Say Her Name

by
Francisco Goldman

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Overview

In 2005, celebrated novelist Francisco Goldman married a beautiful young writer named Aura Estrada in a romantic Mexican hacienda. The month before their second anniversary, during a long-awaited holiday, Aura broke her neck while body surfing. Francisco, blamed for Aura’s death by her family and blaming himself, wanted to die, too. Instead, he wrote Say Her Name, a novel chronicling his great love and unspeakable loss, tracking the stages of grief when pure love gives way to bottomless pain.

Suddenly a widower, Goldman collects everything he can about his wife, hungry to keep Aura alive with every memory. From her childhood and university days in Mexico City with her fiercely devoted mother to her studies at Columbia University, through their newlywed years in New York City and travels to Mexico and Europe—and always through the prism of her gifted writings—Goldman seeks her essence and grieves her loss. Humor leavens the pain as he lives through the madness of grief and creates a living portrait of a love as joyous as it is deep and profound.

Say Her Name is a love story, a bold inquiry into destiny and accountability, and a tribute to Aura, who she was and who she would've been.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Goldman's (The Divine Husband) fifth book is a highly personal account of the author's life in the aftermath of his young wife's drowning. Goldman moves in time from meeting Aura in New York and her harrowing death on Mexico's Pacific Coast to the painful and solitary two years that followed in Brooklyn, marked in part by his mother-in-law's claim that he was responsible for Aura's death. His struggles to exonerate himself from his own conscience, and from his mother-in-law's legal threats, is electric and poignant, encapsulated in painful such moments as the author's discovery of "the indentations of Aura's scooping fingers like fossils" in the surface of her face scrub soon after her death. Goldman also includes fragments of Aura's fiction and her diary: "Played Atari like crazy, rearranged my Barbie house" recall her youth in Mexico City, and "We're on a plane, we've spent most of the day traveling, Paco asleep on my shoulder" illuminate the private moments of the couple's life. Goldman calls this book a novel and employs some novelistic techniques (composite characters, for instance), but the foundation is in truth: messy, ugly, and wildly complicated truth. (Apr.)

Library Journal

With total candor, Goldman (The Divine Husband) describes his life with his wife, Aura Estrada, who died tragically in 2007. This is only a novel in that he changed names to protect some specific identities; otherwise the story is true. This is an authentic work of the heart and soul. He and Aura had a short married life, but one can tell they were happy. They were both gifted writers. He was significantly older; her mother was controlling, and her father absent. Aura was a bright light of ineffable humanity. Goldman describes Aura and his life with her in a gradual way that circles backward and forward in time from the present. He fills in the story bit by bit; the actual description of the accident coming last. VERDICT The feeling, the memorial incarnation that this book creates, is monumental. Essential for all libraries. This book about tragic death is a gift for the living.—Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos P.L., CA

More Reviews (3) Fewer Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

A nonfiction novel of love and loss...and perhaps even a little redemption.

In the Author's Note, Goldman makes clear that much of this novel is based on the facts of his life. The main characters are named Francisco Goldman and Aura Estrada, a married couple. Goldman (in real life) lost his 30-year-old wife Aura in a freak accident on a beach in Mexico, as does the "Goldman" of the narrative. Both Goldmans are novelists; both Auras are writers of fiction. Goldman (the author) weaves into his story excerpts from journals and short stories penned by his late wife. While all this logistical complexity could conceivably be confusing, at some level it doesn't matter what's "truth" and what's "fiction," for the story is inherently moving and tragic, and it focuses on loss and lament—universal themes whether they derive from memoir or from an author's imagination. The novel moves back and forth chronologically, starting at Aura's death and providing generous flashbacks into both Aura and Goldman's life. When they met, he was an accomplished journalist and a gifted novelist in his mid-40s, and she a talented graduate student from Mexico who'd come to Columbia to earn her doctorate in comparative literature. Along the way she decides she would like to study creative writing, so she co-enrolls in an MFA program at Hunter College. Aura is sprightly, witty and free-spirited, while Goldman is an extremely creative but self-admittedly overgrown adolescent. Their love is deep, and Goldman feels inconsolable at her loss. Shortly after Aura's death, her domineering mother Juanita begins a campaign against Goldman, suggesting that he was in some way responsible for her death and threatening to bring a lawsuit against him.With pathologically maternal petulance, she refuses to let Goldman have some of Aura's ashes for him to take back to their New York apartment. Toward the end of the novel, he begins to accommodate himself to Aura's loss and to a limited extent to Juanita's fractiousness.

