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The Widow Memoir

 There are things I dislike in Geraldine Brooks's work. The titles are often bland. "March," "Foreign Correspondence," "Horse." There is little or no evidence of a sense of humor. And there is a distressing fondness for cliche; the new memoir opens with a catastrophic 3 AM phone call and ends with a "primal scream." (This is how an undergraduate would structure a "sad memories" essay for a writing seminar.)


Brooks's dead husband, Tony Hurwtiz, seems sort of obnoxious. In life, he swore off butter and dessert. (Good grief.) He seemed to mock everyone around him, to the extent that a guitarist discussed this trait at his (Hurwitz's) funeral. When Hurwitz read Joan Didion's memoir for an awards adjudication job, it seems he could note only the memoir's "padded" quality and its interest in name-dropping. There isn't more to say about that book?

Brooks never writes, "It might seem like my husband was sort of obnoxious in his living years." The omission of this sentence turns Brooks into a somewhat unreliable narrator.

Here is another thing that bugged me. At the end of the book, Brooks shares advice for widows. "Always make others feel comfortable if they want to discuss your loss. Leave the radio on so its sound fills the house when you get back from your errands." She says she received a third bit of advice from a friend, but she can't remember it, so it's lost forever. Pardon? It's 2025. She couldn't call the friend and ask? Or--in a lazy mood--she couldn't say, "I have just *two* pieces of advice"--? I find this irritating.

All that said, I like reading about people entangled in a bureaucratic mess. Sometimes, the world makes you think you're the one and only person who deals with insurance or municipal silliness or careless doctors. But even someone as fancy as Geraldine Brooks has these issues--and she also has a formidable memory. Her sharp-tongued discussions of incivility are the highlights of her new book.

So: a mixed bag. But it's worth reading.

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