Say Her Name
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The Pulitzer Prize–finalist’s intimate autobiographical novel of a marriage cut tragically short is “a beautiful love story, and an extraordinary story of loss” (Colm Tóibín).
In 2005, celebrated novelist Francisco Goldman married Aura Estrada. The two were deeply in love, and Aura was a gifted young writer on the cusp of her own brilliant career. But while on vacation only a month before their second anniversary, Aura died in a tragic accident. In Say Her Name, Goldman pours his feelings of love and unspeakable grief into a fictionalized account of their brief time together.
Desperate to keep Aura alive in his memory, Goldman collects everything he can about her, delving deeply into the writings she left behind. From her childhood and university days in Mexico City to her studies at Columbia University, through the couple’s time in New York City and travels to Europe, Goldman composes a vivid and multifaceted portrait.
Filled with “propulsive drama” (The Boston Globe), Say Her Name is a tribute to who Aura Estrada was and who she would’ve been, that “will also transport you into the most primal joy in the human repertoire—the joy of loving—and reveal it with aching vibrancy” (San Francisco Chronicle).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Goldman's (The Divine Husband) fifth book is a highly personal account of the author's life in the aftermath of his young wife's drowning. Goldman moves in time from meeting Aura in New York and her harrowing death on Mexico's Pacific Coast to the painful and solitary two years that followed in Brooklyn, marked in part by his mother-in-law's claim that he was responsible for Aura's death. His struggles to exonerate himself from his own conscience, and from his mother-in-law's legal threats, is electric and poignant, encapsulated in painful such moments as the author's discovery of "the indentations of Aura's scooping fingers like fossils" in the surface of her face scrub soon after her death. Goldman also includes fragments of Aura's fiction and her diary: "Played Atari like crazy, rearranged my Barbie house" recall her youth in Mexico City, and "We're on a plane, we've spent most of the day traveling, Paco asleep on my shoulder" illuminate the private moments of the couple's life. Goldman calls this book a novel and employs some novelistic techniques (composite characters, for instance), but the foundation is in truth: messy, ugly, and wildly complicated truth.
