss, the slow melancholia of prolonged grief, and anthropological curiosity about the societal institutions and rituals that mark death.
It is this final element that gives Memorial Day its true spark. Brooks’ history as a foreign correspondent and gifted writer of history and culture is a trait she shared with her late husband. No wonder she brings in journalistic threads as she communes with his absence.
Brooks is a skilled enough writer that this occurs seamlessly. Critiques on cultures of accomplishment addiction and overwork, the haphazard brutality of the US health system, the violent history of colonisation of Tasmania, a worldwide tour of death rituals and the prehistoric architecture of her natural environment – Brooks’ concise handling of the material appears effortless, but it’s far from it.
Grief memoirs are bruisingly challenging to master. Brooks gives us her soul on the page and yet never leaves the reader feeling unsafe or burdened by her darkness. What occurs instead is a kind of lightness and awe – an appreciation of her husband, their love and the fragility of all things.Â
Read: Book review: Those Opulent Days, Jacquie Pham
Memorial Days is another gift from one of our greatest living writers. It is one for all readers, but especially the bereaved, who will find comfort in Brooks’ beautiful, aching prose and deft hand.Â
Memorial Days, Geraldine Brooks
Publisher: Hachette
ISBN: 9780733651076
Format: Hardback
Pages: 224pp
Publication: 29 January 2025
RRP: $32.99
