Memorial Days

A Memoir

By: Geraldine Brooks

Narrated by: Geraldine Brooks

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.

©2024 Geraldine Brooks (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Healthy Grieving

Author’s journey with grief beautifully expressed with honesty and compassion as she recounts her famous husbands sudden death.

Thank you

Thank you for sharing your story. Meaningful and helpful at this point in my life.

Heartbreaking and breathtaking

Brooks uses her incomparable storytelling and ability always to find the perfect word not just to chronicle her own path to coping with overwhelming loss, but to write a guidebook for her fellow sufferers. She is a gift

The reality of losing your spouse.

Ms. Brooks is a wonderful story teller. I've read all of her books. Yes, "Horse" is my favorite.
My husband, who I had known for over 40 years & had been married to for 23, died of a long struggle with dementia. It was terrible.
Mr. Horowitz death was as well. Geraldine did a wonderful job of explaining the complexity of grief. Thank you, Ms. Brooks.

A wise, candid and beautiful recount of a life that could have been derailed by a sudden horrific loss.

This memoir was completely r although the lives of the widows, this writer and this reader, had few visible parallels until their loss

Her honesty

Her story and her help given to me in my own grief. She is resilient and honest.

Heartfelt, lyrical story of a grief endured

Geraldine Brooks tells a tender, visceral story of the unexpected loss of her husband and how she processed (and continues to process) the news of his death. Her words are brave and honest, her eyes are clear. She toggles between the days immediately following his death (which happened on Memorial Day) and the personal “memorial days” she carved out for herself, several years later, on a remote island. Grief brings you casseroles and heartfelt wishes, letters and emails and eulogies. It also brings labyrinthine legal, logistical, and financial processes to the forefront. Add to this the demand of work (in her case, creative writing) and you can feel the crush of details and performance overshadowing the quiet inner work of remembering and feeling. The book is short, and brings us along for the journey.

In the end, Ms. Brooks offers advice for us all, simple actions that might make this journey a little easier for our loved ones. In a mortality-avoiding culture, we would all be wise to ponder this inevitability and, perhaps plan for the logistics and allow the space for emotion.

Moving memoir of a great love story.

A raw account of love and loss. I loved this book. Recently read Horse which I could not put down. Love this writer.

Powerful, authentic, moving

Love the gift of sharing by the author, it reminds me to cherish each day with my loved ones.

Jenube

This is a boring uninspired slog. It is soulless. It seems to have written to exploit the reputation of its subject and author for the sole purpose of generating income.