Zibby Media Presents: Geraldine Brooks
Even as she soared professionally, Brooks reveled in an extraordinary marriage, a true partnership with Pulitzer Prize–winning author and journalist Tony Horwitz, whom she had met in graduate school. When Geraldine turned from foreign correspondence to novels, the couple bought a house on Martha’s Vineyard and drifted into middle age, writing during the day and cooking family dinners or watching the sunset with friends in the evening.
Then, on Memorial Day 2019, it all came crashing down.
Horwitz, a seemingly fit 60-year-old, collapsed while walking in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and died. Caught up in the red tape and bureaucratic demands of death, Geraldine found no space to grieve.
Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of her native Australia in the hope of finding it there. Holed up in a shack, often seeing no other human being for days, she pondered how other cultures facilitate grieving and the rituals she might devise to rebuild a life around the void left by Tony’s death.
Ultimately, she turned to the ritual she had long used to make sense of the world: writing. Her stunning new memoir, Memorial Days, is the result, an intimate and compelling portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love.
Geraldine Brooks joins us to discuss the geography of grief, the shattered landscape it creates and the complexities of navigating it; in conversation with Zibby Owens, author, podcaster, bookstore owner and CEO of Zibby Media.
An optional lunch with the author to follow.