Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

Posted by Ms A on June 30, 2025 in All | Leave a comment

It’s a rare book that can be both a guide to the sudden loss of a spouse and a genuinely enjoyable read, but Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks does just that.

With a protective wink, my neighbour and dear friend, slipped me her copy wanting to make sure I had the benefit of any pre-planning material that might be available should my husband not make it home from the mines that night. But the truth is, it doesn’t take a mine to collapse – anyone’s life can change in an instant. Just ask Geraldine Brooks.

Brooks is a legendary Australian author and journalist whose list of works includes the novels Year of Wonders, People of the Book and The Secret Chord, as well as years writing at the Sydney Morning Herald and The Wall Street Journal.  She won her the Order of Australia in 2016 for distinguished service to literature. Her husband and the love of her life, Tony Horwitz, also an award-winning journalist, was equally well known and respected. 

This literal, literary power couple ran busy lives, writing and touring and visiting family all around the world.  Tony was fit and active and no one, least of all Brooks, was prepared when he collapsed and died of a cardiac arrest in the arms of a stranger on Memorial Day, 2019. He was 60 years old.

Instantly overwhelmed by the chaos of losing the person responsible for every password, bank account and logistical component of their shared life and in the middle of her own writing project, Brooks set her grief aside until she could be properly alone with it.  

When the time was right, she took herself to remote Flinders Island to heal and write Memorial Days.  In alternating chapters, she recounts the events (big and small) leading up to and following Tony’s death and reflects on the heartbreak of losing not just the man she loved, but the shared life they had built and the future they had planned.

In my experience of the human library of emotions, grief is the most complex and least predictable item on the shelf. It has the capacity to disguise itself in so many ways and to burrow deep down to unreachable places.

Geraldine Brooks has done the world a generous service by writing about the most personal of subject matters so beautifully and putting words to her experience of loss.  My neighbour was similarly generous in passing me her copy of this gorgeous book.

And that’s my 2 cents worth.