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'say her name': the blaze of a shortened, ardent life.

Phoebe Connelly

Aura Estrada (left) and Francisco Goldman were married in August 2005 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. A few months shy of their two-year anniversary, Aura died in a freak body surfing accident. Goldman's novel, Say Her Name , both remembers and fictionalizes his grief, their marriage and her infectious, passionate personality. Rachel Cobb hide caption

Grief is a sprawling, messy thing. Easy to share — and yet near-impossible to make comprehensible.

In his new novel-cum-memoir, journalist and novelist Francisco Goldman joins the ranks of writers, from Joan Didion to Calvin Trillin, who have attempted the tricky alchemy of pressing grief over the loss of a spouse into a neatly bound volume. Goldman's much younger wife, the writer Aura Estrada, died in a freak surfing accident while the two were vacationing on the western coast of Mexico in 2007. They had been married just shy of two years.

Estrada was a promising literary talent. Born in Mexico in 1977, she was raised in Mexico City by a single mother. She moved to the United States to pursue her doctorate in Spanish literature at Columbia University and was simultaneously working on an MFA in writing at Hunter College. She had published numerous reviews and short stories in Spanish, and had started publishing in English — her first piece for the Boston Review had been published a month before her death.

Say Her Name By Francisco Goldman Hardcover, 288 pages Grove Press List Price: $24

Read an excerpt.

Throughout the novel, Goldman's power of description lulls you into forgetting that you're reading a tragedy. Of the west-coast Mexican beaches that Estrada fell in love with as a girl, he writes, "Evening always came as a welcome surprise, cooling the burning sand, filling the sky and air with diluted fruit drink colors, until finally it became too dark to read."

Those beaches become a third character in the book, pulling us inexorably toward Estrada's end. Estrada is not just a writer, or Goldman's wife; she's a forgetful, laughter-filled woman who worries about how her colleagues will view her marriage to an older man and delights in a new quilt or a dinner with friends.

The book cuts back and forth between Goldman rebuilding his day-to-day and Estrada's life before her marriage. When Goldman returns to New York after her death, two of Estrada's girlfriends pick him up at the airport and take him back to their dusty, abandoned apartment. The women begin to construct an altar to Estrada — her hairbrush, a copy of the Boston Review in which her essay had appeared, a turquoise drinking flask. The centerpiece is Estrada's wedding dress, handmade of fine cotton and silk lace. The straps are yellowed with sweat, and the hem dirty from dancing. The everyday of her life haunts him. Goldman dreams of his wife curled around him, blue like a popsicle, of arriving in a bargain basement where her dresses are neatly packaged for sale. There is a sensation, Goldman writes, "that my brain was leaking, spurting dream images into the day."

Francisco Goldman is the author of The Ordinary Seamen , a Pen/Faulkner Award finalist, and The Art of Political Murder , a nonfiction account of the assassination of a bishop in Guatemala. He lives in Brooklyn and Mexico City. Jerry Bauer hide caption

This is a reminder that we have been handed an adulterated account of the entire marriage. Say Her Name is not a memoir, not even an unfaithful one — it's a novel, a parallel universe built with some of the facts of Estrada's life and death. In an interview with Publisher's Weekly , Goldman explained that in writing the novel he would take lines from Estrada's diary and fictionalize an entire entry around it.

The best novels about marriage acknowledge that there is something hidden, something unknowable within to all outside parties. In writing Say Her Name, Goldman has shared with the reader the sort of ephemeral fantasy that we invent about the people we love. He blurs the line between lover and biographer. Goldman gives us enough of Estrada that I was left wishing she were alive to give her own account.

This is is not necessarily a book to be loved . It's a map of grief and work and missed chances. It is rare to be invited into a marriage, offered a drink and asked to hear of all its messy particulars. "[I]t's as if I inherited," Goldman writes, "but just somewhat, that manner of feeling sometimes attuned to something dreadful out there."

Phoebe Connelly is a writer in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Washington City Paper, The Awl , and Bookforum .

Say Her Name

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Review: Say Her Name

“No quiero morir. I don’t want to die. That may have been the last full sentence she ever spoke, maybe her very last words,” writes Francisco Goldman of his late wife Aura Estrada in his novel Say Her Name.

A fiction writer and doctoral student at Columbia, Aura was just thirty when she died in a bodysurfing accident while vacationing with Goldman on the Pacific Coast in her native Mexico in 2007. It was the month before their second anniversary. Goldman, then fifty-two, was with her in the water when the fateful wave knocked her down, breaking several vertebrae at the top of her spine. She was taken by helicopter to a hospital in Mexico City.

