Say Her Name

"The ocean surrounds you as soon as you go near it, she wrote in her diary, and pushes and pulls you and seduces you with the whispering of its foamy withdrawal over the bubbling sand. The heavy waves suspended in the air for miraculous instants in front of your gaze. They fall fall fall with fury, and fling and drag you with more force than you'd calculated."

This is a passage from Francisco Goldman's novel Say Her Name, and by typing this sentence I am presented with what perhaps shouldn't be a problem but can't help but be: is this fiction? It certainly seems like  a memoir, but is classified as fiction. Goldman, a writer of some distinction, married a young Mexican writer twenty years his junior named Aura Estrada. They split their time in Brooklyn and Mexico. After being married four years, Aura died in a swimming accident off the Pacific Mexican shore. So, a reader can't help but think, what is true about this book, and what is not?

Perhaps Goldman changed some names. A major thread running through the novel is his prickly relationship with members of Aura's family, particularly her mother, who blamed him for her daughter's death, and even threatened legal action. Perhaps a lawyer said, "Cover your ass and call this fiction." Otherwise, it has the ring of authenticity, from the opening scene when the couple visit a zoo and Aura asks, "Where are the axolotls?"

The book is a long rumination on a fairy-dusted love affair and the hollowness of grief. Goldman, as stated, was twenty years older than Aura, and throughout the book we hear how he couldn't believe his own luck: "I was so surprised by her warm sweet-smelling and supple youth and by this unexpected development in my life that I was in danger of getting carried away like a romping puppy in a field of tulips, and silently I urged myself not to lose control, to make love to her like a grown man, not an excitable teenager." At various times, Aura is described as looking like the Mexican Bjork, Giulietta Masina, and Audrey Tatou. He's like a guy that can't stop bragging about his great new girlfriend, and you'd wish he'd shut up, but then you remember that she's dead and it makes you feel guilty.

There are some remarkably written passages, though: "A black, flat-topped mountain, or maybe it's a butte, overlooks Las Vegas, rising out of the Mojave Desert against the horizon like a giant black van in an empty parking lot, hot and shiny in the blazing sunlight. Aura and I decided that it radiated evil, spraying it in continuous arcs, like long-range cat pee, over the gleaming city. Our taxi driver was at least partly responsible for this lasting impression, driving us from the airport as if he was under orders to deliver us in the fastest possible time to the sinister mountain, where his Lord Master, the judge and ruler of our fate, was waiting in his cave."

Goldman tells the story nonsequentially, bouncing around in time. He tries to set the stage, but it can often get confusing. He, of course, saves the details of Aura's death for last, doling out small tidbits until he tells the horrible story in every gripping detail: "Then I saw her. The withdrawing foam uncovered her like a white blanket slowly being pulled back: her smooth round back and shoulders floating; she was floating, utterly motionless, facedown in the water."

It is likely that Goldman wrote this book as some form of catharsis, which makes very good sense. There are times, though, when a reader can feel like someone eavesdropping on intense psychotherapy. In essence, this book is about grief, and I think he sums it up best here, in the passage that gives the book its title: "Maybe I feel sick of people not understanding what this is like, but it's not like I wish for anyone else to live through this. I stamped out Aura's cigarette and lit another one. Hold her tight, if you have her; hold her tight, I thought, that's my advice to all the living. Breathe her in, put your nose in her hair, breathe her in deeply. Say her name. It will always be her name. Not even death can steal it. Same alive as dead, always. Aura Estrada."