Book Review: Geraldine Brooks’ “Memorial Days”

On Memorial Day 2019, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks had only just settled at her desk to begin the day’s work when she received a call from a harried resident at George Washington University Hospital informing her that her husband of thirty-five years, Tony Horwitz, had died. He was on tour to promote his new book, “Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide,” when he collapsed on a suburban Maryland street, due to an as-yet-undiagnosed heart condition. Five-hundred miles away, at their home on Martha’s Vineyard, Brooks struggled to make sense of the resident’s words. “Not Tony. Not him… The sixty-year-old who still wears clothes the same size as the day I met him in his twenties. My husband, younger than I am.”

In the weeks and months that followed, Brooks suppressed her grief and bewilderment and threw herself into the obligations that most immediately required her attention: taking care of her and Horwitz’s sons, one still in high school, the other a recent college graduate; planning two memorials; organizing her finances; and reinstating her family’s health insurance, which was summarily canceled by the insurer upon Horwitz’s death. Other emotionally draining chores followed, each of which Brooks painstakingly resolved, spurred on in one case by a vague directive—to fire their accountant—that Horwitz had scrawled onto a slip of paper before he’d left on the book tour.

The material world, demanding so much of her time and attention, kept Brooks at a remove from the profound grief she felt over the loss of her husband, with whom, for many years, she had also shared a career as a foreign correspondent for newspapers that included The Wall Street Journal and The Sydney Morning Herald, before they each began writing books full-time.

Throughout “Memorial Days,” Brooks alternates chapters chronicling the immediate aftermath of Horwitz’s death with others that focus on a trip she made in February 2023 to Flinders Island, an island between Tasmania and mainland Australia. Brooks embarks on this journey “to do the unfinished work of grieving.” She says, “I have come to realize that what I did that day in late May 2019 and what I was obliged to do in the days and months that followed has exacted an invisible price. I am going to this remote island to pay it.”

The author eschews self-pity and sentimentality in favor of straightforward self-examination and illuminating remembrance. In lucent prose, she maintains a tone both elegiac and confiding, which calls to mind Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking”—a book she admired, and Horwitz, on the jury the year it won the National Book Award, had a different response to—one Brooks recounts with gentle humor.

When she recalls the months preceding Horwitz’s death, she remembers seeing him driving himself hard, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. As long as she’d known him, he had always worked with intense, self-punitive focus. “To get [“Spying on the South”] done on time, he chewed boxes of Nicorette gum; nibbled Provigil, the pill developed to keep fighter pilots alert; drank pints of coffee.”

In mourning her husband and memorializing their life together, Brooks has offered readers a deeply affecting book, at once personal and expansive. “I merely wish,” she tells us in “Memorial Days”’ final pages, “for the bereaved some time and space, however long, however short, for melancholy—what Victor Hugo described as the happiness of being sad.”

“Memorial Days”
By Geraldine Brooks
Viking, 224 pages