The novel is a kaleidoscope of memories of Goldman’s relationship with Aura both before and after the months of her unspeakable death, as well as reflections of the kind we hope to never make about our loved ones: “Where was Aura’s wave that night, as we slept in our bunks in the hostel in Oaxaca? Was it already a murderous old wave, or still a relatively young one, born only the night before in a tropical storm maybe only a thousand miles out to sea?” Such moments make this a gripping story from the first page, despite the fact that readers know the ending.

Goldman’s acclaimed first novel The Long Night of White Chickens (Grove Press, 1992) is set in Guatemala and Massachusetts. Like his narrator, he grew up outside Boston and was born to Jewish and Guatemalan parents. His most recent book before this one was a forensic investigation into the murder of the head of the Archdiocese of Guatemala, Bishop Juan Gerardi, by the military authorities in Guatemala.

After having met, married, loved, and lost his wife in the span of four years, Goldman wrote Say Her Name, which he ultimately could not publish as nonfiction. Perhaps the emotional truth of this painful story could only be expressed with the freedom provided by fiction. Still, the prose in this novel never succumbs to the temptations of melodrama, but instead forges into the dark alleys of our shared human mortality. Why her? Why not her? “Was I destined to have come into Aura’s life when I did, or did I intrude where I didn’t belong and disrupt its predestined path?” This is one of many unanswerable questions Goldman grapples with in the novel.

Librarians and bookstore staff might want to shelve Say Her Name under “fictional autobiography” or “novelistic memoir.” Regardless of where the book is filed, the beauty and emotional resonance on these pages—each filtered through Aura’s last words, no quiero morir—will likely resound in the reader’s memory.

Jennifer De Leon is the winner of the 2011 Fourth Genre Michael Steinberg Essay Prize. Her work has appeared in Ms., Briar Cliff Review, Poets & Writers, Guernica, The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010, and elsewhere. An instructor at Grub Street and UMass Boston, she is currently working on a novel.

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Say Her Name : A Novel

• By Francisco Goldman
• Grove Press
• Reviewed by Rhoda Trooboff
• April 26, 2011

This elegiac tribute blurs the line between memoir and fiction.

Say Her Name , Francisco Goldman’s intimate and elegiac tribute to his late wife, Aura Estrada, initially reads like the latest entry in a long list of tragic love stories starting with Orpheus and Eurydice. That alone would suffice to make this a compelling read. But Mr. Goldman goes further. Like Joan Didion ( The Year of Magical Thinking ) and John Bayley ( Elegy for Iris ), Mr. Goldman mercilessly immerses the reader in mourning’s abyss. He extols his young wife’s beauty and brilliance and entrusts to his reader a meticulous, unflinching study of survivor’s guilt. But the real accomplishment of Say Her Name is its proof that art can restore the dead to life. On a Mexican beach where Ms. Estrada lay paralyzed, her back broken in a July 2007 bodysurfing accident, Mr. Goldman administered mouth-to-mouth respiration, breathing for her again and again to no avail. Say Her Name, however, sustains Aura Estrada for the ages.

Numerous settings are fully realized, giving a memoir-like truthfulness to the action unfolding in New York and Mexico City. There are scenes of Paris, where Ms. Estrada had set the novel she was writing before her death; of the beach at Mezunte in Oaxaca, on Mexico’s Pacific Coast; at hospitals in Pochulta, Huatulco and, finally, Pedregal, near Mexico City, where she died.

The novel blends in elements of memoir, inviting the reader to puzzle over distinctions between the fictional Aura and Francisco and the real Ms. Estrada and Mr. Goldman. The novel’s fictional truths begin in real-life truths: the love affair and marriage of Mr. Goldman (author of previous novels The Divine Husband, The Long Night of White Chickens and The Ordinary Seaman, and of the nonfiction The Art of Political Murder ) and the vivacious Ms. Estrada, the precocious only child of a doting mother; Ms. Estrada’s stellar doctoral work in Latin American literary studies at Columbia; her authorship of numerous stories and essays on Latin American fiction; her work on her own novel. The tragedy that took Ms. Estrada’s life at the beach at Mazunte 26 days before their second wedding anniversary is also true, as are Mr. Goldman’s ensuing efforts to both examine his culpability and immortalize her.

Central to this novel is the making and blurring of distinctions. Whose mourning is deeper, the mother’s or the husband’s? Which legacy is truer, ashes or written words? After Aura’s death, Francisco fights a bitter war with his mother-in-law, Juanita, who keeps Aura’s ashes. Francisco, however, keeps Aura’s diaries, laptop and handwritten notes, from which, Pygmalion-like, he reconstructs a fully rounded, wise, soulful, funny Aura, satisfying his longing to know what it was like to be her.

