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Say Her Name: A Novel

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Say Her Name: A Novel by Francisco Goldman is so much more than another book about grief. It is a literary monument erected by a man whose life was utterly blown apart when death wrenched his beloved from his heart. The man is Francisco Goldman and this book is his monument to Aura, his soul mate and the light of his life, a light which was forever extinguished in this world on July 25, 2007.

Usually when I finish a book I can promptly gather up my thoughts about it and quickly translate them into a book review, but this was not the case this time. This deceptive novel snuck up on me, enveloping me slowly in gradually mounting emotion until at the height of pain's crescendo, the story took me prisoner and battered me breathless, leaving me gasping, sobbing and weeping ~ for Aura, for Francisco and for myself. I had to put the book away until I could find my composure, process my own emotions, and think objectively rather than empathetically about this brilliant work of literary art.

The anniversary of my husband's unexpected death by a massive heart attack is quickly approaching. It is extraordinary that lately I have come across so many fine works of literature with which I can identify and find solace. It has been 18 years since I awoke from an afternoon nap, walked into the living room expecting to go to my husband and as usual cover his warm, fuzzy face in my adoring kisses, only to find him face down on the floor. When I turned him over, there was no mistaking that he was gone. It was the worst moment of my life. I will never forget those lifeless blue eyes that only an hour earlier had looked so lovingly into mine.

These books of grief therefore have become vital to me. Some say I should have gotten over my loss by now. Do we ever? Is it possible to overcome such grief? Can we ever forget? I do not think so nor do I want to. If I cannot have my husband, I want this pain of longing for him. It keeps him alive in my heart and I believe that is what Francisco Goldman is doing with Say Her Name: A Novel.

I bless Francisco Goldman for this beautiful, moving tribute to his Aura. It touched me so deeply that it hurts to even think of it. I praise him for being able to put into words his tremendous love for Aura. He says on page 166 that "Love is religion. You can only believe it when you experienced it." I understand that intimately and I find it so fitting that he built his altar for Aura ~ not only the physical altar built in the sanctuary of their bedroom, with the perfect symbol of their marriage and their love for each other - her wedding dress ~ but also this very book, an altar built in the sanctuary of his heart, with memory upon memory and even intimate pieces of Aura's very own thoughts. It is a book about a love and a marriage, a life and a death, of loss and grief, of remembering and healing.

Goldman of course is a writer but so was Aura. Aura was a brilliant academician who was working on her PhD in Literature at the time of her death. She was also a gifted writer, as dedicated to her art as she was to her husband. Theirs was a life of great books and great authors, of libraries and bookstores, of reading and writing ~ with a zeal and passion that matched their devotion to each other. With such a shared love for books, how appropriate that Goldman would write this literary tribute to Aura Estrada ~ that this book is another altar for his Aura.

Goldman has built into novelistic form the life of Aura Estrada. The structure is interesting and deceptive in simplicity. Goldman uses entries from Aura's childhood diaries and stories she told him to reconstruct her early life. We are given an open window into a childhood that shaped a young girl's life into the remarkable woman should would become. We come to understand the major influences in her life, particularly her bonding with her mother and her separation from her father. I have to admit that I sometimes found this section a bit slow and sometimes even boring. This is exactly where the reader is deceived for while we think the plotting is tedious or dull, Goldman is really establishing a solid foundation which can support the weight of the rest of Aura's story. By the time we reach say Chapter 15, we know Aura so intimately that she comes alive for us. She has so much joy and so passion for life that we feel her ebullience. The strength and the power of her story peaks at the event of her death and is told with such exquisitely palpable detail ~ we feel everything: the panic, the fear, the pain, the trauma, the shock. Even though we know from page one that her death is imminent, we still pray for her life just as Francisco prays for her life, and when she slips away, fighting until the very end because she does not want to die, our guts are wrenched just as Francisco`s guts were wrenched. Francisco's loss is our loss, his grief is our grief, and his wounds are our wounds.

