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A novelist embraces solitude and nature as antidotes to loss

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks was halfway through writing her novel “Horse” in 2019 when she received devastating news. Her husband of more than 30 years, the celebrated author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz, had suddenly collapsed on a sidewalk in Washington and died.

Horwitz’s abrupt death plunged Brooks not just into confusion and profound grief, but also into the disorienting maelstrom of tasks that are demanded of those left behind. In the process, she lost the breathing room to embrace the full measure of mourning.

Brooks’ moving new memoir, “Memorial Days,” is a chronicle of fully acknowledging her loss and moving toward solace. In February 2023, almost four years after her husband’s death, she sets out for an isolated shack on Flinders Island off the coast of her native Australia to do “the unfinished work of grieving.” 

Why We Wrote This

There is no single set of instructions on how to cope with grief. But a gifted writer, sharing her own story, can offer a path out of darkness toward reflection and peace.

Horwitz died on Memorial Day. With this sojourn, Brooks begins her own “memorial days,” finally giving herself the time for “a grief deep enough to reflect our love.”

The book’s chapters alternate between Brooks’ account of the days and weeks immediately following her husband’s death and her journey of reflection and healing on Flinders Island. 

We learn about Brooks and Horwitz as individuals as well as about the fabric of their life together – meeting in journalism school, falling in love, finding a symbiotic relationship as writers, living around the world as foreign correspondents.

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