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Wall Street Journal
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Exit Wounds' Review: The Rose's Last Thorns
Memoirs don't have to be by celebrities or household names to be compelling. Take Peter Godwin, a New York-based writer who was born and raised in the benighted southern African colony of Rhodesia (before it became the accursed and independent Zimbabwe). Mr. Godwin is not, of course, an unknown; he has written several first-rate books on Africa and is a former president of PEN America. But for all his accomplishments—and the recognition he's earned in higher-brow circles—he isn't altogether famous, being instead the sort of professional scribbler who must write to pay the bills and explain who he is to some people at parties. 'Exit Wounds' is the third instalment of Mr. Godwin's own private story, as eloquent as the first two in his trilogy of remembrance. It's not 'a conventional memoir,' the author tells us. 'It is digressive and partial, rather like viewing life through a fairground mirror.' It helps to have lived, as the author has done, a riveting life. His first autobiography, 'Mukiwa' (1996)—subtitled 'A White Boy in Africa'—tells of his early years. Its narrative centerpiece is his experience as a conscript in the Rhodesian army, at the time locked in a civil war with an array of black rebels (including the vile Robert Mugabe, who became the president that beggared his country). Its opening line stays in the mind: 'I think I first realized something was wrong when our next-door neighbor, oom Piet Oberholzer, was murdered.' (Oom is Afrikaans, and Dutch, for uncle.) Mr. Godwin's second memoir, 'When a Crocodile Eats the Sun' (2006), delves into his family's past, including the revelation that his father—whom he'd assumed was a rock-ribbed colonial Anglo—was in fact a Polish Jew whose family had perished in the Holocaust and who'd given himself a new identity in England. It was there that he married an English Rose (literally, for 'Rose' was her ancestral name), before heading to Africa to start a new life. The elder Godwin died in 2004, his body cremated by the local Hindu community in a wood-fired funeral pyre since there were no functioning electric crematoriums in power-starved Zimbabwe. 'Exit Wounds' doesn't pick up exactly where the previous book left off. It starts in 2015, when Helen Godwin, the author's mother, turns 90. Bedridden—'for no compelling medical reason,' Mr. Godwin tells us—the widowed Helen now lives in London with Georgina (her youngest daughter, the author's sister). Despite having worked for 50 years as a government doctor in Zimbabwe—the only medic for thousands of square miles along the country's eastern border with Mozambique—Helen faces 'humiliating penury' in her old age. 'A lifetime's savings, pensions, and careful investments' were, writes Mr. Godwin, 'zeroed out by the worst hyperinflation the world has ever seen.'
New York Times
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Faced With Death, He Did the Only Thing He Could: Take Notes
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. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