For those who love prose, this book will sing for you. For those who have ever been bereaved, this novel will resonate for you. There is so much that Goldman exposes and illuminates through the brilliance of his prose, one cannot help but identify with him in his grief. I do not believe that we ever overcome our grief. All we can do, all we must do, is to keep ourselves busy. Goldman kept himself busy by studying everything his Aura ever wrote, every story she ever told, and distilling it down to its exquisite essence. His offering to her is this literary monument ~ Say Her Name: A Novel.

Grief is, by and large, a private and intimate thing. We utter a few platitudes and then turn away in discomfort from who are laid bare by their grief. And emotionally, we begin to withdraw.

Francisco Goldman shatters those boundaries in his devastating book Say Her Name, forcing the reader to pay witness to the exquisite and blinding pain of a nearly unbearable loss. He positions the reader as a voyeur in a most intimate sadness, revealing the most basic nuances and details and the most complex ramifications of the loss of someone dear.

And in the process, he captures our attention, rather like Samuel Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, until the reader is literally as fascinated and transfixed with Aura Estrada - Francisco Goldman's young and doomed wife - as he himself is. It is a masterful achievement, hard to read, hard to pull oneself away from.

The barebones of his story are these: Francisco Goldman married a much younger would-be writer named Aura, who gives every indication of literary greatness. They revel in their marriage for two short years, but right before their second anniversary, Aura breaks her neck while body surfing and dies the next day. Francisco is raw with grief, which is exacerbated by Aura's passionately devoted and controlling mother Juanita, who blames him for the tragedy.

Brick by brick, Francisco builds a literary altar to the vibrant and exuberant woman he married. And at the same time, he lays naked his own grief at her loss: "Little did I suspect...that I would ever learn what it was like to feel swallowed up by my own sobbing, grief sucking me like marrow from a bone." And later: "Every day a ghostly train. Every day the ruin of the day that was supposed to have been. Every second on the clock clicking forward, anything I do or see or think, all of it made of ashes and charred shards, the ruins of the future."

Hungry to keep Aura alive, Francisco takes us back to Aura's past, to her complex relationship with her overbearing mother and her yearning for the father who left when she was only four years old (setting her on a course to look for a father replacement). He showcases various writings that Aura created in her advanced studies at Columbia and under the tutelage of two famous authors (revealed in bios to be Peter Carey and Colum McCann) for her MFA program. He paints a word picture of Aura as a young girl, a daughter, a wife, and a writer on the cusp of potential greatness.

And in order to keep himself sane, he channels his grief into his art, documenting their time together and Aura's extraordinary life: "This is why we need beauty to illuminate even what has most broken...Not to help us transcend or transform it into something, but first and foremost to help us see it."

At its core, Say Her Name is not "another grief book" but a love story, a tribute to Aura, a universal narrative of what happens when one loved one survives another. It is, I suspect, a novel that Francisco Goldman did not choose to write, but had to write. It is a wrenching and eloquent book of remembrance.

Francisco Goldman's not-quite memoir, not-quite novel, arrives with a plethora of quotes attesting to its haunting beauty, heart-wrenching story, exquisite writing. For once, these are not platitudes proffered by fellow writers to help a friend sell books. No, they are nothing less than the truth of the matter. Goldman's account of his all-too-brief marriage to the writer Aura Estrada, before her horrendously early death in a surf-boarding accident, is one of the most moving, passionate, anguished, love stories this reader has EVER encountered. Indeed, there is only one problem with the work. It is SO well done, SO intimate, that one cannot help but feel, every so often, that this is TOO personal. I should not be reading this! I'm an intruder; An outlier! But one does keep reading. Because one cannot stop. And we feel, finally, exhilarated at the end, that such a love... and such a writer... can be.

Positives: The author does a terrific job bringing Aura back to life. She is a high strung but lovable character. Heroic. Funny. The last 50 pages are heart wrenching.

