Memorial Days: A Memoir

"One of the themes of our shortlist, you’re right, is death and grief. Mother Mary Comes to Me is about grief for a mother, and Memorial Days’ reason for being, the centre point, is the sudden loss of the author’s husband, Tony Horwitz. He was on his own, on a book tour. And what a loss. This was a long marriage of two writers, such an important relationship. There wasn’t an illness, so there was no preparation. They were going about in the prime of their lives, and then this sudden loss. I think readers responded to the suddenness of that. It reminds me of Joan Didion’s book… not Blue Nights … Yes. With Brooks, suddenly there is this loss, and we move through the initial shock of those days. How do you tell your children? How do you physically move and do all the things that one has to do, all the errands and chores of loss. And I was interested in how this memoir maps grief over time and place, from the writer’s home in Martha’s Vineyard, then to a remote island off the coast of Tasmania. She takes us with her on a journey, moving to all these different places as she deals with this huge, sudden absence. Then, also, from interviewing people or from looking at accounts, she puts together what happened on that street in those final moments where her husband was alive, then her husband collapsed and was not alive any more. It’s incredibly moving and intimate to take us along on that journey with her through grief."

"When novelist Geraldine Brooks’s husband, Tony Horwitz, dies while on a book tour, she gets the call from a harried medical resident who can’t get off the phone fast enough. Brooks alternates between memories of those first days and her life three years later on an isolated island in Australia, where she finally takes time to focus on grieving. Listening feels particularly intimate. Brooks’s performance is heartfelt and beautiful, both precise and expansive. (5 hours)"