Mourning Glory

Love hurts, and love lost can hurt forever, but consummate novelist Francisco Goldman forces light into the heart of darkness with the pure intensity of his grief and the honesty of his inquiry. Say Her Name (Grove) is the story of his young wife, Aura Estrada, a brilliant Mexican scholarship student and writer 22 years his junior, who died suddenly after a bodysurfing accident on a remote Mexican beach where they were vacationing. Goldman's memoir is exhilarating, a testament to love that questions our suppositions about luck, fate, good fortune, and tragedy, and demands our agency in interpreting the narrative arc of an altered life. Goldman lives grief as a deepening wound. "Every day," he writes, "a ghostly ruin. Every day the ruin of the day that was supposed to have been." Goldman, whose most recent, masterful novel is entitled The Divine Husband, established the Aura Estrada Prize—for women under 35 writing in Spanish in North America—following her 2007 death. Now, in pitch-perfect prose, he renders Aura Estrada indelibly alivefunny, savvy, passionate, sincere. Goldman's memoir stands as an incisive, diamond-sharp act of love.

JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS