Memorial days A memoir

Brooks was working on her novel Horse (2022) when her fit and vital husband, writer Tony Horwitz, died on Memorial Day in Washington, DC, while on book tour. She was alone in their home on Martha's Vineyard when she received the shocking news, the start to a long, anguished, sometimes surreal, often infuriating ordeal with the bureaucracy of death. After several years of concealing her sorrow in "one endless, exhausting performance" of normalcy, Brooks finally asserted her "right to grieve," embarking on her own "memorial days" by returning to her home country, Australia, and retreating to remote, wild, and haunted Flinders Island. In this rinsed-clean memoir, Brooks tells her story leading up to her meeting Tony and after as they "vagabonded as foreign correspondents" in war zones in the Middle East and Libya, then settled down to raise their two sons and write books, intricately entwined in every aspect of life. On Flinders Island, Brooks discovers another side to Tony as she reads his journals. Reflecting on mourning rituals in various traditions, while chronicling the dramatic, lonesome, and restorative beauty and spirit of the island, Brooks, with arresting precision, sensitivity, and candor, takes deep soundings of her grief and evolving perceptions and feelings in a generous and resonant remembrance.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Brooks' many fans will want to learn more about her, while ardent memoir readers and those looking for books about grief will also reach for Memorial Days.

Pulitzer-winning novelist Brooks (Horse) delivers a moving and lyrical account of the years following her husband's death. In 2019, Brooks's 60-year-old husband, Tony Hurwitz, died of a heart attack. Three years later, Brooks spent several months on the secluded Flinders Island off the coast of Australia, finally "unclenching... the soul" and allowing herself to grieve. The narrative focuses mostly on the period between Tony's death and that sojourn, cataloging the hectic months during which Brooks dealt with tax problems, a lack of health insurance, and a legal fight over her youngest son's guardianship. Tender flashbacks recount the couple's courtship at Columbia Journalism School in the 1980s, their travels across the globe as foreign correspondents, and their decision to settle in Massachusetts, start a family, and concentrate on writing books. Brooks concludes by imploring readers to spend time processing their trauma, crediting the experience with her resolution to make "the life I have as vivid and consequential as I can." Brooks's spare yet forceful prose and admirable determination to stare pain in the face go a long way toward achieving that goal. Readers reckoning with the loss of a loved one will find wisdom in these pages. Agent: Kristine Dahl, CAA. (Feb.)

Finding an island for grief. On Memorial Day, 2019, Tony Horwitz, Brooks' 60-year-old husband, collapsed on a street in Washington, D.C., and died. In the days and months that followed, Brooks found herself hiding behind a "heavy and elaborate" facade, "a fugitive from my own feelings." Finally, in February 2023, she traveled to a remote island off the coast of her native Australia to allow herself to mourn. In alternating chapters, Brooks creates an absorbing memoir of shocking loss and protracted grief as she reflects on her marriage, her driven, Type A husband, and her future alone. She and Horwitz met at a party when they were graduate students at Columbia Journalism School. A bit shy, she couldn't help but notice the "tanned, tousle-haired blond in overalls and red sneakers, regaling the small group on the balcony with the woes of living with his brother in Alphabet City," a rough section of Manhattan. They both went on to successful careers as journalists, including working as foreign correspondents with posts in Cairo, London, and Sydney, where she had hoped they would settle as a family. But Horwitz needed to be in the U.S., preferably within walking distance to a newsstand and coffee shop. After their son was born, when she no longer wanted to go on risky assignments, he encouraged her to try to write fiction. She was in the middle of her novelHorse when he died. Brooks pays homage to the loving, gregarious Horwitz, lashes out at America's flawed medical system, and deftly conveys the ongoing reverberations of her shattering experience. Like other widowed writers (Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates), Brooks both relives the trauma of her husband's death and keeps his cherished memory alive. A graceful and moving meditation on bereavement. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.