Negatives: I wish there were a more politically correct way to say this, but unfortunately the author does a good job of bringing himself to life as well. The way he churns through women so casually, so selfishly. And God forbid if they might be near his age and perhaps up to the game he likes playing. Aura deserved better.

I almost stopped reading this 2 or 3 times because the guy was such a creep. He is an excellent writer though

On August 20, 2005, journalist and novelist Francisco Goldman and Columbia University graduate student Aura Estrada wed in Mexico. On July 25, 2007, Aura died, a day after her neck was broken while body surfing at a resort on Mexico's Pacific Coast. In a novel that possesses the immediacy and power of a memoir, Goldman recounts the story of their passionate, if improbable, love affair and of the nearly insurmountable grief that stalked him after its tragic conclusion.

Francisco and Aura first meet at a literary event in New York City in 2002, and when they encounter each other again in Mexico City nine months later, Aura (a talented writer herself who was at work on a novel at the time of her death and had a story published posthumously in Harper's) is about to embark on studies for a Ph.D. in Latin American literature at Columbia. Goldman lovingly describes the jagged arc of their romance, unveiling Aura's passionate, inquisitive nature in brief, tender glimpses, the joy of their life together always shadowed by the tragedy that's revealed in the book's first sentence.

SAY HER NAME sacrifices strict chronology for an episodic journey over the four years of this relationship (including detours into their lives beforehand). What emerges is a delicate portrait of a young woman enraptured by literature, intensely engaged with life and, above all, committed to the older man who adores her. "Love is a religion," she writes in one of the diary entries Goldman shares. "You can only believe it when you've experienced it."

Goldman is more than two decades older than Aura (only three years younger than her mother), and from the outset, the May-December aspect of their relationship is a source of familial tension. It explodes in the aftermath of Aura's accident, when her mother and an uncle all but accuse him of complicity in the event, summarily ejecting him from the apartment he and Aura occupied during their visits to Mexico City and hinting darkly at their desire for a criminal investigation.

And in the wake of Aura's sudden death, so mundane as to be almost inexplicable, Goldman is cast into a nearly unendurable grief. Along with her friends, he builds an altar to her in their Brooklyn apartment, draping her wedding dress over one of the mirrors ("We were all trying to find Aura in each other, I guess, though I don't think we recognized it"). His recovery is complicated by a hit-and-run accident that nearly kills him. He even drifts into a brief, almost purely sexual relationship with another young woman. For him, there is "No happy memory that isn't infected. A virus strain that has jumped from death to life, moving voraciously backward through all memories, obligating me to wish none of it; my own past, had ever happened."

Unlike Rafael Yglesias, whose 2009 novel, A HAPPY MARRIAGE, is admittedly autobiographical, Goldman has chosen not to alter the names of his principal characters in an account he's emphatically characterized as fiction, and in a recent interview he expressed his frank distaste as a journalist for the "idea of making composite characters, or moving events around in time, exaggerating, and still calling it nonfiction." It's that preference that evidently motivated him to tell his story in novel form, and while the choice gave him the freedom to "fictionalize," perhaps a more compelling reason was his distrust of memory's fallibility, revealed in this searing passage near the book's climax:

"Maybe memory is overrated. Maybe forgetting is better. (Show me the Proust of forgetting, and I'll read him tomorrow.) Sometimes it's like juggling a hundred thousand crystal balls in the air all at once, trying to keep all these memories going. Every time one falls to the floor and shatters into dust, another crevice cracks open inside me, through which another chunk of who we were disappears forever."

In whatever fashion one chooses to read it, SAY HER NAME is distinctive for the unrelenting candor of its journey through the twinned emotions of love and grief. "I need to stand nakedly before the facts; there's no way to fool this jury that I am facing. It all matters, and it's all evidence," Francisco Goldman writes. With the observational skill of a seasoned journalist and the heart and expressive language of the poet, in these pages at least, he conjures his beloved Aura back to life.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

This is a book of grieving. An aging literary academic marries a much younger woman with literary ambitions of her own. They have a few wonderful years and then she tragically dies despite his efforts to save her. He blames himself and so does her mother. This is also a book of obsession. Both Frank, the husband, and Aura's mother pit themselves against one another as each live with their regrets and loss. Frank hangs on to her clothes and other possessions, he sees her ghost in the tree outside his house, and he avoids the people and places they loved.

