Getting to Know Death

Starred review from April 22, 2024
Bestseller Godwin (Grief Cottage) delivers a powerful and poetic reflection on death, dying, and what constitutes a good life. At age 85, Godwin fell while watering a dogwood tree, breaking her neck and forcing her into a brace for six months. With little to do but meditate on the implications of her injury, Godwin reacquainted herself with a speech she’d given at a literary festival a few years earlier, which included a particularly prescient line: “This is my life, but I may not get to do what I want in it.” Taking that sentiment to heart, she turned her gaze backward, asking herself whether she was happy with the first eight and a half decades of her life. She found answers in memories of relationships both romantic and familial, including her absentee father’s offer to pay for her college so she could escape her abusive stepfather. Godwin also reflects on the deaths of friends and family, including her beloved colleague Rob Neufeld, who edited two volumes of her journals even as he suffered from ALS. Throughout, her tone is curious and vaguely wonderstruck, resulting in an account that’s full of insight and free of platitude. This is a gift. Agent: Moses Cardona, John Hawkins & Assoc.

May 15, 2024
Godwin's attempt to water a struggling dogwood tree in June 2022 resulted in a bad fall and a broken neck. In her eighties with 18 novels to her credit, including Old Lovegood Girls (2020), this seasoned writer of X-ray perception and peppery candor chronicles her long, demanding recovery in a pithy and matter-of-fact dispatch from the front lines of aging. She turns hospital and rehab episodes into vivid tales of human mystery and wonder. Back home, she reports on how effortful everything is. Godwin remembers her late husband and shares tales about and letters from her best friend, Pat. Her riveting family sorrows include her mother withering under the abuse of her second husband, which Godwin also endured. Just in the nick of time, Godwin's long-absent father reappeared, saved her from the "desperate place," and made sure she attended college, only to die by suicide. Turning to literature to help her think about death, Godwin muses over works by Samuel Beckett and the drive to write directly and clearly in pursuit of the essentials, an art she practices here to gracefully evocative effect.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 15, 2024
The veteran novelist looks with a clear eye at her declining health and the loss of many of those she has loved. In the summer of 2022, just before her 85th birthday, Godwin, a three-time nominee for the National Book Award, went out to water the dogwood tree in her garden, slipped on the gravel, and fell and broke her neck. Confined to a rehabilitation facility for a few weeks, she had to wear a neck brace for six months; when that didn't work, she underwent partially successful neck surgery. The period gave her plenty of time to reflect on her past and observe her present. In fragmented passages, organized in no evident pattern, the author reflects on her long friendship with a woman who died in 2021; the deaths by suicide of her father and brother; the tentative friendship she formed with her roommates at the rehabilitation facility; the loss of her husband two decades earlier; experiences of despair; a friendship with the home health aide who helped her after her release from the rehab center; and her less-than-cordial interactions with her blunt doctor, who told her, "You have too many issues for surgery"--and then, reluctantly and grumpily, changed his mind. Because much of the narrative revolves around the relationship between incidents in Godwin's life and the ways in which she transformed them into parts of her many novels--and takes for granted that readers will be familiar with those novels--the book will be best suited for those already acquainted with the author's work. While those looking for a coherent narrative or a tidy conclusion will be disappointed, Godwin makes for good company, and the text sparkles with flashes of insight and humor. A tart, mordantly witty glimpse at losses past, as well as those to come.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.