How to create space for grief in a society that expects individuals to be available 24/7, to be endlessly on and energetic, to be in a constant state of “productivity,” whatever that may mean? For writers like Geraldine Brooks and her late husband Tony Horwitz, it means getting the words on the page, whatever else may be going on in the world. The pair met at Columbia Journalism School in the 1980s. Brooks, an Australian native born to an American father and Australian mother, was at Columbia on scholarship after working at The Sydney Morning Herald. Horwitz and Brooks were married for thirty-five years. Once they moved to Martha’s Vineyard to write books full-time, after careers as foreign correspondents, they shared both a home and a profession, as well as the work of raising two sons.
Brooks’s recent memoir is Memorial Days (Viking, 2025), named both for the day in May when Horwitz died suddenly in 2019 and the problem of how to memorialize. Horwitz collapsed while on a book tour in Washington, D.C., and Brooks was informed of his demise by an exhausted emergency room doctor at the end of her shift.
Brooks is the author of a previous memoir about her childhood pen pals from all over the world, a nonfiction book about women in the Middle East, and six novels, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning March and the pandemic-anticipating bubonic plague novel The Year of Wonder. In this new memoir, she writes, “I cannot change that story. I can only change myself.” Following is a conversation, edited for clarity and brevity, conducted by Google Meet on April 10 while Brooks was visiting California from her new home in Australia, where she splits time with her Martha’s Vineyard abode. The conversation ranged from which letter from a reader meant the most to her, to hearing other people’s voices, to the country with the highest percentage of vegans, to her suggestions for those who are grieving.
Beth Kissileff: What I was struck by in your book is the differentiation between community ritual and your own personal ritual, and how you used nature so beautifully to help you heal and create your own personal rituals. And I am really interested in that dichotomy between communal mourning and personal mourning, because both are important, particularly from the Jewish perspective.
Geraldine Brooks: The book is a little bit of a lament for the fact that we’re not protected in the way that traditional societies protect people when they are grieving. If I belonged to an Orthodox community, I would have had a very straight road map that I would have followed…. I think the psychological genius of some of the community rituals—they made a lot more sense to me having gone through a bit more grief than they did before. I had known about shiva, I had not known about that first phase, the first twenty-four hours …
BK: Aninut [the period between death and burial, when mourners are not obligated to observe any time-bound commandments].
GB: Yes, aninut made so much sense to me, because that is the time when you’re just not in your right mind at all, and the idea that you don’t even try and console the grieving person because they’re not able and don’t need to be consoled. And to compare that with what happens in modern life to people, where everything is coming at you, and at that moment when you’re not fit to do anything, you have to do so many things, and you have to make so many decisions…. You are almost set up to make the wrong ones. And the idea of that protective embrace that follows, where your only business for the following days is to sit and just be consoled and looked after—I just think there is a psychological genius to it, and we’ve lost all that.
I love my secular life. I would not give my secular life up. But I think it is worth looking at what we have in our traditions, and what other people have in their traditions, and seeing what we can take from it that can help us, because I needed help and I didn’t get it. And part of it is on me, that I didn’t look for it, and I didn’t look for it in a timely way.
BK: Did you ask your rabbi for advice, or were you just busy making decisions?
GB: My rabbi [Rabbi Caryn Broitman of the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center] is so fantastic, and I turn to her all the time. I love our services, because they are intellectually very chewy and it’s very much to me, what I get out of it; it’s about textual analysis, because she takes the parsha and she just squeezes the juice out of it. We hold it up to the light about modern experience, and she’s fantastic. I went on a great many beach walks with my rabbi, and we talked about any number of things. But in terms of, “nobody’s going to be there to help you with your credit card company”—religion is not going to help you fight the insurance companies.
BK: That was just terrible that your health insurance was cancelled [after your husband’s death].
GB: Without us even knowing. My younger son was a high-level lacrosse player, and he had to get to all the lacrosse showcases that Tony was going to take him to, and he could have been smashed up in one of those. We were just very lucky.
BK: Doesn’t he have insurance through his school?
GB: Not for that match, no, only when you are playing for the school. You know that crazy youth-sport thing.
I love my secular life…. But I think it is worth looking at what we have in our traditions, and what other people have in their traditions, and seeing what we can take from it that can help us, because I needed help and I didn’t get it. And part of it is on me, that I didn’t look for it, and I didn’t look for it in a timely way.
BK: I was horrified by that loss of insurance coverage. I am so sorry that all of that happened. There was help that could have been available, and you weren’t able to access it. So is the role of your book to educate other people about what possible rituals from different communities are?
GB: Honestly, I wrote this book for me. I’m sorry, readers, I wasn’t thinking about you. When I’m writing a novel, it’s always my pleasure to think about readers, but in this case this book was what I finally did to sort of reorganize my mind from what I was pretending to be to what I needed to be. So it was my therapy. But as it turned out, the book’s been out for a couple of months now, and it’s just been amazing. Beth, I’ve just had so many letters and emails from people who are relating to this book and who tell me that they’ve found it so helpful to them, and that’s just an incredible bit of grace that I wasn’t expecting.
So I think telling your story is very important, however you do it. I did it in writing, because I am a writer, but you just might need to tell it to a friend, tell it to a therapist, to put it on the outside of you so you can look at it objectively.
