Grieving the End of a Literary Couple’s Globetrotting Life

MEMORIAL DAYS: A Memoir, by Geraldine Brooks

Behind every good book lurks another, smaller book: a sidecar, an appendage, a mental dividend. Most never get written, let alone published. But here is Geraldine Brooks’s “Memorial Days,” a modulated howl into the void that shows her best-selling 2022 novel, “Horse,” should have been awarded a special citation for compartmentalization.

For 35 years Brooks was married to Tony Horwitz, the itinerant reporter and author of immersive nonfiction like “Confederates in the Attic.” Both had Pulitzer Prizes, and after various adventures in foreign correspondence — necessitating go bags packed with “shortwave radios, field dressings, bricks of cash for countries that didn’t take cards, my chador, a bulletproof vest” — they’d settled into a beautifully ramshackle house in paradise, a.k.a. Martha’s Vineyard.

Horwitz had just bought two linen shirts before a tour to promote his 2019 book, “Spying on the South,” when he collapsed on a Washington, D.C., sidewalk, prompting women to rush out of a yoga studio with a defibrillator. He was pronounced dead at 60, of what proved to be a “myocarditis event,” at the same hospital where he’d been born.

“Spying on the South,” too, would become a best seller. “His death,” Brooks notes dryly, “was a news peg.”

“Memorial Days” is an account of her processing this loss, to use the bloodless modern verbiage, along with processing all the paperwork and bureaucratic glitches that cruelly accompany such a loss. Without Horwitz, Brooks’s credit limits shrink. Her health insurance is canceled. Retrieving a missed message about organ donation, she imagines her husband’s wasted corneas “a sizzle of moisture, evaporated in a split second in the crematorium.”

The narrative oscillates between West Tisbury, on the Vineyard, and Flinders Island in Australia, Brooks’s native country, where she decides to retreat for bouts of isolated grieving.