I've read several memoirs concerning grief written by female writers. This gives a male perspective. Living without someone who's become a part of us can feel like you've been ripped in two. Goldman does a good job of conveying this.

This review was based on an ebook supplied by the publisher.

3.5/5

Say Her Name
by Francisco Goldman

I heard about this title on Wisconsin Public Radio and was riveted by the author's candid as well as incredibly heart-breaking account of his wife's death in a bodysurfing accident.

In the first few chapters I went back and forth from feeling sorry for this man's broken heart to thinking; geez buster, things happen, get on with it. Then I began to see the tapestry he so cleverly wove in order to try and understand how one's destiny could possibly be anticipated. To understand death and where it comes from and to dig for possible signs is the beginning of his quest...

New York Times bestselling author Francisco Goldman thought he'd found his true love in Aura Estrada, an intelligent graduate student in creative writing twenty years his junior. He was smitten.

"...had a kind of magical, like the clairvoyant empathy of a holy child, and I remember thinking that everybody at least now and then should react like that to the world's murderous horrors."

Since Goldman is also an award-winning journalist, he approached his wife's death, after only two years of marriage, as only a writer can--he wrote. Flowing from the past to the present Goldman pieces together Aura's life through her diaries, interviews of her many friends as well as studying many of her computer documents. Interestingly, he also studied the science of waves and used this powerful metaphor as almost a separate character; the Villon. A man obsessed with trying to understand; a man driven to keep the memory of his wife as alive as possible. Yet what is this mysterious thing called memory?

"Sometimes it's like juggling a hundred thousand crystal balls in the air all at once, trying to keep all these memories going. Every time one falls to the floor and shatters into dust, another crevice cracks open inside me."

A tragic sub-plot Goldman's broken heart is further burdened with is Aura's mother suspecting him of murdering her only child. It seemed obvious from the very beginning that this wasn't the case, but it isn't until the last 50 pages that the complete truth of what happened on that beach in Mexico is painfully revealed.

Goldman's anguish over losing the love of his life is a paradox of the truest romance perhaps ever written. He found a true love and in typical romance fashion he lost it. His message to the world is this:

"Hold her tight, if you have her; hold her tight, I thought, that's my advice to all the living. Breathe her in, put your nose in her hair, breathe her in deeply. Say her name. It will always be her name. Not even death can steal it. Same alive as dead, always. Aura Estrada."

Say Her Name: A Novel
I read a negative review of this novel/memoir before I bought it. I thought I'd like it anyway. Well, I should have listened to the reviewer of the Amazon site. The story would have been overwhelmingly sad if the writer, Francisco Goldman, hadn't have been so full of himself. The other thing I didn't get was how his girlfriend had time to balance a Ph.D in English program at Columbia in NYC, a creative writing degree at some other college in NYC, her own writng career, her loving relationship to the author, and the many trips she and Francisco took on a regular basis to Mexico City to see her Tias and her mother who sounded like a bitch on wheels. I had trouble feeling sorry for anyone by the time this book ended. Frankly, I couldn't have cared less at that point even though I know that sounds highly insensitive. The whole books sounded like one big fantasy on the part of Goldman although I don't doubt it is true. I just don't understand how such a young girl, no matter how gifted and talented, can do so many different things in such a short period of time unless she stayed awake 24/7 and did things haphazardly.

Midway through this fragmentary, fictionalized memoir about his love for and loss of his wife, the young writer Aura Estrada, Francisco Goldman (or the character who bears his name, anyhow) diagnoses himself as a man in the throes of "pathological mourning," a species of inconsolable grief (as he acknowledges, it's a lot like what Freud called "melancholia"). It's a good enough description of what this book is about, or to be more accurate what half of it is: painful moments from after the death, stories of terrible bereavement. The experience of loss is evoked painfully and authentically in Goldman's moment-by-moment account.

