MEMORIAL DAYS: A Memoir, by Geraldine Brooks
Behind every good book lurks another, smaller book: a sidecar, an appendage, a mental dividend. Most never get written, let alone published. But here is Geraldine Brooks’s “Memorial Days,” a modulated howl into the void that shows her best-selling 2022 novel, “Horse,” should have been awarded a special citation for compartmentalization.
For 35 years Brooks was married to Tony Horwitz, the itinerant reporter and author of immersive nonfiction like “Confederates in the Attic.” Both had Pulitzer Prizes, and after various adventures in foreign correspondence — necessitating go bags packed with “shortwave radios, field dressings, bricks of cash for countries that didn’t take cards, my chador, a bulletproof vest” — they’d settled into a beautifully ramshackle house in paradise, a.k.a. Martha’s Vineyard.
Horwitz had just bought two linen shirts before a tour to promote his 2019 book, “Spying on the South,” when he collapsed on a Washington, D.C., sidewalk, prompting women to rush out of a yoga studio with a defibrillator. He was pronounced dead at 60, of what proved to be a “myocarditis event,” at the same hospital where he’d been born.
“Spying on the South,” too, would become a best seller. “His death,” Brooks notes dryly, “was a news peg.”
“Memorial Days” is an account of her processing this loss, to use the bloodless modern verbiage, along with processing all the paperwork and bureaucratic glitches that cruelly accompany such a loss. Without Horwitz, Brooks’s credit limits shrink. Her health insurance is canceled. Retrieving a missed message about organ donation, she imagines her husband’s wasted corneas “a sizzle of moisture, evaporated in a split second in the crematorium.”
The narrative oscillates between West Tisbury, on the Vineyard, and Flinders Island in Australia, Brooks’s native country, where she decides to retreat for bouts of isolated grieving.
“A stunningly civilized land next to America but at the same time smug and sun-struck … not a place I want to live,” Horwitz had written in one of the journals she quotes selectively — realizing that, like most journals, they reflected darker hours of the soul. Most of their differences were complementary (his extroversion, her imagination; his financial savvy, her fix-itness), but Brooks is still brooding over his dis of Down Under.
Having reported on, for example, the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini, she considers the elaborate lamentation rites of various cultures, like the Sorry Business of Australia’s First Nations people, and longs for more acceptance of sustained, shapeless melancholy in relentless get-on-with-it America.
If she finds solace in any deity, it is Gaia, the Greek goddess of earth: noting the “labial folds” of a cave on Marshall Bay, and marveling as maggots swarm a dead thornbill in “riotous jitterbug.”
Brooks is careful to calibrate her grief against larger-scale disasters — earthquakes, plague, wildfires, war. “Widows, widows everywhere,” as she writes. And of course “Memorial Days” bows down to the mother of mourn-moirs, Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Horwitz was no fan. “Name & product dropping. Padded,” he scribbled in a reviewer’s copy while judging the National Book Award Didion won.
His own widow’s contribution to the genre is the opposite of padded. If anything, it’s a little overlean and eked-out, 200-odd pages aired by paragraph breaks. Brooks seems brittle still, but writing is her way through, and now her solo livelihood — she finished “Horse,” she now admits, only so that she could dedicate it to Horwitz. And she’s such an adroit, un-maudlin observer that “Memorial Days” does transfix, and stick.
She recounts meeting Horwitz while attending the Columbia Journalism School in New York, their fast ’80s courtship delayed slightly after he dropped his glasses down the toilet at Danceteria.
They went on to work so symbiotically at The Wall Street Journal that editors referred to them as Hobro, soon becoming that endangered species, a successful literary couple. She converted to his Judaism and they married and raised two sons, one adopted from Ethiopia. They were, Brooks writes, “connoisseurs of sunsets.”
“Enjoy yourself/it’s later than you think,” goes the old song. Horwitz enjoyed himself plenty: garrulously hosting dinner parties; staging elaborate scenarios for April Fool’s and Halloween; playing softball. (His ashes were buried, per his offhand wish, in a lefty baseball mitt.)
But he also seemed to carry a lot of career anxiety, typically restless and feeling “henpecked” during a brief stint as a staff writer at The New Yorker. He wrote his last book fueled by coffee, Nicorette gum and the stimulant Provigil by day; rivers of wine at night. “Last week I saw my cardiologist. He told me I drink too much,” he wrote in a piece about bar-stool reporting for The New York Times. A month later, he was gone.
Struck by sorrow, Brooks layers well-chosen words around her like blankets: hers, his, others’. Excerpting the many tributes of esteemed writers in their circle, she imagines her beloved’s reaction:
“I see his pen slashes, his terse scrawl: Cut this. Bragging.”
MEMORIAL DAYS: A Memoir | By Geraldine Brooks | Viking | 224 pp. | $28