Ghosts By Daylight
A Memoir of War and Love
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
AN EVENING STANDARD, ECONOMIST AND DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR
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'Gripping and brilliantly done' - The Times
'Unashamedly romantic, and combining quiet reflection with pacy narrative, di Giovanni looks at love with the same clear eye she brings to war' - Economist
'A vivid, heartfelt book that shows the extremes of life lived to the full' - Tatler
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A scorching memoir of love and loss from award-winning journalist Janine di Giovanni
Janine and Bruno first fell in love as young reporters in the besieged city of Sarajevo. Years later - after endless phone calls, much of what the French call malentendu, secret trysts in foreign cities, numerous break-ups, three miscarriages, countless stories of rebel armies and a dozen wars that had passed between them - they arrive in Paris one rainy January to begin a new life together.
The remnants of their separate lives, now left behind, are tentatively unpacked into their shared apartment on the Right Bank: Bruno's heavy blanket from Ethiopia, a set of long feathered arrows from Brazil, an ash tray stolen from a hotel in Algeria, and Janine's flak-jacket and canvas boots, still full of sand from the Western Desert in Iraq.
But having met in another lifetime - in another world - ordinary, civilian life doesn't come easily. War has become part of them: it had brought them together, and, though both are damaged by it, neither can quite leave it behind. And the difficult journey that follows, through their mix of joy and terror at becoming parents, Bruno's battle with post-traumatic stress and addiction, and Janine's determination to make France her home, leads to an understanding of the truth that people who deeply love each other cannot always live together.
A searing, profoundly moving love letter, beautifully written, Ghosts by Daylight is a powerfully raw portrait of marriage and motherhood in the aftermath of war.
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'Janine di Giovanni writes with unblinking courage about war, death, marriage, motherhood, loss, love, redemption, fear - indeed, about all the world's most pressing risks and dangers ... Her writing here (as ever in her remarkable career) is a great and important achievement' - Elizabeth Gilbert
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Di Giovanni, an American-born war correspondent (Madness Visible) who's covered conflicts from Sarajevo to Afghanistan, met Bruno Girodon, a French photographer, whom she eventually married after a long, passionate, tortuous courtship, and they settled in Paris to raise their son, Luca, born prematurely after a difficult pregnancy. In beautifully deliberative passages, Di Giovanni depicts the elaborate concoction of her marriage, the renovation of a choice apartment, and the accoutrements of a privileged Parisian life yet Bruno, her modern-day Ulysses, could not settle down. Obsessed by the safety of his family, by survival fears inculcated during wartime, he began drinking heavily, was plagued by depression, and eventually needed hospitalization. Conversely, while her husband seemed to be losing himself, Di Giovanni began to find autonomy for the first time in the strange country of the prickly, exacting French. (Her portrayals of perfectionist Frenchwomen who don't breastfeed because "it ruins your breasts" is priceless.) Her rather scrambled, touching work is about trying to habituate herself within a mad, chaotic world where even love cannot be fixed in place inviting enormous sorrow along with the joy.
