Faced With Death, He Did the Only Thing He Could: Take Notes

New York Times

09-04-2025

As a child growing up in Zimbabwe, Peter Godwin saw neighbors murdered by guerrillas during the civil war that broke out during the fight for independence from Britain. Before he turned 18, he was conscripted into the army. Later, he wrote about conflicts from South Africa to Bosnia to Ukraine, practiced human rights law and was left for dead near a refugee camp in northern Somalia.
'I'm on more than nodding terms with death,' said Godwin, an award-winning war correspondent and author, filmmaker and Guggenheim fellow. 'It's something I've had a front-row seat to my whole life.'
The subject is also at the center of his most recent book, 'Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss and Occasional Wars,' published by Summit Books on April 8. After chronicling childhood and civil war in Africa in 'Mukiwa,' and the chaos in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe's authoritarian rule in 'When a Crocodile Eats the Sun' and 'The Fear,' Godwin, 67, now wrote about the death of his mother, the end of his marriage of nearly two decades to the media executive Joanna Coles, and the disorientation of finding himself, in his sixth decade, adrift without the stabilizing anchor of family. Image
His editor in the United States, Judy Clain, who — like his British editor Ellah Wakatama — is from Zimbabwe, worked with Godwin on 'When a Crocodile Eats the Sun' and 'The Fear.' Clain said she connected deeply with the grief and the humor in 'Exit Wounds,' and that the book is a departure for him because, unlike his previous memoirs, it's not rooted in Africa.
'The book is about home and belonging and longing and secrets,' said Clain. 'It's about letting go not just of his mother and his marriage and coming to terms with the death of his sister, but also mourning the idea of being an exile. I almost feel like he won't write about Africa again. I feel he's turned a corner in some way.''Exit Wounds' is Godwin's seventh book and third memoir — and a book he tried really hard not to write, he said. He didn't want to tell a story about personal loss that was 'wallowing in self-pity.' But, as his mother lay bedridden in England, suffering from dementia, his wife surprised him one morning in Manhattan by telling him she wanted to end the marriage. Amid this emotional chaos, Godwin said, he couldn't help himself. He did what any memoirist would do: He started taking notes.
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