A few months ago I read an extraordinary article in The New Yorker entitled ‘The Wave: A Tragedy in Mexico’. It was a personal history that novelist Francisco Goldman (pictured left) had written about the death of his wife, Aura Estrada, on a beach in Mexico. That story has haunted me because of the precise, filmic way Goldman described those moments between life and death, the disbelief and grief of losing your love. They met at NYU where he was on a panel with two Mexican novelists: Jose Borgini, Aura’s then-boyfriend, and Gabiela Castresana. Afterwards he invited her to join them for dinner (Borgini didn’t) with Salman Rushdie. Goldman’s description of their first meeting, ‘Hola! (Hello!) Meet your death’ and their subsequent marriage is an achingly accurate account of what Octavio Paz called ‘The Double Flame’ of love and eroticism.

Say Her Name is a meditation on their love, infused with Aura’s poetry and fragments of her short stories. He recounts Aura’s family history, her father’s abandonment of her and her mother when she was four, and her life in Mexico City – the squalid apartments and three jobs her mother worked to ensure Aura went to university. Aura’s mother, Juanita, blames Francisco for the death of her only child; she evicts him from their apartment in Mexico City and threatens him with a lawsuit. One can understand her wrath at that wave for extinguishing her shining light, her beautiful and brilliant daughter and Goldman accepts it. ‘It seemed perfectly right for everybody to be acting crazy.’ He must return to their apartment in Brooklyn, where her best friend Valentina has erected a shrine to her memory, but he wanders their old haunts alone. I cannot improve on Colm Toíbín’s description of Say Her Name as ‘a beautiful love story, and an extraordinary story of loss’.

Justine Douglas is manager of Readings Port Melbourne