Say Her Name

In the summer of 2007, Francisco Goldman's young wife Aura died suddenly on a beach in Mexico. Say Her Name is the novel born out of this personal tragedy ...

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. Humour 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.

Francisco Goldman is the author of three novels: The Long Night of White Chickens which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Ordinary Seaman, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and The Divine Husband. His non fiction work The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? was Best Book of the Year for The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and the Economist in 2007. Goldman has been contributing editor for Harper's magazine, and his fiction, journalism and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine.

“Francisco Goldman tells us that in ‘descending into memory like Orpheus’ he hopes he might ‘bring Aura out alive for a moment.’ But in the act of writing, Goldman transcends the constraints of myth, and achieves nothing short of the impossible. Page by page, by the breath of his own words, Say Her Name restores Aura from shade to flesh, and returns her, unforgettably and permanently, to our world.” —Jhumpa Lahiri