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A Memoir
by Geraldine Brooks
Book Reviewed by:A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey towards peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse.
Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz – just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy – collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.
After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha's Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at the beach. But all of this ended abruptly when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.
Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.
A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.
May 27, 2019
WEST TISBURY
"Is this the home of Tony Horwitz?"
Yes
"Who am I speaking to?"
This is his wife
That is exact. The rest is a blur.
"Collapsed in the street ... tried to resuscitate at the scene ...brought to the hospital ... couldn't revive him... ."
And, so, now he's in the OR. And, so, now we've admitted him for a procedure. And, so, now we're keeping him for observation.
So many things that logically should have followed.
But she says none of these things. Instead, the illogical thing:
He's dead.
No.
Not Tony. Not him. Not my husband out on the road energetically promoting his new book. My husband with the toned body of a six-day-a-week gym rat. The sixty-year-old who still wears clothes the same size as the day I met him in his twenties. My husband, younger than I am—hilarious, bursting with vitality. He's way too busy living. He cannot possibly be dead.
The resident's voice is flat, exhausted. She is impatient with me as I ask her to repeat what she has just said. It is, she ...
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (2/19/2026)
I enjoyed "Everything Is Tuberculosis" last week and found that I am becoming a huge John Green fan. I should be done with the very sad "Memorial Days" by Geraldine Brooks by tomorrow. I believe "Heart the Lover" by Lily King is next in the stack.
-Anthony_Conty
2025 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists
...finalists. Which have you read and which are standouts? Are there any you'd like to add to your list that you haven't already? Autobiography/Memoir : Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (Viking) Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Scribner) Paper Girl by Beth Macy (Penguin) Shattered by Hanif Kureishi (Ecco) A Truce That Is Not...
-kim.kovacs
What’s the best nonfiction book you read in 2025?
Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks. I'm not a big fan of memoirs, but this was chosen for a discussion and I loved it.
-Holly_K
What are you reading this week? (7/10/2025)
On advice from a book club member, I'm reading Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks. The author speaks to the shocking numbness that the sudden death of a loved one can bring. The grieving delayed as life and its customary demands pu...
-Connie_K
If you could suggest one book for The Busybody Book Club to read, what would it be and why?
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton. This book made such an impression on me this year. So did Geraldine Brooks' Memorial Days . Both are nonfiction, beautifully written and moving stories. I think each member of that bookclub would relate in some way to these books. For a lighter, but no less poignant ...
-Barbara_E
What are you reading this week? (5/1/2025)
A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedora Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks The Tell by Amy Griffin A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men by Shannon Monaghan
-Shirley_T
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BookBrowse Awards
2025
Not quite four years after Tony died, Brooks, Australian-born writer of both fiction and nonfiction, moved to the farthest end of Flinders Island in the Bass Strait for two specific reasons. She wanted to unpack every inch of buried grief. To do the unfinished work, as she often called it. To pay the promissory note that was long ago due. And she wanted to examine her compromise of leaving Australia and raising her children on Martha's Vineyard. Was this choice responsible for her current despair? Had she chosen Australia for her family, would Tony still be alive? Had she traded one beautiful thing for one terrible thing? Reflections like these make up her memoir Memorial Days. We will all lose someone we love, if we have not already, and it's only human to admire those who have been dealt a horrible hand and can talk about it with clarity. It is what makes Memorial Days so striking as a remembrance. It's a story about sudden death and trauma and it's a story about being in love...continued
Full Review
(1353 words)
(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).
.jpg "Mourner's Kaddish")
On the worst day of her life, author Geraldine Brooks began to shake in her lower extremities. Above her thighs, she was frozen. No tears, no screams, no falling onto the floor with anger and rage. Her shock was suddenly buried and it all felt so surreal. Tony Horwitz, her husband of thirty-four years, had died, which felt impossible, improbable, and unfair. Brooks had just read an email from him. Only minutes before the hospital called and her world changed, she had spoken with her older son. "If I let go," she writes in her memoir Memorial Days, "if I fell, I might not be able to get back up."
Losing a spouse can feel like losing an essential part of oneself. The days that follow are often filled with regret, guilt, loneliness, and...
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In youth we run into difficulties. In old age difficulties run into us
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