But the other half of the book is also worth praising on its own terms: a charmingly sweet love story, full of fragments from a romance and a marriage, and portions of both Francisco's and Aura's childhoods and lives and thoughts. Both this and the mourning-work are stories told in fragments, reflections on single moments and themes rather than grand overarching narratives, and most of the larger plot is clear from the beginning, though some little mysteries are resolved. What unites the two into a greater whole is not, then, the narrative structure, but rather the larger project of memorializing and monumentalizing. The book is an extended memorial to Aura Estrada, a story of who she was and of Goldman's love for her, with fragments of her writing and her ideas interleaved; if the fictionalized portrait of Goldman is sometimes unstintingly self-mocking (the older man immoderate in his love of the younger woman, running himself into debt), that of Estrada glows with a sad and loving nostalgia. The book is at least partly a work of fiction, to be sure, but it is also a monument: Aura Estrada emerges from it as the non-fictional person she was, and her loss is all the more painful for the reader as well as Goldman as a result.

Still, by the end, it can't be read simply as a memoir. It is that, but it is also a relatively complicated work of fiction, or at least of fictionalizing -- the making of a coherent set of stories, connected by thematic threads both overt and subtle. As Goldman ends the book, seemingly being taken into an apparently fictional experimental asylum out of one of Estrada's unfinished works (much as he and she both began the book in a Cortazar story), the book's trajectory toward the ambivalent consolation of fiction is clear. If only in fragments, if only momentarily, Goldman shows himself and us that the telling of stories can manage, momentarily, to overcome the absoluteness of loss. That the book both stages this problem of memory and at the same time evokes so powerfully the pain of mourning is a great accomplishment. It's a book that anyone who wants to understand grief will find something in, and at the same time it's a significant literary accomplishment.

I am a fan of Mr. Goldman. In my opinion, I think he forgot to put his journalist's cap on while writing this very sad tale. The story of the wave surfing accidental death of his young wife Aura is certainly a tragic tale, and frankly I doubt that Mr. Goldman could ever really recover from such a terrible experience.

On the positive side, I found it very interesting that the lives of two ordinary people, Francisco and Aura, have the conflicts and drama to make a very interesting story even if it did not have such a horrific ending. It would be engaging reading, even if the characters were fictional.

On the critical side I found Mr. Goldman's lack of psychological insight into the dynamics of his and Aura's attraction to each other very surprising given his journalistic experiences. It was apparent to me that Aura's attraction to Francisco, had so much to do with her own deep wounds at the abandonment of her own father and the pain and longing that it caused her, even in the present. Her so readily indulging in her moods, doubts and insecurities with Francisco resonated to me something a daughter would confide to a father with whom she had a close, trusting relationship with.
His reactions to Aura had the flavor to me of those of a father to a daughter than those of a man to his love.

In addition, he was incredibly naive and gullible to assume that the affair the had after Aura's death with a waitress college student they both knew was because of a deep conviction on the part of this young woman that Aura meant for her to take care of Francisco. This is callow nonsense, and it seemed to me that this woman was just moving in to replace Aura when she had the opportunity. In fact, the way Francisco described her "taking care of him" was through very intense and frequent sex. Francisco had brief acting out romantic encounters with a couple of other close friends of Aura's after her death, which sadly lead me to believe that he was very immature, impulsive and psychologically blocked. It made me doubt aspects of his character and his deeper psychological motivations for even entering into a relationship with a woman thirty years his junior. By the end of the book I found myself identifying more with Aura's mother's negative attitude towards Francisco than with him.

I am not minimizing Goldman's grief and enormous sense of loss over Aura's death, but I think it was written way too soon after the loss and he needed more time, space, healing and reflection to understand the dynamics of the relationship and its aftermath as it pertained to him on a deeper more insightful level.