Geraldine Brooks’s memoir of her life with writer Tony Horwitz and the aftermath of his sudden death in 2019 is an intimate, gut-wrenching, funny, and inspiring tribute to their life together and to his writing. It will take its place alongside other powerful memoirs of love and loss, like Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking (about which the two of them strikingly disagreed). With her well-honed journalistic skills, Brooks describes the brutally bureaucratic way America handles sudden death alongside her own journey through grief’s landscape while capturing Horwitz’s exuberant personality and adventurous spirit. Having read and loved most of her work, I now can’t wait to read his.
Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks, (List Price: $28, Viking, 9780593653982, February 2025)
Reviewed by Sarah Goddin, McIntyre’s Books in Pittsboro, North Carolina