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    Say Her Name
    Say Her Name
    Say Her Name
    Audiobook12 hours

    Say Her Name

    Written by Francisco Goldman

    Narrated by Robert Fass

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Celebrated novelist Francisco Goldman married a beautiful young writer named Aura Estrada in a romantic Mexican hacienda in the summer of 2005. 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. But 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 utter grief and creates a living portrait of a love as joyous and playful 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 have been.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 4, 2011
    ISBN9781452672069
    Say Her Name
    Author

    Francisco Goldman

    Francisco Goldman (Boston, 1954) ha publicado cinco novelas y dos libros de no ficción. Sus novelas han sido finalistas de diversos certámenes, incluyendo el Premio PEN/Faulkner en dos ocasiones. Monkey Boy fue finalista del premio Pulitzer de ficción 2022.

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    Reviews for Say Her Name

    4/5

    79 ratings15 reviews

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    • 4/5
      4.4 A piercingly real love story told from each side of an accidental death. There is so much life in this book it is unimaginable that it was actually written. Raw, gentle, and thundering. Worth it for the axolotls.
    • 3/5
      2.75 starsThis is a memoir of the author's relationship with the love of his life, a woman 20+ years younger than he was, and who died only two years after they got married. Her family blamed him for her death. This was supposed to be some amazing love story, but I didn't get the connection between them, and I didn't particularly like either of them. He jumps all over the place in time, so nothing is chronological, and I don't like multi-page paragraphs, either. There were parts that were interesting, which explains why I didn't give it a lower rating, but also parts that bored me (i.e. I couldn't have cared less about her academic life). Overall, I wasn't impressed
    • 4/5
      I think I'd find the protagonist and his lover revolting if I were to meet them in reality, but the story is beautiful and harrowing.
    • 2/5
      Audio book narrated by Robert Fass
      2.5**

      Goldman found the love of his life in a decades younger grad student (not his student) from Mexico. He gave his heart to the brilliant, witty, exuberant Aura, and they were looking forward to starting a family when she was tragically killed during a beach holiday. This unexpected tragedy affected Francisco and Aura’s mother in ways no one expected. Francisco was completely bereft and lost in his grief. Eventually he wrote this “novel” – a barely fictionalized story of Aura and of their love.

      I had such high hopes for this book. Everything I had read about it and what I was told by others who had read it (and whose opinion I trust) led me to believe this would be a wonderful testament to an enduring love that ended tragically. I was able to go hear the author speak when he was on the book tour, and was touched by his sincerity and emotion.

      So what went wrong for me with this book? At first I thought it was the fault of the narrator. Fass does not have the right voice for this book. His tone is not “round” enough to tell the story of the Mexican Aura Estrada. Yes, I know the narrator of the book is Francisco, who was born and raised in the United States, but I’d heard the author read excerpts from the book, and Fass doesn’t sound like what I remembered Goldman sounding like. Still, I really do not think I can blame Fass and the audio version for my lackluster reaction. I have the text as well, and looking through it, reading sections on my own … I just don’t find the “heart” I was expecting.

