Pulitzer winner turns from fiction to ‘very personal project.’ She’s coming to KC
When Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks leaves her native Australia to visit frigid Kansas City on Feb. 6, it will be a trip she’d rather not make.
Not because she will have to abandon her visits to the summer beaches Down Under and her morning ritual of drinking coffee on her balcony while feeding grapes to rainbow lorikeets. Rather, Brooks will come to Kansas City as part of a limited U.S. tour in support of a book she wishes she’d never wrote.
Never had to write, to be more accurate.
“Memorial Days” (to be released Feb. 4) is a memoir about Brooks’ relationship with Tony Horwitz, her husband of 35 years who died suddenly in 2019 at the age of 60. It is a celebration of his life as well as an exploration of grief, healing and coping.
“I needed to write it,” Brooks said recently by telephone from Australia. “That became clear to me.
“As a writer we write. That’s how we learn what we think about things. That’s how we process how we feel about things. And I had this enormously traumatic upheaval in my life, and I hadn’t really come to grips with it. It was three years later, and I finally got the insight that what I needed to do is what I do, which is write about it.”
Brooks won the Pulitzer for Fiction in 2006 for her novel “March,” a retelling of “Little Women” from the father’s perspective. It was the second of her six novels, which followed two nonfiction books drawn from her career as a journalist and foreign correspondent.
The couple had met while Brooks, who has dual U.S.-Australian citizenship, was working on a master’s in journalism at Columbia University. She and Horwitz, who was also a journalist, author and Pulitzer Prize winner (for national reporting in 1995), traveled throughout the world reporting on stories before starting a family and settling down on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
Horwitz’s books include “Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War” (2011) and “Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide” (2019). It was during a book tour for “Spying on the South” that he collapsed while walking in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was declared dead shortly thereafter.
Brooks was midway through writing her most recent novel, “Horse,” when she abruptly needed to focus on the needs of their two sons and on trying to put her life back together.
“I hadn’t had to think about all the things that he handled for 35 years, and suddenly I had a very steep learning curve about how my life actually worked,” she said.
Meanwhile, she found herself unable to write for a year.
“I could not put one word in front of another,” she said. “My brain was just not working in the way it needs to work in order to do creative writing.
“But in the end, I did manage to get back to the desk and finish ‘Horse.’ I felt like I owed it to Tony because he really held my feet to the fire on that book when I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to manage it. And he said, ‘This is a book you have to write.’”
Eventually, Brooks was able to explore her own experiences with life and death as part of writing “Memorial Days.” It involved isolating herself in a cabin on Flinders Island, off the southern coast of Australia.
“I was really writing it for myself,” she said. “Usually, I’m writing very much for the reader, hoping for a connection with readers, looking to put a book in their hands that they’ll find worthwhile. But this one was a very personal project. … It is really what I did instead of going to therapy.”
Brooks still owns the property on Martha’s Vineyard where she and Horwitz lived for most of their marriage and where she keeps her donkey and dog. Their sons, Nathaniel and Bizu, grew up there.
Nathaniel now runs a business in Brooklyn; Bizu, whom the couple adopted from Ethiopia when he was 5 years old, attends college and is doing a semester in Australia this year.
“Now that they’re moving more confidently into adulthood,” she said, “I plan on spending more time here in my country.”
Brooks, who was named an Officer in the Order of Australia in 2016, said she will return there and dive into writing her next book as soon as her U.S. tour for “Memorial Days” ends in late February. Kansas City is one of only eight stops, the first of which will be Feb. 4 in San Francisco.
She’s well aware that she will be entering a Chiefs-crazed environment three days before the team plays in the Super Bowl. In fact, the timing might be fortuitous.
Brooks’ last visit to Kansas City was Oct. 26, 2015, for her novel “The Secret Chord,” and she said the town was “decorated in blue” for the Royals. They played the first game of the World Series the next day, going on to beat the New York Mets in five games.
“Hopefully, I can bring you good luck again this time,” she said.
Geraldine Brooks in KC
When and where: 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 6, at Unity Temple on the Plaza.
What: A Rainy Day Books event featuring Brooks in conversation with Kansas City author and Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle about her memoir, “Memorial Days.”
Cost: $30 for one or two tickets and a book.
More information: rainydaybooks.com
This story was originally published February 2, 2025 at 12:00 AM.
