What readers think of Memorial Days, plus links to write your own review.

“Memorial Days” by Geraldine Brooks is about grief; for that reason, I would recommend that some of you steer clear if an experience is still too close in your mind. So, if you are one of those people triggered by the phrase “Trigger Warning,” suck it up because a grieving person needs to know what they are getting into here.

Brooks experienced the sudden death of her husband and needed to piece together why it happened, both physically and existentially. Although she communicates for a living, appropriate words fail her. The fact that they both worked as journalists drove their relationship and her memories. She valued her husband’s work and his contributions to hers. Basic proofreading comes off as intimate.

Tony Horwitz had a respected voice in the nonfiction community, and his wife admired his ability to write appropriately with those with whom he did not necessarily agree in Nashville. His absence makes the author stare off into space in Australia, taking in the landscape with a writer’s eye. Fans of her fiction will enjoy her focus as she mourns.

Geraldine and Tony’s collegiate meet-cute is not terribly unique, but it reminds you that the little things will remain with you long after loved ones have left this mortal world. When she tries to conduct a memorial, you see how easy it is for writers to become lost for words. You will cringe with recognition if this is your reality.

Since the book has so many peers in the realm of loss and death, you might expect some repetition, but Brooks will create a personalized experience with her colorful words. Knowing that grieving has no true closure, the author still attempts to provide it to readers trying to live without their former certainty. It is real but not easy.

People of the Book is an all-time favorite novel, and I love Horse as well. But now Australian author Geraldine Brooks has written the most compelling memoir about grief I've yet read. Yes, of course it's sad, achingly so at times. But for the most part, I found myself feeling hope and appreciation for her departed husband, the writer Tony Horwitz. Brooks found the ideal form with which to frame her memoir, and to give space to her grief. The memoir is told in dual book-of-days timelines, one that excavates from the moment she learns of Horwitz's death on Memorial Day 2019. This alternates with her day-by-day account of the time she spent three years later holed-up in a shack on Australia's remote Flinder's Island. This is the space and time she devoted to mourning. It's beautifully intimate and candid and also informative about various cultural grief rituals. It's also a call for the US medical-forensic establishment to rethink their shitty practices. It's well done, and I hope writing it helped Brooks. I imagine it will help others.

Oh, this book made me cry. And smile…and a few times, I even laughed. This is the deeply sad—but also honest and hopeful—memoir of a widow in the days, weeks, months, and years after her beloved's untimely and unexpected death.

Geraldine Brooks met her husband Tony Horwitz at Columbia University in the early 1980s when they were both studying for a master's in journalism. She is a native of Sydney, Australia, and he is a native of Chevy Chase, Maryland. They married in 1984, and had two sons. They had a storybook life. Throughout their more than three decades of marriage, they were very much in love. They also had professional success, each winning a Pulitzer Prize—she for fiction in 2006 and he for national reporting in 1995.

It was on Memorial Day, May 27, 2019, when Tony was 60 and on a grueling book tour to promote his latest book, "Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide," that he collapsed on a sidewalk on the border between Maryland and Washington, D.C. just blocks from his childhood home. He died instantly. And for Geraldine, who was at their home on Martha's Vineyard at the time, life forever changed.

This is her story. Her story of this profound, heartrending loss. Her story of grieving and learning to live again. Her story of managing all the complex tasks—from taxes to health insurance to credit cards—that Tony had always taken care of and about which she knew nothing. Her story of escaping three years later to the extremely remote Flinders Island, northeast of Tasmania, Australia, so she could properly grieve for Tony.

Written with grace and aplomb, this is a story of a deep, abiding love and the wrenching emotions that occur when it all ends. It's a story of hope, of living again even when you think that's not quite possible. It's a book that will resonate with anyone who is in love, and it will make all readers truly appreciate the here and now.

When Tony died, Brooks was writing her acclaimed novel "Horse," but she was struggling with it. She says that he believed in the book more than she did, but she wanted to finish writing it just so she could dedicate it to her beloved. This is the dedication, and it gave me goosebumps when I read it the first time in 2022, just as it does now:
FOR TONY
It will be the past and we'll live there together. –Patrick Philips, "Heaven"

Memorial Days is a memoir by award-winning, best-selling Australian author, Geraldine Brooks. When, in late May 2019, Geraldine learned of the sudden death of her husband of thirty-five years, Tony Horwitz, she didn’t get the chance to grieve. Four years on, in 2023, she travelled to Flinders Island where, in a remote little shack, she allowed herself to do so.

That first notification call to their Massachusetts home by the ER doctor at George Washington Hospital in DC was utterly devoid of any empathy, and a later call to the same ER offered a jaw-dropping lack of sensitivity. Geraldine experienced a roller-coaster of care: the DC policeman who spoke to her was considerate and gentle, as was the first person to find Tony, collapsed in the street, and neighbours in West Tisbury who would care for her horse and dogs.

In that immediate aftermath, there was so much pressure on legal and financial fronts, and on acknowledging a tsunami of condolences, she couldn’t permit herself the time and space to deeply grieve. Instead “I’ve moved around in public acting out a series of convincing scenes, one endless, exhausting performance.” That is what she went to Flinders Island to allow herself to do.

“I have only a loose notion of how I will spend my time here. I will walk and reflect, taking whatever solace nature cares to offer me. I will write down everything I can recall about Tony’s death and its aftermath. I will allow myself time and space to think about our marriage and to experience the emotions I’ve suppressed.”

Geraldine explores how the different cultures deal with death, noting how most faith traditions “put guardrails around the bereaved, rules for what to do in those days of massive confusion when the world has collapsed.”

She had a book to finish, but it wasn’t something that could happen with “the beast of grief clinging to me, claws as intractable as fish hooks”

Towards the end of the book, she begs for reform of the US medical-forensic establishment’s inhumane practices, which prevented her gaining comfort from being with Tony, and forced her to ID from a photo. And she implores the reader to write a guide to their household, to help those left behind after a sudden death.

Much of what Brooks writes about the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death can’t fail to have the reader choking up, tears welling, and it’s difficult to imagine that she wasn’t writing this with tears streaming down her face. Her grief will resonate with many readers, and her experience will shock and move. Beautifully told, full of love.