Geraldine Brooks remembers her husband (and fellow Pulitzer Prize winner) in ‘Memorial Days’

I remember a night of inconsolable mourning when I played records way too loud, drank too much and scribbled pages into my tear-splattered journal.

This eruption of anger and sadness came more than two years after my longtime partner died at 32 of AIDS-related illness.

While I don’t recall what sparked the delayed reaction, it allows me to relate to Geraldine Brooks’ illuminating new memoir, which recounts the death of her husband, writer and historian Tony Horwitz. He died on Memorial Day in 2019 at age 60, but Brooks sequestered herself on a remote Australian island to write about him more than three years later.

Even in death, life intervenes. Or a pandemic. Or numbness, deadlines, details, denial.

“I have come to realize that my life since Tony’s death has been one endless, exhausting performance,” writes Brooks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (for “March”) and journalist. “I have cast myself in a role: woman being normal.”

In a powerful, slender book packed with quotable observations, she writes that she has not allowed herself “the wild wideness of an elaborate, florid, demonstrative grief.” It’s a great sentence, but Brooks’ tone is more clear-eyed than wild, more flinty and reportorial than florid, full of heart and sentiment; never gushy.

Being married to a writer as fine as Brooks would ease the sting of anyone’s death.

We live in an era when medicine often extends lives; Brooks’s husband of 35 years died suddenly, crumpling to the street one day while visiting Washington, D.C. near the end of an exhausting tour to promote his latest book. Strangers called for help. He was dead before an ambulance got him to the nearest hospital.

“He’s way too busy living,” Brooks remembers thinking after getting the news by phone at the couple’s home on Martha’s Vineyard. “He cannot possibly be dead.”

Brooks seeks, unconvincingly, to find blame in the aftermath of her loss. She fumes that a brusque phone call from the hospital about Tony’s death was “[t]he first brutality in what I would learn is a brutal, broken system” involving those close to dead people in the U.S., including insurers, doctors and coroners. This reads like overstatement, given that she encounters others who are patient, empathetic, kind.

How could a doctor approve delaying tests that may have saved Tony’s premature death, Brooks wonders? Turns out, the delay was requested by Tony, who didn’t feel he could spare the time for a complete cardiac run-up ahead of a cross-country book tour. How could a fit and athletic man have had heart failure so young? Turns out that he used prescription stimulants, nicotine gum and lots of caffeine to fuel intense work days, and then drank heavily in the evening to unwind. These seem less like systemic markers than symptoms of an overworked, imperfect society.

Chapters alternate between the weeks following Horwitz’ death and 2023, when Brooks travels to remote Flinders Island in her native Australia, where “I can think about him undistracted.” She walks windswept beaches, watches wombats, seabirds and sunsets and writes about her life with Tony.

Their closeness went beyond the usual marriage. They worked as foreign correspondents for the Wall Street Journal and spent years globe-hopping to cover conflict and war from the Balkans to the Middle East, sometimes sharing bylines and awards.

Eventually, they settled down, raising two sons. Brooks became an award-winning fiction writer whose novels also include “Horse” and the superb “Caleb’s Crossing,” about the first Native American to graduate from Harvard. Horwitz won a 1995 Pulitzer for journalism.

“Memorial Days” masterfully reveals Brooks as both reporter and fiction writer, marshaling facts and details while probing the ever-motivating miracles of love and loss.

Claude Peck is a former Star Tribune editor.

Memorial Days

By: Geraldine Brooks.

Publisher: Viking, 207 pages, $28.