On May 27, 2019, Geraldine Brooks’s husband of 35 years, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and historian Tony Horwitz, died of a heart attack on a street in Washington, D.C., while on a book tour. The death of Brooks’s best friend and sounding board, with whom she reported news stories around the world in the 1980s and ’90s, left her shell-shocked.
“I pretended to be normal after Tony’s death, and didn’t leave the house without putting on a costume and mask,” Brooks says via Zoom from her apartment at New College in Oxford, England, where she’s spending a few months researching an upcoming novel. “I needed to use writing as my therapy.”
Brooks’s memoir Memorial Days, out in February from Viking, is a love letter to Horwitz and an exploration of grief and healing. For decades, the author has been producing works that tackle life, death, and everything in between with nuance and heart. Her books include two nonfiction titles (Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence) and six novels, including March, a retelling of Little Women from the father’s perspective that won a Pulitzer in 2006. Her works have sold more than five million copies, according to Viking, and have been translated into 35 languages.
Unlike her previous projects, Memorial Days was a book she approached reluctantly. “I needed to write it,” she admits, “more than I wanted to write it.”
In Memorial Days, Brooks, moves back and forth in time, detailing the day she learned her husband—a man who “didn’t function at less than 100%”—had died and the chaotic weeks that followed, which included dealing with insurance and credit card companies while trying to mourn. She takes readers to isolated Flinders Island, in Tasmania, where she stayed in a cabin in 2023; considers the mourning rituals of various cultures (among them, orthodox Jews and Australia’s First Nations peoples) as she wonders why the modern secular world doesn’t allow people time to process loss; and celebrates her bond with Horwitz. “We were always up in each other’s business,” she says, smiling. “Totally entwined.”
Andrea Schulz, VP and editor-in-chief of Viking, calls Brooks a clear-eyed observer of the world. “I instantly felt like it was one of those masterpiece memoirs,” Schulz says of Memorial Days, “that are going to stand as classics.”
Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1955, Brooks—always eager to discover new people and places—wrote to pen pals in Israel, France, and elsewhere as a kid. “My parents lived paycheck to paycheck, but it felt luxurious because it was such a big world imaginatively,” she says. A visit at age eight to the offices of the Sydney Morning Herald, where her father was a proofreader, fueled her passion for journalism. “The smell of the ink in the air—it was sensory overload.”
After earning a bachelor’s degree in government and fine arts from Sydney University in 1979, Brooks took a job at the Sydney Morning Herald, then moved to New York City and, in 1983, got a master’s in journalism from Columbia, where she met Horwitz. The couple married in 1984. From 1983 to 1995, she worked for the Wall Street Journal, with much of that time spent abroad as a foreign correspondent. She opened the first WSJ bureau in Sydney, served as the paper’s Middle East correspondent, and covered goings-on at the United Nations. She and Horwitz lived in Cairo and London in the ’80s and ’90s; traveled to Iran, Saudi Arabia, and beyond; and often reported on stories together.
Brooks moved back to the U.S. in 1992, settled in Virginia with Horwitz, and continued as a foreign correspondent, covering conflicts in Africa and the Balkans. While in Nigeria in 1994 investigating the murky dealings of an oil company, she was thrown in jail for three days and then deported. Upon her return home, she decided it was time to start a family. Her son, Nathaniel, was born in 1996.
The author published her debut novel, Year of Wonders—set in the 17th-century during the Great Plague of London—in 2001, and credits her foreign correspondence work with shaping her as a fiction writer. “It was unbelievably impactful,” Brooks says. “You are constantly dropping into people’s lives, into their worst moments, seeing the best and worst of humanity. I wouldn’t be able to write my books without those experiences.”
In 2004, Brooks was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had surgery to remove a lump and underwent radiation treatment and chemotherapy. In 2008, with her health scare in the rearview, she and Horwitz expanded their family and adopted a son, Bizu, from Ethiopia, when he was five years old. “You go through something like cancer and it puts everything in perspective,” Brooks says. “You really start to appreciate your life.”
Kris Dahl, Brooks’s agent, has represented the author since Year of Wonders and has seen her handle life’s biggest challenges head-on. “Geraldine is curious and passionate and a little otherworldly,” Dahl says. “She has these brilliant blue eyes and a big smile and wonderful laugh. She’s completely engaged with life and throws herself out there, and that takes enormous courage—to march into the unknown.”
With Memorial Days, Brooks says, she was able to take control of her experience of loss by writing about it, which helped her endure and restored her spirit. Ultimately, the death of Horwitz has brought about an awakening in Brooks. “Life is gone between one breath and another,” she says. “Whatever small part of me used to be a lazy person, that person is gone. I’m just going harder at life in general. And part of it is filling that enormous gap that Tony not being here has left.”
After Brooks wraps up her research at Oxford, she’ll return to her place on Martha’s Vineyard, where she keeps a horse and a mischievous donkey with a talent for breaking out of enclosures. “When I’m home, I could spend time in the garden and with the horse and donkey, and I do those things, but I don’t want that to be my whole life,” she says. “I want to keep pushing and creating. There’s no time to waste. Work is what’s saving me.”
Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.
