Writers and Friends

I took my time reading Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman. I heard a review on National Public Radio and thought it might be a book worth spending time with but I recently went through a difficult grief journey of my own and it made me cautious about diving into Mr. Goldman's story. I bought the book and read the first few pages then set it aside for a couple months. Once I picked it up again, I didn't push through to the end like I often do with novels. I read five or six pages at a time. It was a heavy, dark, and very sad book.

It's been eighteen months since my dad died and I'm finally beginning to feel more like my old self. As I closed in on the final pages of "Say Her Name", I found one paragraph that felt particularly familiar to me. The author talks about falling on some stairs and his absolute need to stand and recover from that fall without assistance from those who witnessed the fall.

"One of the most common tropes and complaints in the grief books I've read is about the loneliness of the griever, because people and society seem unable, for the various reasons always listed in those books, to accommodate such pain. But what could anybody possibly do or say to help?...You have to, can only, live this on your own."

Goldman bared his emotions: the guilt, the sorrow, the misgivings, the anger. Mostly the guilt. He also did it while telling a beautiful love story and he managed to pay tribute to his wife who was also coming into her own as a writer at the time of her death.

It's a well-written book and I was only minimally surprised when I clicked on the author's Facebook page and saw on his list of friends, Junot Diaz - one of my favorites. Diaz wrote The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a first novel which happened to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Loved it!

I have plenty of wonderful authors on my Facebook Friends list. Today I received a package in the mail. War Remains is by my friend, Jeffrey Miller. I'm anxious to get started on it. Review will be here. Soon. Promise.