Assembling an altar to Aura in their Brooklyn apartment, Francisco turns insignificant remnants of her life into talismans — a tube of shampoo left behind in their Mazunte hotel room, for example. Totally bereft, he would daily “open a drawer and hold a pile of her clothes to my nose, frustrated that they smelled more of the drawer’s wood than of Aura, and sometimes I emptied out a drawer on the bed and lay facedown in her clothes.” Every scene, replete with such vivid imagery, is redolent with love.

Nonfiction elements — short, elegant essays on the literature of bereavement, ocean-wave science, jargon-free literary analysis — help Mr. Goldman blur other distinctions. In a brilliant, opening explication of Julio Cortázar’s short story “Axolotl,” the reader is made to peer through murky aquarium glass in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes at a pinkly beautiful, broad-smiling, nearly extinct Mexican reptile with funny ears. Suddenly, mid-sentence, Cortázar’s third-person narrator becomes the “I” of the axolotl. The passage haunts the rest of the novel: Like Cortázar’s narrator, Francisco wills himself into Aura’s mind, lovingly and repeatedly mentioning her wide smile and pretty ears. Later, Francisco finds in Aura’s laptop her notes from a disappointing seminar on literary theorist Henri Foucault’s essay “What Is an Author?” Francisco reads what had frustrated Aura, then responds: “ The essay seemed to me like a dazzling web woven by an insane genius spider. I read to the part where Foucault cites Saint Jerome’s contention that even an author’s name has no credibility as an individual trademark, because different individuals could have the same name, or someone could write under someone else’s name, and so on.”

Such literary riffs serve the novel’s goal of dissolving boundaries among characters, real and fictional. Similarly, stunning hallucinatory passages reminiscent of magic realism dissolve boundaries between reality and imagination, the living and the dead.

Francisco strives to relive Aura’s memories. He revives her playful imagination, lively good humor and sensuous, passionate intellect; he keeps her mind and voice alive, fulfilling her promise of literary greatness. His dreams evoke her physical presence. Francisco seems to become Aura.

The novel is non-sequential and repetitive. We know the end from the start; details and images reappear, piecemeal, throughout. This, of course, is how the mind works, offering memory’s crumbs in no apparent order, again and again. In a final chapter, however, Francisco recounts in orderly sequence all the horrifying events at Mezunte, in the ambulances, at the hospitals. His retelling is both a reliving and a confession that provide neither relief nor absolution.

Thanks to Mr. Goldman’s transparent and never lofty  prose, the reader inhabits Francisco’s head, his memory, his crotch, his bed. If any criticism could be leveled at this novel, it is its relentless embarrassment of the reader, who becomes a voyeur, peering through the veil of another human being’s inscrutability. (Camus’s L’Étranger comes to mind . ) Perhaps Ms. Estrada might not have wanted others to read her notes. The reader squirms at witnessing Francisco’s shabby efforts to suppress his misery in the years after Aura’s death.

Some readers might regard the novel’s relentlessness as hyperbolic. Reading Say Her Name is total immersion in a deep-grieving, tortured soul, belying Shakespeare’s words in “Richard II”: “My grief lies all within, and these external manners of lament are merely shadows to the unseen grief that swells with silence in the tortured soul.” Near the end Francisco asks, “Could a shadowy facsimile of Aura’s soul or self be grafted onto mine? Was it maybe already there and would they see it?” This reader’s resounding answer: Yes.

Rhoda Trooboff , a longtime literature and writing teacher at National Cathedral School in Washington, DC, is a publisher of children’s books at Tenley Circle Press, Ltd.

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, say her name.

On August 20, 2005, journalist and novelist Francisco Goldman and Columbia University graduate student Aura Estrada wed in Mexico. On July 25, 2007, Aura died, a day after her neck was broken while body surfing at a resort on Mexico's Pacific Coast. In a novel that possesses the immediacy and power of a memoir, Goldman recounts the story of their passionate, if improbable, love affair and of the nearly insurmountable grief that stalked him after its tragic conclusion.

"In whatever fashion one chooses to read it, SAY HER NAME is distinctive for the unrelenting candor of its journey through the twinned emotions of love and grief."

Francisco and Aura first meet at a literary event in New York City in 2002, and when they encounter each other again in Mexico City nine months later, Aura (a talented writer herself who was at work on a novel at the time of her death and had a story published posthumously in Harper's ) is about to embark on studies for a Ph.D. in Latin American literature at Columbia. Goldman lovingly describes the jagged arc of their romance, unveiling Aura's passionate, inquisitive nature in brief, tender glimpses, the joy of their life together always shadowed by the tragedy that's revealed in the book's first sentence.