BK: I’m wondering if you could comment about nature as religion. Obviously you are a very committed and connected Jew, but there’s also this pull for you to something else, and I think it does connect to Judaism in a lot of ways. You talk about the ocean as a mikveh.
GB: The whole creation story to me, I think we’ve read it wrong. Because, actually, if you read it, it is making us custodians of this incredible biodiversity, and we are supposed to be looking after it.
BK: It says “l’ovdah uli’shomrah,” to work and to guard so absolutely.
GB: It also actually says that the plants are our food. It doesn’t say anything about eating animals. There’s a great deal of eco-theology. I think we haven’t paid enough attention to it.
BK: Sounds like you are.
GB: I love telling everybody my fun fact, which is, “What country has the highest percentage per capita of vegans?”
BK: Israel.
GB: Yeah. You go there and you can get these brilliant vegan meals that you don’t see anywhere else. I love that the IDF not only has vegan rations but they have non-wool berets for their special forces.
BK: Really?
GB: Non-wool berets and non-leather boots.
BK: Contradictions, contradictions.
GB: Accept complexity, that is what I always tell everybody.
BK: One thing I took personally from your book—my husband has a lot of different medical issues, and my mother is always telling me I have to go to appointments with him, and I have to know what medicines he is taking, and I always feel like, “Well, I don’t need to be so involved.” And after reading your book I said, “Okay.”
GB: That’s probably the letter that’s meant the most to me—the woman who wrote that because of the book, she sent her husband to the cardiologist. He’d never been to one. He didn’t get to leave the doctor’s surgery—they admitted him from there, and if he had not gone he would almost certainly be dead, because his anterior descending artery was almost completely occluded. So what a gift to learn that you might have been responsible for someone not going through this.
The whole creation story to me, I think we’ve read it wrong. Because, actually, if you read it, it is making us custodians of this incredible biodiversity, and we are supposed to be looking after it.
BK: What changes would you like to see? I know there are so many but just a few. In our system of grieving and of helping new widows, that is.
GB: And widowers. I think men have a really hard time of it, because women generally are better at reaching out. I had a great friend, a man who just recently died, who lost his wife—I actually mention him in the book—he set up the National Widowers Organization non-profit, because he felt there was nowhere for men to go with their grief.
The hospital, to their credit, reached out to me…. They said, “What do you recommend?,” and I said, “Well, two things. If possible, I think in a situation like that [informing someone far away from the hospital about the death of a loved one], you should call the local first responders. The cops know how to deal with this….
They deal with traumatic situations all the time. And in a small community like mine, they know me personally—they are the coaches on my kids’ sports teams. They would have known who to bring.
BK: They would know to call your rabbi or …
GB: My rabbi or my neighbor or something. It would have been a lot better.
BK: I think it makes a lot more sense to have a person come to the door to give you life-changing news than to have a stressed resident who is just trying to get home after her thirty-six hour shift.
GB: Exactly. And also somebody who is specifically trained. Got a few clues. So there is that. And then on a personal level, like I said in the book, it would be very helpful to have a document, “Your life, this is how it works” kind of thing. Somebody who wrote to me said, “We had that in our house, but it’s vulgar: ‘I’m dead, you’re fucked, here’s what you have to do.’”
I do think it would be the thing that surprised him the most, if he were to suddenly come back, he’d say, “You managed to file your taxes without getting an extension or not getting audited.”
BK: So you have written a memoir, but my question is how these different kinds of writing—telling other people’s stories in journalism, telling fictional people’s stories in fiction, and telling your own story—how that puts things together?
GB: What I love about what I do in journalism and in fiction is trying to hear the voices of the unheard. As a journalist in the Middle East, I went looking for the women, because nobody was talking to the women. And in fiction I am always looking for the voices where the historical record is silent because people didn’t get a chance to tell their story. So I am looking for those places where there is a gap in the record and only imaginative empathy can fill it. So the memoir … I wasn’t even sure that what I was writing on Flinders [Island in Australia] would be a book. It was an open question to me. But because I am a writer and I like to eat … I kind of thought I would publish it. But that’s not what I thought I was writing it for.
BK: Do you have any rituals that you recommend or something that you would want to say to someone grieving, that they should pay attention to?
GB: I think telling your story is the main thing. Find the way that’s right for you. I think that that’s the most helpful. I didn’t realize that what I was doing is actually therapeutically recommended. If you have a traumatic situation in your life, go back and remember it in as much detail as you can. And then return to it and remember it more. I guess that’s the treatment for PTSD. I didn’t realize that, but that is what I was basically instinctively doing.
BK: I’ve been writing an essay about Exodus 17:14—“write it down and then blot it out”—so I’m intrigued by what you are saying.
GB: “Write it down to cross it out.” Which is exactly what I was doing, in a way. Cross it out and stop perseverating on it all.
BK: Can your experience be generalized for others?
GB: That’s one of the things I want to underline. I was in a position of great privilege. This happens to all of us, it’s coming for all of us, not everybody has the luxury of being able to take themselves out of life. If you’ve lost a breadwinner, and you’re working two jobs to put food on the table for your kids, you’re not going to be able to go to Flinders Island for an indefinite stay, you know. So I want to say that I understand that a) people have bigger tragedies, and b) not everybody has the luxury of being able to do that. Everybody can talk about it though. Everybody can tell their story to somebody.