I'm joining Kat and the Unravelers today with some slightly different making than my usual. After looking at my pile o' presents, I realized that I didn't have anything for Nugget. I spent some time on YouTube (okay, quite a bit of time after I started watching cats riding Roombas) and found some ideas. So I'm sparing you another week with the Sparkly Hitchhiker and you get to see some sewing for a cat instead.
Reading this week consisted of an average short story and an exceptional memoir. My Last Name was a pleasant short story that I won from goodreads. The author tells the story of Lottie, 95 years old, infirm, and living in a care facility. She struggles with her memory, understanding exactly where she is, and who is with her, but she still clearly recalls important moments in her life. A longer book would have enabled me to better understand Lottie and her life, and it was a bit too religious for my personal taste, but it was still a sweet end-of-life story.I gave it three stars.
It feels quite wrong to review the memoir of
someone else's grief at the death of a spouse, but that is my task here.
I read several reviews of Memorial Days and wanted to see if I
would appreciate Geraldine Brooks' nonfiction writing as much as her
fiction. I also knew that I didn't want to wait until the book was
published in February, and I'm happy that I didn't have to. I found this
to be every bit as good as her fiction writing.
Memorial Days
recounts the time after Brooks' husband Tony Horwitz literally dropped
dead on a Washington, D.C. sidewalk in May of 2019. The author tells the
more immediate story of frantically trying to travel from their home on
Martha's Vineyard to Washington and all the bits and pieces of what
happened next. These chapters alternate with her thoughts and feelings
after she has flown to Flinders Island off the coast of Australia to
truly grieve three years later. Brooks and Horwitz met in journalism
school and they lived and reported from many locations around the world
before settling in Martha's Vineyard to raise their two sons. On
Flinders Island she she writes about the varied ways other cultures
grieve, such as Australia's Indigenous People, the Balinese, and the
Iranian Shiites, and how she might move through similar practices
herself.
The author enjoys some amount of privilege, like having
the resources to fly to a sparsely populated island to process her
grief, and having her cancelled health insurance reinstated because she
had some connections and the right people were on her side. She writes
about the consolation she and her son felt reading Tony's obituaries in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
But she also recognizes this and writes about it, noting that these are
not things the average person is likely to benefit from. Brooks is
honest about dying in the Unites States, from receiving the news from an
exhausted and overworked resident, to the red tape involved in getting
Tony's body released to a funeral home, to having her credit cards and
health insurance cancelled because they were in her husband's name.
Geraldine Brooks' memoir is every bit as good as her fiction writing,
and now I need to reread Horse. I didn't realize that she was only half done writing that book when her husband died, which makes Horse an even more remarkable novel.
Thank you Edelweiss and Viking for providing me with a copy of this book. It will be published on February 4, 2025.
What are you making and reading this week?
