Writer Geraldine Brooks shut out the world and grieved with the space and time she needed after her husband, Tony Horowitz, had died abruptly of a heart attack on a Washington D.C, street.
Brooks tried to press on, undertaking a book tour and parenting her two almost-grown boys as she faced the years ahead without her beloved.
But she realized that as much as she tried to act like all was normal, her sorrow was patient and waiting.
Her memoir "Memorial Days" shifts between those early days of learning about Tony’s death and her retreat to a small island in the Bass Strait between the Australia mainland and Tasmania where she finally shed the “endless, exhausting performance.” Because “contrary to appearances, I am not at all OK.”
It is about her long-delayed reckoning with that loss and the truth of the life that would follow.