Appropriately, in this novel of death and dying, Goldman writes gorgeous, heartbreaking prose.

Robin Romm

…passionate and moving…[a] beautifully written account of Goldman's short marriage to Estrada…while Goldman's gifts as a reporter are on full display…the truth that emerges in this book has less to do with the mystery of her death—which, at its core, is the mystery of all tragic deaths—than with the miracle of the astonishing, spirited, deeply original young woman Goldman so adored. "I always wished that I could know what it was like to be Aura," he writes. Goldman revives her through the only power left to him. So remarkable is this resurrection that at times I felt the book itself had a pulse.
—The New York Times

Roxana Robinson

Goldman's long cry of pain seems more like memoir than novel. The use of real names, the apparent cleaving to historical facts, the relentless attentiveness to detail and feeling—all suggest that tenebrous realm we've come to know through the eloquence of Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates. Regardless of form, Goldman shares their dark territory. As to what a writer should write about his private life, the answer is that writers have no private lives: We write what we know. Goldman here bears witness to his anguish, which is mighty.
—The Washington Post

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780802119810
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date: 4/5/2011
Pages: 288
Sales rank: 116,198
Product dimensions: 6.30 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.30 (d)

Meet the Author

Francisco Goldman

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN is the author of three novels: The Long Night of White Chickens, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Ordinary Seaman, a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Divine Husband. Goldman is also the author of the non-fiction book, The Art of Political Murder: Who killed the Bishop?, which was named a Best Book of the Year by The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Economist. Goldman has been a contributing editor for Harper’s magazine, and his fiction, journalism and essays have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation grant and the T. R. Fyvel Freedom of Expression Book Award, and was a fellow at the American Academy of Berlin and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He currently directs the Premio Aura Estrada/Aura Estrada Prize (premioauraestrada.com). Goldman divides his time between Brooklyn and Mexico City.

Read an Excerpt

Say Her Name

By Francisco Goldman

Grove Press

Chapter One

Aura died on July 25, 2007. I went back to Mexico for the first anniversary because I wanted to be where it had happened, at that beach on the Pacific coast. Now, for the second time in a year, I'd come home again to Brooklyn without her.

Three months before she died, April 24, Aura had turned thirty. We'd been married twenty-six days shy of two years.

Aura's mother and uncle accused me of being responsible for her death. It's not as if I consider myself not guilty. If I were Juanita, I know I would have wanted to put me in prison, too. Though not for the reasons she and her brother gave.

From now on, if you have anything to say to me, put it in writing—that's what Leopoldo, Aura's uncle, said on the telephone when he told me that he was acting as Aura's mother's attorney in the case against me. We haven't spoken since.

Aura.

Aura and me

Aura and her mother

Her mother and me

A love-hate triangle, or, I don't know

Mi amor, is this really happening?

Où sont les axolotls?

Whenever Aura took leave of her mother, whether at the Mexico City airport or if she was just leaving her mother's apartment at night, or even when they were parting after a meal in a restaurant, her mother would lift her hand to make the sign of the cross over her and whisper a little prayer asking the Virgin of Guadalupe to protect her daughter.

Axolotls are a species of salamander that never metamorphose out of the larval state, something like pollywogs that never become frogs. They used to be abundant in the lakes around the ancient city of Mexico, and were a favorite food of the Aztecs. Until recently, axolotls were said to be still living in the brackish canals of Xochimilco; in reality they're practically extinct even there. They survive in aquariums, laboratories, and zoos.

Aura loved the Julio Cortázar short story about a man who becomes so mesmerized by the axolotls in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris that he turns into an axolotl. Every day, sometimes even three times a day, the nameless man in that story visits the Jardin des Plantes to stare at the strange little animals in their cramped aquarium, at their translucent milky bodies and delicate lizard's tails, their pink flat triangular Aztec faces and tiny feet with nearly humanlike fingers, the odd reddish sprigs that sprout from their gills, the golden glow of their eyes, the way they hardly ever move, only now and then twitching their gills, or abruptly swimming with a single undulation of their bodies. They seem so alien that he becomes convinced they're not just animals, that they bear some mysterious relation to him, are mutely enslaved inside their bodies yet somehow, with their pulsing golden eyes, are begging him to save them. One day the man is staring at the axolotls as usual, his face close to the outside of the tank, but in the middle of that same sentence, the "I" is now on the inside of the tank, staring through the glass at the man, the transition happens just like that. The story ends with the axolotl hoping that he's succeeded in communicating something to the man, in bridging their silent solitudes, and that the reason the man no longer visits the aquarium is because he's off somewhere writing a story about what it is to be an axolotl.

