Geraldine Brooks in Conversation with Kara Swisher

  • February 16, 2025

The author of Memorial Days: A Memoir comes to DC on Wed., Feb. 19th, at 7 p.m.!

Geraldine Brooks in Conversation with Kara Swisher

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine Brooks and Tony Horwitz settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built over more than three decades was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness. But that ended abruptly when Horwitz died on a sidewalk in DC on Memorial Day 2019, at just 60 years old.  

The demands on Brooks were immediate and many, and without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a gulf. Three years later, she went to a remote island off the coast of Australia to mourn. She pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Horwitz’s death. 

Memorial Days is a portrait of a timeless love that captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life. Brooks is the author of the novels Horse, People of the Book, Year of Wonders, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning March. Her acclaimed works of nonfiction include Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. She’ll be in conversation with Kara Swisher, the host of “On with Kara Swisher” and cohost of “Pivot,” and the author of the New York Times bestseller Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.  

[Editor’s note: Click here to read Kitty Kelley’s review of Memorial Days.]

Hosted by Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, 600 I St., NW, Washington, DC. Learn more here.

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