{"id":15171,"date":"2011-05-03T14:00:29","date_gmt":"2011-05-03T18:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=15171"},"modified":"2011-06-27T10:57:26","modified_gmt":"2011-06-27T14:57:26","slug":"francisco-goldman-on-say-her-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/03\/francisco-goldman-on-say-her-name\/","title":{"rendered":"Francisco Goldman on \u2018Say Her Name\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Aura Estrada and Francisco Goldman at their wedding in 2005. Photograph by Rachel Cobb.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cEsto es tu culpa,\u201d Francisco Goldman was told by his mother-in-law, as his wife, Aura Estrada<\/a>, lay dying in a Mexico City hospital. <\/em>This is your fault. Goldman and Estrada had been vacationing on the Pacific Coast when Estrada was fatally injured by a freak wave. She was thirty years old, a writer on the brink of a promising career. Goldman is also a writer; his latest novel, <\/em>Say Her Name<\/a>, centers on Estrada\u2019s death. The narrator, also named Francisco Goldman, is grappling with his mother-in-law\u2019s accusation of murder. The book is part mystery, part biography, part meditation on grief, and, finally\u2014mostly\u2014a love story. Goldman\u2019s writing has astonished me in the past (notably his underread 2004 novel <\/em>The Divine Husband<\/a>), but <\/em>Say Her Name<\/a> is powerful and surprising and even funny in ways that feel unique. He has, in a sense, invented a form. Goldman met me for drinks recently at a bar not far from the Brooklyn apartment he and Estrada shared. This is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation.<\/em><\/p>\n

How long after Aura\u2019s death did you start working on the book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I started working on the book in December. She died in July. Those ensuing months after Aura\u2019s death were so horrible and I was probably drunk for almost all of it. In December\u2014I was dreading being alone in our apartment over the holidays\u2014Chloe Aridjis, the writer from Mexico City who was living in Berlin, offered me her apartment. It was this very literary apartment with a very nice writing desk, and it was good to be someplace where I didn\u2019t know anybody. And the city itself\u2014it seemed cold, gray, a rainy drizzle coming down every day that almost made nighttime seem like daytime\u2014it somehow matched my mood perfectly. I started it there, and in a way the book accompanied me through my mourning. It was like my indispensable other self.<\/p>\n

Throughout the book you go back and forth between addressing the reader and addressing her\u2014were you having a dialogue with her as you were writing? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Back then I was always writing her e-mails, and I still talk to her in my head all the time. I was trying to keep some kind of communication open. I was especially always asking her, \u201cWhat do you want me to do about your mother? Is there anything I can do? What should I do?\u201d Her mother tried to do some rather rash things that caused a lot of problems, and it really turned my mourning into something altogether different from what it might have been. How do you ask somebody who is not there if she blames you? I really got to know Aura in a whole new way. I tried to understand everything in her life that leads to that moment where she throws herself into that wave to ride it. And, honestly, that\u2019s Aura\u2019s entire personality, activated in that split instant.<\/p>\n

You call this book a novel, but obviously many of the fundamental elements of the story are true. Could you talk a little about what you see as the relationship between fact and fiction in this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I made things up in order to be able to tell the truth. I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory you are already in the realm of fiction. I am not claiming that there is not some other side to Aura that I missed. And there is the way I portray myself: a factual account of the kind of widower I was would give a completely different impression. I was a really superb widower. I honored her every day. I founded the Aura Estrada Prize [which gives a large stipend to Latin American women who are thirty-five and under and write in Spanish]. We have enough money for the next twenty years. I worked. I got her book published. But, really, that wasn\u2019t emotional truth. The emotional truth was that I was in complete chaos. I was lost. I couldn\u2019t have been more lost.<\/p>\n

For me the most important thing was that she had to get all the good lines. I thought, well what would<\/em> she have said? What might<\/em> she have said? I would trade back and forth, so there were things in the novel that I thought of or said that I would give to her, which is what the essence of love is anyway, why love is so important, because for once in your life you leave yourself and all your yearning and all your imagination. You\u2019re trying to enter the other person and think of what they<\/em> feel, of what they<\/em> want, of how they<\/em> are experiencing it. That is very rare; at least, it was very rare in my life.<\/p>\n