      I will say that the section where Goldman relates that final day at the beach is absolutely riveting. My heart breaks for Aura and Francisco, and all their friends and family, even for the “bystanders” who witnessed the events and tried to help, or shied away in horror. I wish the immediacy and emotion of these chapters had been present earlier and throughout the book.
    • 4/5
      Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman is a haunting tale of love and grief. The way that Goldman tells this autobiographical novel draws the reader into his pain making you feel his grief and guilt towards the death of his wife, Aura.The story takes you through Francisco’s life when he is dating Aura, their marriage, and the year after her death. The love he had for his wife shines through in his writing, making the reader feel so connected with his grief. The gist of the story is that Francisco marries a much younger Mexican woman, Aura, who is aspiring to be a writer but is getting her PhD at her mother’s request. Goldman takes us through the two short years that they were married, before they go on vacation to the beach for two weeks in Mexico. They spend a lot of time back in Aura’s home country when they are not in New York City. They had been to this beach several times before and the waves were not as dangerous as some of the other Mexican beaches. Near the end of the story you finally learn how she dies at the beach and why Francisco blames himself and his mother-in-law does as well. I thought this book was so well-written and I would recommend to anyone. I would give this book a 4 out of 5 stars.
    • 3/5
      This seems to have been a love which was meant to be, and the two of them true and devoted to each other. Accidents happen, tragic accidents happen too, and end something before its time, without the reason, and forever. Francisco Goldman goes through all the details of the time he was able to spend with Aura before she died. Surely it is a much more purposeful way for him to deal with this tragedy than killing himself would have been, and there are many interesting details, but I still found it difficult to read at times, because of its private nature, because of the many details he writes about, not only about Aura, but other people in his life.
    • 5/5
      This was one of those books I wish I could have rated with a 4.5 - it wasn't quite a five star for me, simply because it took me 100 pages to really feel involved with the story. Partly that was because the confusion between memoir and novel, what was real and what was fiction, kept interrupting my involvement in the story. Goldman's prose was magical, so I kept reading, and eventually I didn't care what was "real" - since it all felt so real and vital.

      I took this book with me to read in Mexico, not knowing that much of the story was set in Guanajuato and San Miguel de Allende, where I was staying. What a delicious coincidence that was.

      Despite being a slow start, this is a heartbreaking yet inspiring story, beautifully told. Read it.
    • 4/5
      Very sweet memoir about the life and death of the author's young wife, who died in a freak body surfing accident. He thoroughly covers every aspect of their relationship, all the signs he might have read along the way, everything that could have been different, but in the end her death seems somehow inevitable. His loves shows through in every sentence of the memoir and he doesn't shy away from the harder aspects of their relationship or the less desirable traits he finds in himself. Overall, a moving portrait of an interesting life and the relationship the two had together.
    • 5/5
      This novel is breathtaking and heartbreaking. Reading it is like being inside the writer's head and emotions during the emotionally turbulent years as he remembers his life with Aura, his much younger wife, and mourns for her. While a lovely elegy, it also brings to life the complex person that Aura was, humanizing her by bringing to the fore her talent and good traits as well as her insecurities, occasional cruelty, impatience and other personal defects. In other words, he loves her entirely, with the good and the bad and makes us care for her too. At times it feels somewhat claustrophobic, for there is little in this book that is not about Aura. Even the narrative of the years of his life prior to meeting her are written in view of the day he will meet her and come into her life. A bit of fresh air would have come into the book if he had contextualized it by letting us know what other things were going on in his life and the world around him during those years. Nevertheless, it is what is is: A book about Aura, his paean and elegy to her, and a map of what it is to survive the brutal blow of losing a deeply loved one.
    • 4/5
      I would have given this a 4.5 if possible. Through his descriptions of his wife Aura and the stories he tells you can feel how much the author loved her. You wish you had known her. His grief is painful to read yet you want to find out more about Aura and their life together.
    • 4/5
      Goldman's meditation on the loss of the love of his life through accident is stark and painful. It captures the discordant nature of sudden death, the complexity of grief, the blame that often accompanies loss. The stream of the narrative is staccato, honest to the experience lived. But for all of this, after reading the book I hardly knew Aura any better at the end than at the beginning; nor did I understand the two of them as a couple - what it was that bound them together remained elusive. A pity that.
    • 3/5
      Wife dies in drowning accident. True story of how husband deals with grief, as he is blamed by his mother in law for the accident.
    • 5/5
      A more than exquisite book on death and dying, grief, love and those left behind. The writing in this book is so far beyond anything I've read in past years, it's just unbelieveable. Mr. Goldman has expressed his grief over the loss of his young wife so that the reader really experiences it. Beautifully illuminating.
    • 3/5
      An interesting book about a May/December romance where the young woman dies tragically in a surfing accident in Mexico. I was a little uncomfortable with all that the husband reveals about his family and in-laws but it was an interesting story that kept my attention throughout.
    • 4/5
      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.