Author mourns husband's death in Memorial Days

Geraldine Brooks' memoir is an honest journal of the novelist's experience with grief after her husband's death

- Clement Yong

MEMORIAL DAYS By Geraldine Brooks Memoir/Viking/Paperback/ 207 pages/$28.01 ★★★★½

Some religious traditions prescribe strict timeframes for mourning. In Orthodox Judaism, a mourner sits shiva for seven days, withdrawing from the world and its demands, before his or her first walk outside the house is accompanied by friends.

Bali's Hindu and animist traditions extend this further, postponing the finale of mourning so that its tone is transformed into something like celebration. An elaborate cremation ritual usually requires weeks and months to gather the resources to organise, during which the body is first buried.

By the time of the colourful procession, the worst is, in theory, over, and there is a communal revelling in the soul becoming free.

Australian-American novelist Geraldine Brooks' Memorial Days is an implicit argument for a rehabilitation of some of these traditions, though no matter the structure, she finds there is no easy end point for pain.

This slender memoir is her determinedly honest journal of her experience with grief, which had settled and entrenched itself within her after her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Tony Horwitz, died of a sudden heart attack in 2019. Three years on, and after the completion of her incredibly well-received Horse (2022) during Covid-19, she has booked herself a solo sabbatical to Flinders Island in Tasmania, Australia.