SAY HER NAME sacrifices strict chronology for an episodic journey over the four years of this relationship (including detours into their lives beforehand). What emerges is a delicate portrait of a young woman enraptured by literature, intensely engaged with life and, above all, committed to the older man who adores her. "Love is a religion," she writes in one of the diary entries Goldman shares. "You can only believe it when you've experienced it."

Goldman is more than two decades older than Aura (only three years younger than her mother), and from the outset, the May-December aspect of their relationship is a source of familial tension. It explodes in the aftermath of Aura's accident, when her mother and an uncle all but accuse him of complicity in the event, summarily ejecting him from the apartment he and Aura occupied during their visits to Mexico City and hinting darkly at their desire for a criminal investigation.

And in the wake of Aura's sudden death, so mundane as to be almost inexplicable, Goldman is cast into a nearly unendurable grief. Along with her friends, he builds an altar to her in their Brooklyn apartment, draping her wedding dress over one of the mirrors ("We were all trying to find Aura in each other, I guess, though I don't think we recognized it"). His recovery is complicated by a hit-and-run accident that nearly kills him. He even drifts into a brief, almost purely sexual relationship with another young woman. For him, there is "No happy memory that isn't infected. A virus strain that has jumped from death to life, moving voraciously backward through all memories, obligating me to wish none of it; my own past, had ever happened."

Unlike Rafael Yglesias, whose 2009 novel, A HAPPY MARRIAGE, is admittedly autobiographical, Goldman has chosen not to alter the names of his principal characters in an account he's emphatically characterized as fiction, and in a recent interview he expressed his frank distaste as a journalist for the "idea of making composite characters, or moving events around in time, exaggerating, and still calling it nonfiction." It's that preference that evidently motivated him to tell his story in novel form, and while the choice gave him the freedom to "fictionalize," perhaps a more compelling reason was his distrust of memory's fallibility, revealed in this searing passage near the book's climax:

"Maybe memory is overrated. Maybe forgetting is better. (Show me the Proust of forgetting, and I'll read him tomorrow.) Sometimes it's like juggling a hundred thousand crystal balls in the air all at once, trying to keep all these memories going. Every time one falls to the floor and shatters into dust, another crevice cracks open inside me, through which another chunk of who we were disappears forever."

In whatever fashion one chooses to read it, SAY HER NAME is distinctive for the unrelenting candor of its journey through the twinned emotions of love and grief. "I need to stand nakedly before the facts; there's no way to fool this jury that I am facing. It all matters, and it's all evidence," Francisco Goldman writes. With the observational skill of a seasoned journalist and the heart and expressive language of the poet, in these pages at least, he conjures his beloved Aura back to life.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg on April 25, 2011

Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman

• Publication Date: April 10, 2012
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press
• ISBN-10: 0802145809
• ISBN-13: 9780802145802

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BookBrowse Reviews Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman

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Say Her Name

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• Apr 5, 2011, 288 pages
• Apr 2012, 368 pages

• Literary Fiction
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About This Book

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A biographical novel tracing the love story between author Francisco Goldman and his young, late wife Aura Estrada

As Francisco Goldman says midway through his book, all over the world, everyday, people lose loved ones, yet each person's loss is unique. Each of us has a story to tell, a love to honor, and an excruciating path of grief to bear while learning to live without the one who died. After Aura's death, Goldman read everything he could get his hands on about grieving, and not one of the books could explain how he should deal with having lost the love of his life; so he wrote his own book. It is brilliant, brutal, truthful, and I found great reassurance in his words, as there is no easy or dignified way to bear the insanity that death and loss bring. Although it is a novel of shattering loss, Say Her Name leaves the impression of a story of lasting love. Francisco and Aura, despite the large age gap between them, find their soul mates in one another; they kindle a deep, satisfying passion, and, together, create that magic combination in which partners bring balance to each other's lives. The accomplished novelist in his early 50s and the ambitious PhD candidate in her mid-20s had both lived through the unhappy marriages of their parents, through failed relationships of their own, and walked the treacherous paths of aspiring writers. Their combined love of literature and poetry served as text for their union. Destiny enabled the understanding between them. Of course, all was not roses and moonlight. Francisco's gruff personality had to be smoothed as he practiced being the nurturing man Aura needed. And Aura's mother was very protective of her; they were as close as a mother and daughter could be, communicating daily by phone and email while Aura was in New York, and, whenever Aura left Mexico after a visit, her mother would make the protective sign of the cross over her daughter. She was a devoted but controlling mother with fixed ideas about Aura's future. A husband almost thirty years older did not fit those ideas. Aura had grown up without her birth father, raised by her mother's new husband and in competition with a stepsister. Her impulsive nature chafed under a mother's control and posed problems for Francisco as well, who needed a certain amount of order in his life to get his writing done. But when they were together, love conquered all. As he relates the story of their four years together, the wonder and delight they found in each other shines through every sentence. In poetic fragments and reconstructions of memory, Goldman pieces together the cause of Aura's disaster, then takes off into breathless passages of storytelling in which the tale of a great love and a completely unexpected accident come together. Reading Say Her Name is like watching a painting grow on a canvas, and Goldman is a writer in the way that Van Gogh was a painter - slashing streaks of color, ominous shadows, bursts of light, madness, delight, agony, devotion, and delicate detail across his pages. Many reviewers mention the troublesome novel-versus-memoir question. It is true that Aura Estrada was a real person, as is, of course, Francisco Goldman. But just as certainly, their courting, marriage, and ultimately Aura's tragic death, included many fiction-like qualities. I have no problem with Mr. Goldman displaying his novelistic abilities as he recreates and memorializes the amazing Aura. Though the story begins with the announcement of her death and the accusation by Aura's mother that Francisco is responsible, in true novel form, Goldman makes us wait until the final fifty pages for the details of the actual accident, and, finally, he addresses his guilt. Novel or memoir, masterful writing is what matters here:

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.

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Book review: ‘Say Her Name’ by Francisco Goldman

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Say Her Name

Francisco Goldman

Grove Press: 350 pp., $24

Death has taken a conspicuous place in the recent works of several writers. Joan Didion lost her husband and wrote about it, as did Joyce Carol Oates. Elizabeth McCracken lost a baby; Christopher Buckley his beloved parents, “Mum” and “Pup”; Gail Caldwell her dear friend and fellow writer, Caroline Knapp. All transformed their experiences of these losses into memoirs.

Perhaps this is what we have now instead of accepted cultural death rituals: the task of transforming grief into a book. Typically such publications, like memorial services, do not just share a deep sadness but also celebrate the person as he or she lived. Didion’s book, likely to remain a classic of the genre, darts back and forth between her husband’s sudden death, the extended time of mourning and recollections of their life together as the author tries painfully to reorient herself without him.

Francisco Goldman’s powerful new addition to this category, “Say Her Name,” follows a similar zigzag path as the author moves from the Brooklyn home he shared with his wife, to the time before they met, to travels they took to Paris, Las Vegas, Mexico. For reasons that remain murky, Goldman labels his book a “fictionalized memoir” rather than a straight recollection. He keeps his own and his wife’s name the same, and has said that the gripping account of her accident, which appears in the book’s harrowing later pages, was just as it happened — leaving a reader to wonder uneasily which of the book’s details are real and which invented.

Goldman, author of novels including “The Long Night of White Chickens” and a work of journalism, “The Art of Political Murder,” was vacationing with his wife, Aura Estrada, on the southern coast of Mexico in 2007, a month shy of their second anniversary, when Aura broke her neck in a freak bodysurfing accident. She died later that night, after a tortuous collective effort to save her. Goldman’s tender, angry, remorseful, and, above all, passionate account is of their brief, devoted marriage, the life and work of Aura herself — and his various ways of recovering himself after the loss.

Aura was 30 when she died. The fact of her youth, and of their age difference — Goldman was more than 27 years her senior — necessarily shapes his story: Goldman is mourning not just who Aura was and the love they shared, but also who she might have become, the family they might have made. Goldman imagines the child they hoped for, and the literary success he is certain awaited her. (He was a teacher, she a student, when they met.) At the time of her death, Aura was starting to publish stories and essays, and one of Goldman’s devotional acts, after poring through Aura’s journals and computer files, is to resurrect and present to us the products of his late wife’s imagination.

One can’t help wondering whether Goldman’s disclaimer about his book’s veracity exists in part to assuage any possible offense to Aura’s surviving friends — in his grief-addled months he sleeps with one, flirts with another — or more likely her family; especially Aura’s devastated mother, Juanita, who considered having him criminally prosecuted for the accident. Certainly Juanita blamed him for endangering “the daughter she’d given away to me to protect in marriage.”

For his part, Goldman resents the mother’s holding on to Aura’s ashes, and though he protests otherwise, the sense of a son-in-law’s hostility remains, marring to some extent the poetry and romance of Goldman’s story. (When recalling his first meeting with Juanita, who is only a few years older than he, Goldman describes “a maternal Prospero, all powers waned, helplessly spying on a closely huddled, inexplicably enamored Miranda and Caliban.”) Late in the book Goldman mentions a female friend of his who said that because of Aura’s youth, she had “still belonged more to her mother than to me.… You hadn’t had time yet to make Aura all your own.”

