Peter Godwin’s mother is dying. Born in England, and having spent most of her adult life as a doctor in Zimbabwe, she now lies on a hospital bed in the partitioned living room of his sister’s London home. Peter has spent his life missing his Zimbabwean childhood, a longing that does not diminish as he reflects on his time as a journalist on the frontlines of combat around the world, or life in New York with his English wife and transatlantic children. In his mother’s final months, he must come to terms with everything his family was and wasn’t: the secrets they kept from one another, the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them, and the beauty of the wildly different places they called home.
Godwin operates, a rootless Conradian exile of former empire, from a place of loss ... An attempt at bridging the difference between self-consciousness and self-awareness, it’s a search-and-not-destroy mission to dissolve entrenched inhibitions, moral ambiguities, and the numbness of survivor’s guilt.
Godwin describes the grief and horror, followed by long-term PTSD and melancholy, of [his life] very beautifully ... He is excellent at bringing in literary allusions to capture the gossamer quality of memory, skipping lightly but illuminatingly from Dorothy Parker to Emily Dickinson and from Philip Larkin to Vladimir Nabokov ...
Godwin takes palpable pleasure in language, and sometimes this produces poetry, but it can slip into pretension ... Exit Wounds is an elegant, cerebral book, but it is also proof that — unless you’re as funny as Nora Ephron — it’s pretty much impossible to write about your divorce without coming across as bitter.
This is an exceptional memoir, its stories told with such immediacy that the reader lives Godwin’s days with him, constantly on the lookout for the absurdities and anomalies that entertain him, always mindful of partings and wanderings in “hostile environments” ... Godwin chronicles the excruciating steps of marital break-up with carefully judged poignancy. Keeping misery at bay, eschewing sentimentality and self-pity, he fills his book with fluent and erudite asides on anthropology, literature, biology and history ... Few people have described better the anguish of separation, the constant sense of not belonging, the quest for a centre that might hold. He writes humorously; but there is no mistaking the pain.
