Say Her Name
Francisco Goldman, 2011
Grove/Atlantic
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802119810
Summary
In 2005, celebrated novelist Francisco Goldman married a beautiful young writer named Aura Estrada in a romantic Mexican hacienda. The month before their second anniversary, during a long-awaited holiday, Aura broke her neck while body surfing.
Francisco, blamed for Aura’s death by her family and blaming himself, wanted to die, too. Instead, he wrote Say Her Name, a novel chronicling his great love and unspeakable loss, tracking the stages of grief when pure love gives way to bottomless pain.
Suddenly a widower, Goldman collects everything he can about his wife, hungry to keep Aura alive with every memory. From her childhood and university days in Mexico City with her fiercely devoted mother to her studies at Columbia University, through their newlywed years in New York City and travels to Mexico and Europe—and always through the prism of her gifted writings—Goldman seeks her essence and grieves her loss. Humor leavens the pain as he lives through the madness of grief and creates a living portrait of a love as joyous as it is deep and profound.
Say Her Name is a love story, a bold inquiry into destiny and accountability, and a tribute to Aura, who she was and who she would've been. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio• Birth—1954
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education— Hobart College; University of Michigan;
New School for Social Research
• Awards—Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction; TR Fyvel
Freedom of Expression Book Award; Guggenheim Fellow-
ship
• Currently—lives in Mexico City, Mexico and New York
Francisco Goldman is an American novelist, journalist, and Allen K. Smith Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Trinity College. He is workshop director at Fundacion Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), the journalism school for Latin-America created by Gabriel García Márquez. Goldman is also known as Francisco Goldman Molina, "Frank" and "Paco".
Life
Goldman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Guatemalan Catholic mother and Jewish-American father. He attended Hobart College, the University of Michigan and the New School for Social Research Seminar College, and studied translation at New York University. He has taught at Columbia University in the MFA program; Brooklyn College; the Institute of New Journalism (founded by Gabriel Garcia Marquez) in Cartagena, Colombia; Mendez Pelayo Summer Institute in Santander, Spain; the North American Institute in Barcelona, Spain. He has been a resident of UCross Foundation. Francisco Goldman was awarded the Mary Ellen von der Heyden fellowship for Fiction and was spring 2010 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Writing
His first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens (1992), won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and his second, The Ordinary Seaman (1997), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
In November 2007, he acted as guest-fiction editor for Guernica Magazine. "The Ordinary Seaman" was named one of the 100 Best American Books of the Century by The Hungry Mind Review. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and of a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship in 2000-2001. His books have been translated and published in a total of eleven languages worldwide. In the 1980s, he covered the wars in Central America as a contributing editor to Harper's magazine.
Goldman's 2007 book The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? is a nonfiction account of the assassination of Guatemalan Catholic Bishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera, a crime perpetrated by the Guatemalan military. The book, an expansion on what began as an article in The New Yorker represents the culmination of years of journalistic investigation. It was a New York Times Notable Book, and a Best Book of the Year at Washington Post Book World, The Economist, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and New York Daily News. While the book has been widely acclaimed, to some degree a predictable disinformation campaign of exactly the kind described in the book itself has been waged against it. A new afterword in the paperback edition, rebuts them. The book is the winner of the 2008 TR Fyvel Freedom of Expression Book Award from the Index on Censorship and of the 2008 Duke University-WOLA (Washington Office on Latin America) Human Rights Book Prize. It was shortlisted for the 2008 Golden Dagger Award in non-fiction and for the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing.
In 2007 Goldman published his novel, The Divine Husband and, in 2011, Say Her Name, the account of his wife's accidental death.
Family
Goldman's wife, Aura Estrada, died in a bodysurfing accident in Mexico in 2007, which he documents in his 2011 memoir, Say Her Name. He has also established a prize in her honor, The Aura Estrada Prize, to be given every two years to a female writer, 35 or under, who writes in Spanish and lives in the USA or Mexico. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[p]assionate and moving...[a] beautifully written account of Goldman's short marriage to Estrada...…while Goldman's gifts as a reporter are on full display...the truth that emerges in this book has less to do with the mystery of her death—which, at its core, is the mystery of all tragic deaths—than with the miracle of the astonishing, spirited, deeply original young woman Goldman so adored. "I always wished that I could know what it was like to be Aura," he writes. Goldman revives her through the only power left to him. So remarkable is this resurrection that at times I felt the book itself had a pulse.