At this point we realize that “Say Her Name” — Goldman’s colorful, detailed wail of grief — is also exactly that: his determined, lyrical effort to claim his beloved Aura, once and for all, as his own.

Brownrigg’s novel for children, “Kepler’s Dream,” will be published next year.

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SAY HER NAME

by Zetta Elliott ; illustrated by Loveis Wise ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 14, 2020

This empowering collection belongs on every shelf.

A collection of poems centering the experiences of black women, girls, and femmes.

Elliott ( Dragons in a Bag , 2018, etc.) offers up a poetic love letter exploring a vast range of topics: Black Lives Matter; microaggressions such as hair touching; violence against black women and girls; the Middle Passage; what self-care and resistance can look like; not fitting into prescribed definitions of blackness; and surviving in the U.S. (a country where, echoing Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival,” she writes, “…you are a miracle / because we were never / meant to survive / not as human beings / yet despite their best efforts / to grind us down / still we rise / we strut / dazzle / & defy the odds…”). It’s clear that Elliott poured not only her talent, but her heart into this collection, which acknowledges race-wide struggles as well as very personal ones. True to the title, several poems allude to black women and young people who have been murdered; the references to black trans women may be too subtle for readers to recognize without referencing the notes. Elliott includes a sprinkling of mentor poems that served as inspiration to her and that form an introduction to readers unfamiliar with the poets’ works (though why Phillis Wheatley’s ode to internalized anti-blackness “On Being Brought From Africa to America” was included without context isn’t clear). Art not seen.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-368-04524-7

Page Count: 112

Publisher: Jump at the Sun/Disney-Hyperion

Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION

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More by Zetta Elliott

• BOOK REVIEW

by Zetta Elliott & Lyn Miller-Lachmann

by Zetta Elliott ; illustrated by Cherise Harris

by Zetta Elliott ; illustrated by Geneva B

THE NEW QUEER CONSCIENCE

From the pocket change collective series.

by Adam Eli ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020

Small but mighty necessary reading.

A miniature manifesto for radical queer acceptance that weaves together the personal and political.

Eli, a cis gay white Jewish man, uses his own identities and experiences to frame and acknowledge his perspective. In the prologue, Eli compares the global Jewish community to the global queer community, noting, “We don’t always get it right, but the importance of showing up for other Jews has been carved into the DNA of what it means to be Jewish. It is my dream that queer people develop the same ideology—what I like to call a Global Queer Conscience.” He details his own isolating experiences as a queer adolescent in an Orthodox Jewish community and reflects on how he and so many others would have benefitted from a robust and supportive queer community. The rest of the book outlines 10 principles based on the belief that an expectation of mutual care and concern across various other dimensions of identity can be integrated into queer community values. Eli’s prose is clear, straightforward, and powerful. While he makes some choices that may be divisive—for example, using the initialism LGBTQIAA+ which includes “ally”—he always makes clear those are his personal choices and that the language is ever evolving.

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09368-9

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

More In The Series

by Shavone Charles ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky

by Gaby Melian

by Leo Baker ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky

TAKING ON THE PLASTICS CRISIS

by Hannah Testa ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 13, 2020

Brief yet inspirational, this story will galvanize youth to use their voices for change.

Testa’s connection to and respect for nature compelled her to begin championing animal causes at the age of 10, and this desire to have an impact later propelled her to dedicate her life to fighting plastic pollution. Starting with the history of plastic and how it’s produced, Testa acknowledges the benefits of plastics for humanity but also the many ways it harms our planet. Instead of relying on recycling—which is both insufficient and ineffective—she urges readers to follow two additional R’s: “refuse” and “raise awareness.” Readers are encouraged to do their part, starting with small things like refusing to use plastic straws and water bottles and eventually working up to using their voices to influence business and policy change. In the process, she highlights other youth advocates working toward the same cause. Short chapters include personal examples, such as observations of plastic pollution in Mauritius, her maternal grandparents’ birthplace. Testa makes her case not only against plastic pollution, but also for the work she’s done, resulting in something of a college-admissions–essay tone. Nevertheless, the first-person accounts paired with science will have an impact on readers. Unfortunately, no sources are cited and the lack of backmatter is a missed opportunity.

Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-22333-8

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION

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Wednesday 11 June 2014

Book review: say her name by james dawson.

