Death loves a heartache

TimesLIVE

03-05-2025

Not only did Brooks then have to deal with a court case about that matter, she discovered that their family medical insurance had been cancelled the moment Tony had died, but she had not been informed. 'Who kicks widows and orphans off? And I'd paid for it; the rapacious amount that you have to pay. We had been completely exposed to the craziness of the American potentially bankrupting health system without being informed of that. So much of what happened was just wrong, and I'm not alone here. It's not 'woe is me.' This is a system that is just so far off the track in lacking empathy for people.'
It's perhaps not surprising that it took her another three years and a decision to hunker down to write, alone in a shack on remote, sparsely populated Flinders Island, off Tasmania, to deal with 'that howl had become the beast in the basement of my heart. I need to find a way to set it free,' she writes. As she now explains: 'It took me a long time to realise that because I was too busy pretending that I was OK when I wasn't OK.' It took her a year to 'crawl back' to her desk to complete her acclaimed 2022 novel Horse, then she put on a brave front throughout her book tour for it. 'Twenty minutes of amusing patter about the woes of taking up horseback riding in your 50s — I mean it was all a big performance and I was exhausted, honestly, and that's when I realised something had to change.'
Her narrative alternates between America in 2019, where she relives the weeks following Horwitz's death, and Flinders Island in 2023, where she could be alone with her memories, particularly of her husband. 'I could just think about him, undistracted by any of the normal or even pleasant disruptions of my ordinary life. He was a big personality. He was very funny, but he was also a man of immense moral purpose. Dedicated to trying to understand what made people think the way they thought and do the things they did. Totally open-hearted, very generous and funny. Funny hilarious — that's what I miss the most.'
Brooks and Horwitz were not just partners in marriage but also partners in their work. During their years as foreign correspondents they had reported together and often had joint bylines, recounts Brooks. 'Then we both turned to a different kind of book writing [but] we were still each other's first and last editors. We talked about our work constantly.' Horwitz, an esteemed historian as well as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was on tour promoting his 10th book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide when he died. 'He would have loved to have known the outpouring of appreciation for him from noted American historians. I don't think he knew how much he was loved and admired for his take on American history.'
Having won his Pulitzer for his reporting on the income inequality that was developing in America during the 80s and 90s and the reasons for it, Horwitz was a very early examiner of the American political divide. 'His 1996 book Confederates in the Attic looked at how all the unfinished issues of the civil war were still in play, and they really doubled up into the active politics of America in the decade that followed that book. And when I watched that mob invading the capital on January 6,' says Brooks, 'I thought, Tony probably knows about a quarter of those guys. He specialised in those neo-confederate groups, their mentality and the question of why the country is so divided.'
Before she met Horwitz, who needed to live in America, Brooks says her life had been directing her to Flinders Island, so she chose to stay there in solitude as a way of glimpsing what might have been. 'His whole life's work was understanding that crazy country and he needed to be there to do it. And I could do what I do really anywhere, so that was the one marital battle that I had to surrender.'
Already at work on a new novel, Brooks says it was only after reliving the loss of her husband that she realised the recommended clinical treatment for PTSD and complicated grief is exactly what she did. 'You have to keep reliving it and trying to remember more detail every time. I learnt that. And gradually on Flinders, I was able to set aside all this stuff I'd been carrying. The biggest thing that happened there was the realisation that I had to stop being angry about not having the life that I'd expected to have and be grateful for the one I do have.
'You cannot control what happens,' she adds, 'you can only control how you respond to it.'