Memorial Days. Geraldine Brooks. 2025. 207 Pages. (Hardcover.).

Best known as the Australian/American author of Horse, the author and her late husband, Tony Horwitz, travelled the globe as reporters and writers of several non-fiction books. Tony was a hard-working, risk-taking Type A personality who dropped dead at age sixty. Much of the book is about the author’s deep grief and about the various rituals surrounding grief, and about sudden death generally.

She is hardly alone in finding herself incompetent in dealing with such tasks as directing investments, taxes, probate of the will, navigating the dysfunctional American health care system and other accounts after the sudden death of a spouse. I don’t know what makes writers feel that they must write a whole book about their experiences with such a common occurrence as sudden death even if such a death is very often the focal point of their fictions. It seems to me to be at least partly a self-promotional device and a means of advertising the various books they have written. It does not instantly qualify them as expert grief councillors. Much of the book reads like a poor-me whine of self pity with a little in the way of common sense advice in dealing with grief.

Two obvious errors. The left anterior descending coronary artery is certainly not the body’s biggest artery, nor is it known as the widow-maker. That label belongs to the left main coronary artery. And there is something really bizarre about the Transplant Team’s call asking for consent for organ donation long after he died, and his heart had stopped.w

I greatly enjoyed reading this author’s Horse, and to a lesser extent, Nine Parts of Desire, but I was very disappointed in this book.

I hope to die suddenly, but only when I have lived long enough that no one will be upset at my funeral. The difficulty is to detect when that point in time has arrived- it may have already passed.

2.5/5

Thanks, The Economist and Goodreads.