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Paperback , 322 pages

ISBN: 9781642594522

$17.95 $10.77 40% off

Ebook, 224 pages

ISBN: 9781642594737

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ISBN: 9781642594942

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Fill the void. Lift your voice. Say Her Name. Black women, girls, and femmes as young as seven and as old as ninety-three have been killed by the police, though we rarely hear their names or learn their stories. Breonna Taylor, Alberta Spruill, Rekia Boyd, Shantel Davis, Shelly Frey, Kayla Moore, Kyam Livingston, Miriam Carey, Michelle Cusseaux, and Tanisha Anderson are among the many lives that should have been.  #SayHerName provides an analytical framework for understanding Black women's susceptibility to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, and it explains how—through black feminist storytelling and ritual—we can effectively mobilize various communities and empower them to advocate for racial justice. Centering Black women’s experiences in police violence and gender violence discourses sends the powerful message that, in fact, all Black lives matter and that the police cannot kill without consequence.  This is a powerful story of Black feminist practice, community-building, enablement, and Black feminist reckoning.

“The lack of visibility of Black women has changed—and the incredible work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, African American Policy Forum, and the #SayHerName campaign are examples of this. So is this powerful book.” —Janelle Monáe, from the Foreword “Kimberlé Crenshaw is a national treasure.” —Kerry Washington “The United States does not value Black life—and white supremacy threatens all of humanity.  The Black women’s stories of state violence and public silence featured in this powerful and inspiring book are extremely important. We bear children, so when they are robbed from us, it’s like our own breath is taken away. We thank the #SayHerName campaign and Kimberlé Crenshaw and Janelle Monáe for uplifting our stories. The African American Policy Forum is a vital platform for Black voices.”  —Samaria Rice, founder, Tamir Rice Foundation, and mother of Tamir Rice "Reading #SayHerName is an act of solidarity, refusal, and love. Every piercing story in this book, every Black woman heartlessly murdered by the police, had a mother, a sister, a family, a community. Every one of them matters."  —V (formerly Eve Ensler), author of  The Vagina Monologues and Reckoning

"In addition to breaking the silence by offering poignant and loving stories of the black girls and women violated by state violence, #SayHerName also documents the organizations and strategies that have been created to combat that violence. In its powerful accumulation of  memories and testimonies, we should read this book, then, as providing the resources for a much-needed movement.” —Roderick A. Ferguson, Yale University

Other books of interest

How we get free, abolition. feminism. now., from #blacklivesmatter to black liberation (expanded second edition), assata taught me, we do this 'til we free us.

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Here's how a group of fans changed the movie adaptation of It Ends With Us

"They were right and I was wrong," screenwriter Christy Hall tells Entertainment Weekly.

Sydney Bucksbaum is a writer at Entertainment Weekly covering all things pop culture – but TV is her one true love. She currently lives in Los Angeles but grew up in Chicago so please don't make fun of her accent when it slips out.

Bringing It Ends With Us from the page to the screen was not something the team behind the movie adaptation of Colleen Hoover 's hit romantic drama took lightly.

Screenwriter-producer Christy Hall tells Entertainment Weekly that she "lost sleep" thinking about how she was responsible for adapting such a beloved book — not only for fans of Hoover's, but also for the author herself since the story is based on her parents' relationship. That's why Hall and director-star Justin Baldoni went straight to the source to make sure they were doing the book justice.

Nicole Rivelli/Sony

"There are things that we changed and massaged and explored, but we really wanted to get it right," Hall tells EW. "So we did a really cool thing where a couple drafts in, [production company Wayfarer Studios] invited Colleen to Los Angeles, and then they put out a thing on Instagram and Twitter to say, 'Who's a huge fan of this book? Who wants to have an early read of the script and give their thoughts?'"

Hall explains that Wayfarer Studios had an open application where LA-based fans could write in to explain why they loved the book and why they were the right person to help make the movie version better.

"They hand selected, I think there were 20 megafans that had to sign an NDA and came in," Hall says. "They printed off scripts for them, hard copies. This was an early draft of mine. They read the script, we all had lunch, and then we did a roundtable with me, Wayfarer, Colleen was there, and just asked the fans questions like, 'What did you like most? What did you feel like was missing?'"

The roundtable discussion went on for three hours where the group of fans went over the film script and gave their honest opinions — and Hall used all their notes for her next rewrite. "It was just incredible to be guided by actual fans [who said], 'This was a scene I really missed,' or, 'I really liked that you did this or that,' or, 'Even though that's not in the book, it felt like it could have been in the book,'" Hall says. "And so that was a really remarkable experience early on."