You write about the disorienting sensation of realizing that you are \u201cno longer a husband, no longer a man who goes to the fish store to buy dinner for himself and his wife.\u201d And that is one of the things that is the hardest about losing someone, that you are no longer defined in your relationship to that person.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is horrendous. I don\u2019t know if God is in the details, but love is certainly in the details. I wanted to fill the book with an effusion of all of those little details of everyday life. It\u2019s really what makes relationships, it is what is transformative about a relationship, and to lose them is falling into a void, you can\u2019t believe it. To this day I haven\u2019t gone back into the fish store.<\/p>\n

You hold off on describing Aura\u2019s death until the very end of the novel, and as a reader I almost had the sense of you working up the nerve to get there. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I think that it had to go at the end because, if you think of it as a criminal case, you are trying to study everything that led to the moment in question. Was it a crime or not?<\/p>\n

But I have never done anything harder than write those last pages, her death scene. I wrote that at the American Academy, back in Berlin. I didn\u2019t leave my room for about six weeks. And then finally I had to write that scene, and I wrote it in two days. I have never felt anything like that. I have never cried while I\u2019ve been writing, and had to write through tears. I had a knot in my stomach, a stomachache, I was exhausted, and I remember I wrote until about ten at night and I just wanted to go to bed. And I said, \u201cIf you go to bed you are never going to go back and finish this.\u201d I pushed through, and at about three in the morning I finished, and I had a bottle of my favorite Mexican mescal in my room, and I went down to this lake by the Academy, drank half of it, and then\u2014this was on May 4, and my fellowship ran until the end of May\u2014I didn\u2019t do another thing for the rest of the month.<\/p>\n

What is it like for you to be in Mexico now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is sacred ground to me now. Is it Benedict Anderson? The guy who writes about the roots of nationalism and how nations form? I think he was talking about the settling of North America, and he says people don\u2019t really feel that a country is theirs until they\u2019ve buried someone there. And burying Aura in Mexico has made it really sacred to me. I can\u2019t imagine cutting myself off from it.<\/p>\n

What do you think the experience is going to be like of doing all this publicity and touring?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is going to be difficult. It is a hard thing to talk about. You kind of write the book and think, Well, here it is, this is what I want to say. But in our modern literary culture now you have to go out and verbally define it. This book was in no way written as a self-help book. I don\u2019t know that I would say to any griever, \u201cRead this book and act like I did. Get drunk and get run over by a car and be promiscuous and be out of your mind.\u201d But I hope that, if there are other grievers out there who are as blown away as I was, they will identify. And I hope more people read it as a book about love than as a book about death.<\/p>\n

Why don\u2019t you ask me what my influences were?<\/p>\n

What were you influences?<\/strong><\/p>\n

None. I really felt totally alone writing this book.<\/p>\n

I cast around to see what other novelist lost his wife when she was young. There was Ralph Waldo Emerson, but he wasn\u2019t a novelist. And I get so angry sometimes when I see the elder Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted instead of the younger Ralph Waldo Emerson. Later in life, Emerson lost one of his numerous sons and he wrote, \u201cThe\u00a0only thing grief\u00a0has\u00a0taught me is to know how shallow it is.\u201d But go and look at the younger Ralph Waldo Emerson, when his beloved first wife dies. Everybody was afraid for his health and sanity. He was out of his mind for two years. I don\u2019t think that second cool reaction is remotely possible without the devastation he went through the first time.<\/p>\n

It gets back to what we were just talking about in terms of the loss of identity. When he lost his wife he ceased to be a husband, but when he lost his son he didn\u2019t cease to be a father.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a really good point, yes. I was reading Alcestis, <\/em>Euripides\u2019s tragedy. That play is so screwy because it is a grief play, but King Alcestis himself sends his wife to die because he doesn\u2019t want to die. And it is Herakles who goes back to Hades and brings her out. There is a wonderful lament that says exactly that: You will no longer be the man you were<\/em>. In a weird way, in my book, I am both characters, the narrator is both characters. He is the husband, who loses everything, and Herakles, who goes and brings her out of Hades. Which, yeah, that is kind of what I intended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cEsto es tu culpa,\u201d Francisco Goldman was told by his mother-in-law, as his wife, Aura Estrada, lay dying in a Mexico City hospital. This is your fault. Goldman and Estrada had been vacationing on the Pacific Coast when Estrada was fatally injured by a freak wave. 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