The first time Aura and I went to Paris together, about five months after she'd moved in with me, she wanted to go to the Jardin des Plantes to see Cortázar's axolotls more than she wanted to do anything else. She'd been to Paris before, but had only recently discovered Cortázar's story. You would have thought that the only reason we'd flown to Paris was to see the axolotls, though actually Aura had an interview at the Sorbonne, because she was considering transferring from Columbia. Our very first afternoon, we went to the Jardin des Plantes, and paid to enter its small nineteenth-century zoo. In front of the entrance to the amphibian house, or vivarium, there was a mounted poster with information in French about amphibians and endangered species, illustrated with an image of a red-gilled axolotl in profile, its happy extraterrestrial's face and albino monkey arms and hands. Inside, the tanks ran in a row around the room, smallish illuminated rectangles set into the wall, each framing a somewhat different humid habitat: moss, ferns, rocks, tree branches, pools of water. We went from tank to tank, reading the placards: various species of salamanders, newts, frogs, but no axolotls. We circled the room again, in case we'd somehow missed them. Finally Aura went up to the guard, a middle-aged man in uniform, and asked where the axolotls were. He didn't know anything about the axolotls, but something in Aura's expression seemed to give him pause, and he asked her to wait; he left the room and a moment later came back with a woman, somewhat younger than him, wearing a blue lab coat. She and Aura spoke quietly, in French, so I couldn't understand what they were saying, but the woman's expression was lively and kind. When we went outside, Aura stood there for a moment with a quietly stunned expression. Then she told me that the woman remembered the axolotls; she'd even said that she missed them. But they'd been taken away a few years before and were now in some university laboratory. Aura was in her charcoal gray woolen coat, a whitish wool scarf wrapped around her neck, strands of her straight black hair mussed around her soft round cheeks, which were flushed as if burning with cold, though it wasn't particularly cold. Tears, just a few, not a flood, warm salty tears overflowed from Aura's brimming eyes and slid down her cheeks.

Who cries over something like that? I remember thinking. I kissed the tears, breathing in that briny Aura warmth. Whatever it was that so got to Aura about the axolotls not being there seemed part of the same mystery that the axolotl at the end of Cortázar's story hopes the man will reveal by writing a story. I always wished that I could know what it was like to be Aura.

Où sont les axolotls? she wrote in her notebook. Where are they?

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman Copyright © 2011 by Francisco Goldman. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Humbee

Posted August 13, 2011

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Horrific grief~Illuminating Love Story

Grief is emotional and physical agony...it's not something that just dissipates as the days go by like people say it does. It's something that rewires you, shatters your whole life and changes you forever. Finally, Francisco Goldman has touched the ends of that agony and is capable of sharing it with us. There is hope for those who need that comfort now...both for women and men.

Francisco Goldman is positively a man familiar with the agonies of grief. He knows the living death of grief. He knows the impossiblities of having to go on living after the death of the one person who makes life worth living. And, he is the most gorgeous and generous of tellers of that experience I have ever known to be alive in my time. He's a writer of the most profound gifts to share.

"Say Her Name" is a magnificent tribute to Goldman's love, Aura, his precious young wife of only 4 years. Her life affected him in such a way as to brand his heart and soul eternally, and he shows that in an eloquence of language and writing that is timeless, heart-wrenching, and a memorial of their relationship.

I was simply spellbound by his story and his prose. Although this book is fiction, you will be instantly gripped by the love story,the angst of it and the autobiographical insistance. It is a haunting story.

Descriptively, Goldman is a master writer. Let me quote him as he speaks of loss and desolution here:

"Every day a ghostly ruin. Every day the ruin of the day that was supposed to have been. Every second on the clock clicking forward, anything I do or see or think, all of it made of ashes and charred shards, the ruins of the future. The life we were going to live, the years we were going to spend together, it was as if that life had already occurred millennia ago, in a lost secret city deep in the jungle, now crumbled into ruins, overgrown, its inhabitants extinguished, never discovered, their story never told by any human being outside it--a lost city with a lost name that only I remember--"

