The widow of Tony Horwitz, Geraldine Brooks, reflects on sorrow in “commemorative days”: NPR

For us, the readers who admired the writing of Tony Horwitz, infused with his animated and ironic voice in the first person, his sudden death in 2019 was difficult to take. Horwitz, who was a 60 -year -old child, died of cardiac arrest a few days after his book Spying on the south has been published.

Like his 1998 bestseller, Confederates in the attic,, Spy on the South presented the great ditch in America in a precious way between red states and blue. Curiously, for a writer so suitable for borders lines, Horwitz, who was traveling on a book tour, collapsed and died in a street that divides Washington, DC and Maryland.

The wife of Horwitz, the novelist Geraldine Brooks, was far at home in Martha’s vineyard. The opening of its memories Commemorative days Described in the fragmented sentences of the present and fragmented what it was to be at the reception of a call from a doc whose voice is “flat, exhausted … impatient”; And who refers to her husband’s body like: “It.” This call, reflects Brooks, was: “The first brutality of what I learned is a brutal and broken system.”

Commemorative days is a beautifully modulated cry in the desert; A non -sentimental contribution to the constant increase in secular literature on sorrow in which the end of life is punctuated by a period, not an ellipse. Brooks converted to Judaism when she married Horwitz about three decades earlier and, although Judaism does not offer her the assurance of a life after death, it gives her a language and a spiritual vision.

Commemorative days Alternates between immediate time after the death of Horwitz and 2023, when Brooks heads for an isolated cabin on the island of Flinders off the coast of her native Australia. The trip, Brooks tells us, represents an effort to escape what the Hebrew Scriptures call the Maytzar“The narrow place.”

Tackling their two sons following the death of their father and meeting his own writers mean that Brooks could not go to sorrow. Here’s how she explains the need to withdraw:

I take something that our culture has stopped giving freely: the right to cry. To close the world and its requests. …

I realized that my life since Tony’s death was an endless and exhausting performance. I threw myself into a role: The woman being normal. …

I did not allow myself the wild width of elaborate, flowery and demonstrative sorrow. Instead, it is this long feeling of constriction, to maintain it and to stamp it and not to let it be shown.

Brooks is far from distraught from the privilege which allows such a retreat. She grew up, as she tells us, in a blue collar area in Sydney in a house where all the furniture was used. She arrived as a scholarship student at Columbia Journalism School, where she met Horwitz and her life took her turn. The luxury of spending weeks alone in a cabin by the sea gives Brooks not only time to cry her husband, but also to cry the life she could have lived if she had never met her.

Given the distinguished career of Brooks as a novelist and journalist, it is not a surprise Commemorative days is such a powerful will of sorrow; But what East More surprise is the emergence of another subject: namely the harsh reality of writing life. Brooks says, at one point, that she thinks of Spying on the south as “The book that killed Tony. “” She remembers that to finish on the deadline, her husband:

Boxes chewed with nicorette gum; Provigil nibbled, the pill developed to keep the alert hunting pilots; (and) has coffee pints. …

At night, he countered all the stimulants with wine.

Wondering how she can practically support her life without Horwitz, Brooks is said by a financial advisor that she will be well as long as she continues to write: there is friction. Fortunately, Brooks was able to finish his novel during the stage, Horse,, which was published in 2022. And fortunately she was able to write Commemorative days – A book that does not only pay tribute to a married marriage between two successful writers, but also manages to be a clear assessment of the costs of this success.