Robin Romm - New York Times
Goldman's long cry of pain seems more like memoir than novel. The use of real names, the apparent cleaving to historical facts, the relentless attentiveness to detail and feeling—all suggest that tenebrous realm we've come to know through the eloquence of Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates. Regardless of form, Goldman shares their dark territory. As to what a writer should write about his private life, the answer is that writers have no private lives: We write what we know. Goldman here bears witness to his anguish, which is mighty.
Roxanna Robinson - Washington Post
To call Francisco Goldman’s book about the death of his young Mexican wife an elegy hardly represents it. Lament is closer, but insufficient. It is a chain of eruptions, a meteor shower; not just telling but bombarding us in a loss that glitters. With the power and fine temper of its writing, it is as much poem as prose…. Tense set pieces, respectively heartbreaking and chilling…generate the book’s propulsive drama. What they propel, though, is its most remarkable achievement: the incandescent portrait of a marriage of opposites.
Richard Eder - Boston Globe
Goldman has called on his formidable resources to tell the story of Aura’s life, their life together and his grief as a widower… Harrowing and often splendid reading….these pages manage to bring Aura Estrada back to life. She is unforgettable. Count me glad and grateful to know her name.
Karen R. Long - Cleveland Plain Dealer
Extraordinary.... The more deeply you have loved in your life, the more this book will wrench you.... In a voice that is alternately lush and naked, lyrical and sardonic, philosophical and wry...Say Her Name will transport you into the most primal joy in the human repertoire—the joy of loving…[It] pushes back against the tides of forgetting, and gives Aura a new body, a literary body, to inhabit—a body so vivid that by the end of the book we feel as though we ourselves have met and loved this woman.
Carolina de Robertis - San Francisco Chronicle
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.
Publishers Weekly
With total candor, Goldman (The Divine Husband) describes his life with his wife, Aura Estrada, who died tragically in 2007. This is only a novel in that he changed names to protect some specific identities; otherwise the story is true. This is an authentic work of the heart and soul. He and Aura had a short married life, but one can tell they were happy. They were both gifted writers. He was significantly older; her mother was controlling, and her father absent. Aura was a bright light of ineffable humanity. Goldman describes Aura and his life with her in a gradual way that circles backward and forward in time from the present. He fills in the story bit by bit; the actual description of the accident coming last. Verdict: The feeling, the memorial incarnation that this book creates, is monumental. Essential for all libraries. This book about tragic death is a gift for the living. —Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos P.L., CA
Library Journal
A nonfiction novel of love and loss...and perhaps even a little redemption.... Appropriately, in this novel of death and dying, Goldman writes gorgeous, heartbreaking prose.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Say Her Name:
1. Goldman's book opens with the scene in which he and his wife stare through glass at exotic salamanders, the subject of Julio Cortazar's story "Axolotl." Two questions:
a) Why was Aura so desirous of seeing the salamanders?
b) Why might Goldman have begun his memoir with this scene? What symbolic significance does it have in this memoir?
2. Why does Goldman write this book? What is he attempting to understand—and what is he attempting to convey to readers? Does he succeed in either attempt?
3. Why does his mother-in-law blame Goldman? Is there any justification in her court case? Why does Goldman say, "If I were Juniata, I know I would have wanted to put me in prison, too. Though not for the reasons she and her brother gave." What are his reasons?
4. Goldman writes, "I always wished that I could know what it was like to be Aura." Do you think the power of writing—and the mystery of reading—has enabled the author to resurrect Aura? Has he brought her to life for you?
5. What kind of woman was Aura? Describe her qualities, including her eccentricities. Why, for instance, does she keep dresses in her closet that she won't wear?
6. How did Aura's upbringing—especially the pressures imposed on her by her mother—influence the type of woman she became?
7. In her diary, Aura recounts traveling to a beach her mother hever let her visit. Goldman writes that Aura “discovered a new way to be there." In what way was the beach transformative for Aura—how does it change her, or what insights does it open up for her? Have you ever experienced a similar transformation in a special place you found?
8. Talk about the love triangle between Aura, Juanita, and Francisco. Is it natural...or unnatural?
9. How does Goldman himself come across in this account? What does he mean when he calls himself a "man-boy"?
10. What attracts the two to one another? Is their attraction in spite of—or because of—their age difference?
11. Francisco Goldman refers to this work as a novel, yet it is a true account of his wife, her life, and death. So...what is this book: is it a novel or memoir? Can the author have it both ways?
12. If the living move beyond grief, is it a betrayal of the dead?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page (summary)