What touched me at a level of wonder and anger, actually, was that in the telling of his relationship with his wife, Aura, I saw Mr. Goldman's self-effacing and self-sacrificing love; while Aura's was more narcissistic and selfish. Although Francisco gave her his all in love, she was often "ashamed" of him, hiding him away from her college peers, "made jokes" about his age and how ugly he was; i.e., he was easily 30 yrs. older, and manipulated him into all sorts of things. Goldman shares these qualities openly and without rancour as a part of who Aura was and what their relationship was like; but, as a reader, I was struck by how insensitive she was to him in return of his obvious devotion to her. Was he was aware of this as he wrote the book? I doubt it. I believe he was only telling the parts about her that he remembered and wanted to preserve. I don't mean to say that Aura didn't love Francisco, she seemed to, of course, and they had a beautiful relationship, but his love was more profound, I think. Aura was a young woman intent on being a writer and she had determination to that end.
This is a book which will send you directly into the heart of the darkness of human misery after the loss of a loved one, and it will send you into the heart of a love so powerful it transcends that pain. Francisco Goldman is a magnificent author.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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bookchickdi

Posted July 5, 2011

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A haunting story of grief

Francisco Goldman fell in love with the much younger Aura, a graduate student from Mexico, studying literature at Columbia University. To his surprise, she agreed to marry him and they lived a very happy life. He recounts their short life together in his fictional memoir Say Her Name.

On vacation in Mexico, Aura has a surfing accident and dies. Goldman is devastated, and his pain is made more unbearable by his mother-in-law who blames him for her daughter's death, and vows that he will pay for what he has done. She implies that there was foul play, and not only does he have to deal with his loss, he has to worry about being arrested for Aura's death.

Goldman's grief is palpable and visceral. He was
"no longer him. No longer a husband. No longer a man who goes to the fish store to buy dinner for himself and his wife. In less than a year I would be no longer a husband than I was a husband."
Not written as a traditional memoir, Goldman tells Aura's story, using her own writings and diaries to do so. Aura is a poet, and this book has a very poetic, almost dreamy feel to it. He delves into her childhood, her close relationship with her mother, and her insecurities. Although we know that Aura dies, she comes to vivid life on the pages of this book. It is a loving tribute from a husband to his wife.

Goldman lays his grief out on the page for all to see, and it is hard to read at times. He cannot bear to pass by the restaurants and other places they used to go to together. He builds a shrine to her in their apartment, complete with her wedding dress hanging on the mirror.

Say Her Name takes the reader on an honest, emotional journey. We get to know Aura so that her death has an effect on us. There is an element of mystery as well; how did Aura die and did her husband have any responsibility?

Aura and Goldman both studied Mexican and South American literature; if I knew more about it, that would have deepened my appreciation of the book even more.

Readers who liked Calvin Trillin's About Alice and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking will be moved by this story as well.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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suzze

Posted April 8, 2011

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Still thinking about it

Francisco Goldman's "novel" will stay with me for a long time. Such beautiful language, such heart-felt emotions. As I was reading it, I wasn't sure how much I liked it, as it seemed too "high-brow" for me, with two brilliant writers, fluent in several languages, living in two countries, dropping names of professors and authors that I have never heard of. But the crux of the book was Francisco's relationship with his wife, Aura, and a celebration of her life, even as he grieves her tragic death. Haunting.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted April 24, 2012

Creek

Goldclan creek.
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phx-reader1

Posted December 26, 2011

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WOULD NOT RECOMMEND

I DID NOT LIKE THIS BOOK, JUMPED AROUND TOO MUCH SO HARD TO FOLLOW, I DID FINISH IT BUT WOULD NOT RECOMMEND BUYING IT.
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bcarr

Posted June 30, 2011

A beautifully written love story

Francisco Goldman tells us at the very beginning of "Say Her Name" his wife has died, after a swimming accident on a Mexican beach. It is not until after we travel with him through memories of their meeting, courtship and wedding do we read the heart wrenching details of the accident. Trying to find meaning in every detail of his time with Aura, Francisco takes us along with him on his journey through raw and bleeding grief as he weaves us through a story of self blame and ultimate healing alternating the past and present. It is not a book I would have been drawn to, but it is one I am glad I did not miss.

I would give it a 5 but there are several passages in spanish and not translated. I do not speak spanish.
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BetsyTN

Posted May 11, 2011

Beautifully Haunting...

This book is a story of love, loss and the little things that make up the richness of a life shared. It is worth the time and the read. There is a rawness and a realness to it that sticks with you. You can also feel how those memories of someone you have lost are replayed searching for something new that makes you feel like there is still some little piece of someone to be discovered. The result of his musings is that Aura comes alive on the pages. You can almost feel you know her laugh, her wit and her pixie smile. Both their losses are tragic.
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Robin Romm

Roxana Robinson

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Francisco Goldman

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Say Her Name

Grove Press

Chapter One

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