Geraldine Brooks on her memoir Memorial Days and travelling to Flinders Island to do 'the work of grief'

Australia Broadcast Center

07-06-2025

In 2019, Geraldine Brooks was sitting at her desk at home in Martha's Vineyard, working on her sixth novel, Horse, when the phone rang.
On the line was a doctor from a hospital in Washington DC, calling to say her husband, journalist and author Tony Horwitz, had collapsed in the street.
"I'm expecting her to say, 'And now he is in surgery,' or, 'We're keeping him for observation,'" Brooks tells ABC TV's Compass.
"And instead, she says, 'He's dead.' Just like that."
Horwitz — a Pulitzer Prize-winner, like his wife — was midway through a busy tour promoting his latest book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide.
Brooks couldn't understand how a man so fit and full of vitality had died so suddenly. "I just couldn't assimilate it."
She wanted to howl in pain but feared that if she lost control, she might never regain it.
In her new memoir, Memorial Days, she describes how, from that day on, she put on an "endless, exhausting performance" to give the impression she was fine.
Eventually, however, Brooks realised she couldn't go on pretending.
"I felt like this love had not been acknowledged by the capacious grief that it deserved. That's when I thought of Flinders Island," she says.
In 2023, Brooks travelled to the remote Tasmanian island to confront her feelings, a cathartic experience she recounts in Memorial Days.
And now, two years later, she returns to Flinders Island with ABC TV's Compass to discuss the important work of grief.
Now one of Australia's most celebrated authors, Brooks began her journalism career at the Sydney Morning Herald.
After covering the Franklin Dam controversy in the early 80s, she got a scholarship to Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, where she met a fellow journalist by the name of Tony Horwitz.
"I was initially attracted to him because he was such an idealist. He had this high moral seriousness and a great sense of humour," Brooks recalls.
The couple married in France in 1984 and moved to Sydney for a brief stint, before life again took a different direction.
"Out of the blue, the Wall Street Journal called and said, 'Would I like to become the Middle East correspondent?'"
The answer was yes, and an adrenaline-filled decade followed, reporting on geopolitical crises throughout the region.
As foreign correspondents, Brooks and Horwitz often shared joint bylines, earning the tag 'Hobro' in the Wall Street Journal newsroom.
"We were always getting calls in the middle of the night [to cover a story] … We lived with a duffel bag packed with crazy things; I had a chador and a bulletproof vest.
"We often worked on different sides of the same story — [if] he was in Iraq, I would be in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War and vice versa."
Brooks eventually gave up journalism to write fiction, publishing the bestselling plague novel, Year of Wonders, in 2001 and winning a Pulitzer in 2006 for her US Civil War novel, March.
She and Horwitz remained in the US, raising their two sons, Nathaniel and Bizu, in an 18th-century mill house on Martha's Vineyard, an island off the New England coast.
"Their relationship is probably one of the all-time love stories," Bizu says.
"More than anything, [he] revered and respected and loved how smart, intelligent and passionate she was about everything."
Brooks first visited Flinders Island with Horwitz in 2000 to research a novel.
Together they'd toured the island, marvelling at its natural beauty. They were confronted by its dark history too. At Wybalenna, they viewed the unmarked graves of Aboriginal people who died on the island after being forcibly removed from Tasmania in the 1800s.
Brooks ended up abandoning the project, but she was taken with the island and toyed with the idea of one day buying a block there.
When she returned in 2023, it was in very different circumstances.
"For three years after his death, I'd been pretending to be normal. And I wasn't normal. I wasn't right … I wasn't myself," she says.
"You're supposed to work through denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance, and I'd vaulted all the intermediate steps and pretended that I'd arrived at acceptance. You can't do that.
"I needed to go back and work my way through those steps."
For Brooks, Flinders Island offered "time and space … to do the business of mourning".
"Grief counselling would've been one way," she acknowledges. "But I thought, 'Well, what do writers do? Writers write.'"
She rented a shack overlooking a goblet-shaped bay, gazing out at the granite outcrop known as Mount Killiecrankie.
There, alone and without distraction, Brooks returned to the worst day of her life to work through her grief.
"I would get up in the morning and … do the work, write my thoughts, and then when I realised that I had a cramp and hadn't moved in hours, I'd go for a walk."
She found solace in the rocky, windswept landscape.
"I fell in love with granite," she says. "The rocks on Flinders Island are in these sculptural shapes. They're great works of art, monumental sculptures that completely moved me in the way art moves you."
She also found another kind of comfort in her solitude.
"I realised I wasn't alone. I was with Tony. I was able to be with him night and day. And it was wonderful."
Brooks fell into a routine on the island, ending each day with a swim in the ocean.
"At first it was just a swim. But as I got deeper and deeper into the work, I realised that there was something almost ceremonial about it," she says.
"It became this gift to myself to be fully immersed and completely alone in my skin, in the water, like some kind of aquatic creature. And it felt cleansing and healing."
Brooks felt a connection between her daily swim and the mikvah, a purifying bathing ritual that had formed part of her conversion to Judaism when she married Horwitz three decades earlier.
Horwitz's Judaism was cultural rather than religious or spiritual.
"If he had died and I was an Orthodox Jew, there would've been a very set road map to travel, a pathway into and out of grief," Brooks says.
"There are strict rules. The first one, I think, is incredibly insightful: in the first hours after somebody experiences a loss like this, you don't even offer them condolences. They're in a state of 'stupefying grief' is how it's put. All you do is help them.
"It's only after the burial that the grieving and condolences start."
Known as Shiva, this formal mourning period lasts for seven days.
"You sit and let people come and talk about the deceased. You don't bathe, you cover the mirrors, you're taken out of time," Brooks says.
In her travels, Brooks has observed similar mourning rituals in other cultures, but found these customs largely absent from Western society.
"I had no idea what a brutal, broken system it is when somebody dies suddenly far from home among strangers," she says.
"I wasn't allowed to see his body. I got to Washington thinking that I could be with him and hold his hand and say goodbye. And I get to the hospital, and it's not allowed. They just show you a photograph and it's horrible. It wasn't until days later when he was finally released to the funeral home that I was finally able to see him."
Alone on Flinders Island, Brooks found herself instinctively adopting the practices of Shiva.
"I realised, I'd been swimming every day, but I hadn't had a shower, and there was no mirror in the shack," she says.
"I was making it up as I went along but finding my own way to some of these things that have been enshrined for millennia in old religious practices."
During her stay on Flinders Island, revisiting that terrible day in her mind, Brooks felt the howl of grief return.
"I felt it coming back and I let it come," she says.
"And after that, I realised that the time had done what it needed to do, and I was ready to go home."
Brooks will never stop grieving for Horwitz, but she's found a kind of peace.
"What I have been able to do … [is] set down that life I'd expected to have — growing old with him — and just accept that that life is gone. I ain't getting that back. I have to make the most of the life that I do have."
Writing Memorial Days was instrumental to this process.
"When you're in grief, the best thing you can do is tell your story … It wasn't until I wrote my story that I was able to feel like a normal human being again," she says.
Watch Geraldine Brooks. Grief, A Love Story on Compass on Sunday night at 6:30pm on ABC TV, or stream now on iview.