Will surely join the other classics delivered to new widows by their literary friends. In significant ways, it’s more useful and inspiring than some of the others.
Intensely intimate and candid ... Brooks frames her book in two separate narratives; each amplifies the potency of the other ... Brooks captures the striking coincidences that marked his death with a poignancy tempered by her keen ability as a storyteller ... Unlike others, this memoir, delicately written but without any precious patter, frames itself as a book of days. Overwrought metaphors aside, grief is less of an ocean and more of a series of days ... A book that is meant to be read slowly.
Brooks is careful to calibrate her grief against larger-scale disasters ... The opposite of padded. If anything, it’s a little overlean and eked-out, 200-odd pages aired by paragraph breaks. Brooks seems brittle still, but writing is her way through, and now her solo livelihood.
...with this slim volume, Brooks makes that subgenre of memoir her own, wielding precise and often beautiful language and, in the most graceful way possible, pointing a way forward. A rich account of marriage and mourning, too literary to be considered a self-help book, Memorial Days nonetheless contains much compassionate advice for those who have, or will, suffer the same ferocious blow.
Masterfully reveals Brooks as both reporter and fiction writer, marshaling facts and details while probing the ever-motivating miracles of love and loss.
I found it almost impossible to read these chapters without experiencing a welling of my own emotions as Brooks recounts her shock and sudden disorientation at being in a world without her partner ... The marriage of Brooks and Horwitz is both amazing and ordinary, as perhaps most marriages are. It is terrible that it was cut so short, but Memorial Days gives due justice to what it means to live and love and experience loss.
A spectacular ode to grieving and an elegant homage to marriage ... Brooks enchants with her descriptions of Australia, the fragrant forests filled with blooming ti trees, swooping green rosellas, and the bracing scent of eucalyptus. There, she wrestled with the will to survive. After several weeks alone, she managed to vanquish the beast and emerged to write Memorial Days — a masterpiece.
...she vividly evokes a place she comes to consider almost sacred, with its massive, vertical cliffs and wide, white sand beaches surrounded by stunning flora and curious creatures. Her descriptions of her environment and her daily ventures into nature are some of the book’s most compelling passages ... However, Brooks’ journalistic expertise plays a part as well. In one fascinating chapter, she reflects on the variety of ways different cultures experience and express grief, the rituals and observances that allow people to sit with their sorrow.
Reflecting on mourning rituals in various traditions, while chronicling the dramatic, lonesome, and restorative beauty and spirit of the island, Brooks, with arresting precision, sensitivity, and candor, takes deep soundings of her grief and evolving perceptions and feelings in a generous and resonant remembrance.
The author eschews self-pity and sentimentality in favor of straightforward self-examination and illuminating remembrance. In lucent prose, she maintains a tone both elegiac and confiding, which calls to mind Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking ... In mourning her husband and memorializing their life together, Brooks has offered readers a deeply affecting book, at once personal and expansive.
