Review: Say Her Name

“No quiero morir. I don’t want to die. That may have been the last full sentence she ever spoke, maybe her very last words,” writes Francisco Goldman of his late wife Aura Estrada in his novel Say Her Name.

A fiction writer and doctoral student at Columbia, Aura was just thirty when she died in a bodysurfing accident while vacationing with Goldman on the Pacific Coast in her native Mexico in 2007. It was the month before their second anniversary. Goldman, then fifty-two, was with her in the water when the fateful wave knocked her down, breaking several vertebrae at the top of her spine. She was taken by helicopter to a hospital in Mexico City.

The novel is a kaleidoscope of memories of Goldman’s relationship with Aura both before and after the months of her unspeakable death, as well as reflections of the kind we hope to never make about our loved ones: “Where was Aura’s wave that night, as we slept in our bunks in the hostel in Oaxaca? Was it already a murderous old wave, or still a relatively young one, born only the night before in a tropical storm maybe only a thousand miles out to sea?” Such moments make this a gripping story from the first page, despite the fact that readers know the ending.

Goldman’s acclaimed first novel The Long Night of White Chickens (Grove Press, 1992) is set in Guatemala and Massachusetts. Like his narrator, he grew up outside Boston and was born to Jewish and Guatemalan parents. His most recent book before this one was a forensic investigation into the murder of the head of the Archdiocese of Guatemala, Bishop Juan Gerardi, by the military authorities in Guatemala.

After having met, married, loved, and lost his wife in the span of four years, Goldman wrote Say Her Name, which he ultimately could not publish as nonfiction. Perhaps the emotional truth of this painful story could only be expressed with the freedom provided by fiction. Still, the prose in this novel never succumbs to the temptations of melodrama, but instead forges into the dark alleys of our shared human mortality. Why her? Why not her? “Was I destined to have come into Aura’s life when I did, or did I intrude where I didn’t belong and disrupt its predestined path?” This is one of many unanswerable questions Goldman grapples with in the novel.

Librarians and bookstore staff might want to shelve Say Her Name under “fictional autobiography” or “novelistic memoir.” Regardless of where the book is filed, the beauty and emotional resonance on these pages—each filtered through Aura’s last words, no quiero morir—will likely resound in the reader’s memory.

Jennifer De Leon is the winner of the 2011 Fourth Genre Michael Steinberg Essay Prize. Her work has appeared in Ms., Briar Cliff Review, Poets & Writers, Guernica, The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010, and elsewhere. An instructor at Grub Street and UMass Boston, she is currently working on a novel.