Memorial Days
by Geraldine Brooks

Memorial Days is a memoir about grief by one of our most admired contemporary women writers. Memorial Day, the last Monday in May, is an American public holiday to remember those who died in wars. On Memorial Day in 2019, prize-winning author, Australian- American Geraldine Brooks, received a phone call that would forever change her. Brooks was working intensely and was halfway through her novel Horse, and so had not accompanied her husband, fellow writer Tony Horwitz, on his book tour. The phone call from an overworked, overtired emergency doctor was abrupt and cruelly factual – 60 years old Tony Horwitz, Brooks’s husband of 37 years and an apparently healthy and vigorous man, had collapsed and died on a street in Washington DC.

Memorial Days adds to other acclaimed grief memoirs written by literary women after the sudden death of their husbands. Neither The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion nor A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates, has the deft touch that Brooks brings to create something that is entirely her own. And, I think, she has done this with a uniquely Australian flavour.

After three years of putting her and her sons’ lives into this new way of living, Brooks realises she had pushed down her grief, had never had the space or solitude to howl. The energy that is required to keep true grief away is debilitating and Brooks decides to allow herself the gift of time.

She isolates herself on Flinders Island where, with its savage and remote beauty, she can begin the process of true, deep grieving, finding hope and solace in memories and landscape. She allows herself to remember the horror and confusion of that phone call. She examines the busyness of death: the obituaries, the funeral, the memorials (yes, two), the paperwork, the bureaucracy and the tax man. She takes a swipe at the American health system. Everything is required of her when still numb prevents the expression of her own grief. Brooks, anthropologically, also explores the grieving processes in other cultures and how many of them allow essential time to sit with both solitary and shared grief.

Grief memoirs are very challenging to bring off. Brooks with her history of journalism and as a gifted writer of fiction, can give us her heart on the page without burdening the reader with her grief. We are left with wonder at the happiness of her marriage, the joy of landscape, and the knowledge and acceptance of the fragility of all things.

Review by Wendy Tucker