Exit Wounds
A Story of Love, Loss, and Occasional Wars
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From award-winning author Peter Godwin, an “eloquent” (The Wall Street Journal) memoir about his evolving relationships with the women and places that shaped his life.
Peter Godwin’s mother is dying.
Born in England, and having spent most of her adult life as a doctor in Zimbabwe, she now lies on a hospital bed in the partitioned living room of his sister’s London home.
Peter has spent his life missing his Zimbabwean childhood, a longing that does not diminish as he reflects on his time as a journalist on the frontlines of combat around the world, or life in New York with his English wife and transatlantic children. In his mother’s final months, he must come to terms with everything his family was and wasn’t: the secrets they kept from one another, the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them, and the beauty of the wildly different places they called home.
With generations of history behind him, Godwin lyrically brings us into the spaces which make us question and suffer, shows us how we can heal our own scars, and celebrate the lives we have among family and friends.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stark memoir, combat journalist Godwin (The Fear) muses on the links between his high-stress work and his rocky personal life. Godwin was born in colonial Zimbabwe in 1957, when the country was roiled by civil war. When he was six, his parents sent him to a boarding school to keep him safe. He hated it there, and developed intense animosity for his parents when they kept him enrolled despite his protestations. In coping with that anger, Godwin developed a knack for emotional compartmentalization that helped him in his career as a war correspondent. The "controlled schizophrenia" he developed by detaching from the daily horrors he reported on led to predictable consequences: "drinking and drugs, depression and divorce." Much of the account explores how those struggles intersected with the end of Godwin's marriage and his attempts to reconcile with his 90-year-old mother before her death. In both cases, he eschews simple answers, writing that "too many farewells may have broken me, so that I no longer have a coherent character," though stints in therapy have helped him better understand his emotional defenses. Godwin's eloquence and bracing candor make this more than a mere pity party. It's a nuanced and fearless self-portrait.
