To us readers who admired Tony Horwitz's writing, infused with his animated and wry first-person voice, his sudden death in 2019 was hard to take in. Horwitz, who was a fit 60 year old, died of cardiac arrest a few days after his book Spying on the South was published.
Like his 1998 bestseller, Confederates in the Attic, Spying on the South presciently explored the great divide in America between Red states and Blue. Curiously, for a writer so attuned to boundary lines, Horwitz, who was traveling on a book tour, collapsed and died on a street that divides Washington, D.C., and Maryland.
Horwitz's wife, novelist Geraldine Brooks, was far away at their home in Martha's Vineyard. The opening of her memoir Memorial Days describes in present-tense, fragmented phrases what it was like to be on the receiving end of a call from an ER doc whose voice is "flat, exhausted ... impatient;" and who refers to her husband's body as: "It." That call, Brooks reflects, was: "The first brutality in what I would learn is a brutal, broken system."
Memorial Days is a beautifully modulated cry in the wilderness; an unsentimental contribution to the ever-growing pile of secular literature about grief in which the end of life is punctuated by a period, not an ellipsis. Brooks converted to Judaism when she married Horwitz some three decades earlier and, though Judaism doesn't offer her the assurance of an afterlife, it endows her with a spiritual language and vision.
Memorial Days alternates between the immediate time after Horwitz's death and 2023, when Brooks flies to an isolated cabin on Flinders Island off the coast of her native Australia. The trip, Brooks tells us, represents an effort to escape what Hebrew scriptures call the maytzar, "the narrow place."
Tending to her two sons in the wake of their father's death and meeting her own writerly deadlines meant that Brooks couldn't surrender to grief. Here's how she explains the need to withdraw:
Brooks is far from clueless about the privilege that enables such a retreat. She grew up, as she tells us, in a blue-collar neighborhood of Sydney in a house where all the furniture was second hand. She arrived as a scholarship student at Columbia Journalism School, where she met Horwitz and her life took a turn. The luxury of spending weeks alone in a cabin by the sea gives Brooks not only the time to grieve her husband but also to grieve the life she might have lived had she never met him.
Given Brooks' own distinguished career as a novelist and journalist, it's no surprise Memorial Days is such a powerful testament of grief; but what is more of a surprise is the emergence of another subject: namely, the tough reality of the writing life. Brooks says, at one point, that she thinks of Spying on the South as "the book that killed Tony." She recalls that to finish it on deadline, her husband:
Wondering how she can practically sustain her life without Horwitz, Brooks is told by a financial advisor that she'll be OK as long as she just keeps writing: There's the rub. Fortunately, Brooks was able to finish her stalled novel-in-progress, Horse, which was published in 2022. And, fortunately, she was able to go on to write Memorial Days — a book that not only pays tribute to a loving marriage between two successful writers, but also manages to be a clear-eyed assessment of the costs of that success.
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