It Ends With Us,  the first of Hoover's books to be adapted for the big screen, centers on Lily ( Blake Lively ), a woman who overcomes a traumatic childhood with an abusive father to begin a new life in Boston. Things seem to be on track as she follows her dreams to open her own flower shop, but when she falls in love with charming neurosurgeon Ryle (Baldoni), she begins to realize his abusive behavior only continues the harmful cycle she's been trying to escape her whole life. Their toxic love is further complicated when Lily's childhood love, Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), reappears in her life, upending everything she thought she knew and wanted.

The idea to bring in the focus group to give notes came directly from Baldoni's Wayfarer Studios, and Hall thinks it was "really smart" to "activate" the fans early on in the adaptation process. "It was really good to hear things that they bumped on or things that they didn't necessarily miss," Hall says. "It was good to test things."

Jojo Whilden/Sony

Hall, for example, changed smaller details like the name of Atlas' restaurant from Bib's (a.k.a. Better In Boston) to Root, to thematically tie together other important aspects of the story. She was pleasantly surprised that, although the group of fans questioned her decision, they accepted her change and weren't precious about evolving the story. "It was fun to test things like, 'Is that going to massively bum you out?'" she remembers asking. "And they were like, 'No, no, no. We were just wondering why.'"

But there was one edit she made from the book that almost incited a (figurative) riot. At a crucial point in the story, Lily says the title It Ends With Us out loud, and Hall omitted that from her script. "As a screenwriter, a big no-no is you don't want any character to ever say the title of the film," she explains. "So in my initial draft, the draft that they read, I had her say the line, 'It stops here, between you and me,' blah, blah, blah. I didn't have her say, 'It ends with us.'"

The reaction to her changing that line was swift and intense. "The entire room of 20 megafans were like, 'You have to say it!'" Hall remembers. "I was like, 'I'm sorry, forgive me! I was testing it out!' It was like a wall of voices screaming at me, 'She has to say it!'"

Hall's defense of why she made the edit didn't sway any of the fans. "I went, 'Typically you don't say the [title],' and they were like, 'It doesn't matter. In this movie, she has to,'" she says. "And I have to say, now, when I really watch the film, I'm like, 'They were right and I was wrong.' It's different in this movie. It is."

She doesn't regret trying out a different version of that line, but "you need a talent like Blake Lively to pull it off, where it doesn't take you out [of the movie]. It actually is now my favorite moment in the film. It's so honest, it's so real, it's so raw. I find her performance to be really profound, so I am grateful that it's in there, and as it should be. I love that they read an early draft and they just didn't let me get away with it for one second."

Want more movie news? Sign up for  Entertainment Weekly 's free newsletter  to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

The original line from the book now stays intact in the movie, and that wouldn't have happened without the focus group of fans fighting to keep it. "That was a really funny moment because sometimes they'd be split on things, but that one was a resounding, 100 percent out of 100 percent were like, 'How dare you?!'" Hall says with a laugh. "And I was like, 'I'm so sorry. I must be absolved of this sin.'"

After the roundtable ended, Hall got the approval from the two most important people: Hoover and her mother, who was the inspiration for the book. "Colleen brought her mother, which was incredible because her mom's story sparked the whole thing, and getting to meet her was such an honor and a privilege," Hall says. "I remember Colleen and I ended up out on the sidewalk together with her mom, and I just said to her, 'You could have chosen anyone, and I'm just so grateful that you endorsed me to be the one to do this. Thank you for trusting me with your baby.'"

Hall continues, "She smiled at me and she was like, 'Honestly, Christy, you've done a really great job,' and I've never forgotten that moment. If Colleen doesn't love it, then it's like I have failed. But she said, 'You did a great job.' It was just this sweet moment out on the sidewalk, and I wasn't even done yet, but she just could just see the care that was going into it. I just didn't want to let her down."

It Ends With Us  opens in theaters Aug. 9.

Related Articles

In Her Name

By Bradley Gibson | August 8, 2024

Canadian actress turned filmmaker Sarah Carter presents her debut feature, In Her Name , a black-and-white art drama/comedy. She wrote, directed, and produced the story of two estranged sisters forced to confront the past and each other as they come together to manage the affairs of their dying father. Sisters Freya (Erin Hammond) and Fiona (Ciera Danielle) live in the shadow of their eccentric, famous artist father, Marv (Phillipe Caland). They are all haunted by the memory of their mother and wife, played in flashbacks by Carter herself. 

Marv lives in a luxurious estate populated with consorts, artists, writers, poets, and other bizarre hangers-on. The house functions like Warhol’s New York factory, where the usual constraints of polite society don’t apply, with Marv overlooking his menagerie like a rapidly declining Dr. Moreau. 

Freya followed her father’s pattern in life, becoming an artist. Fiona is more buttoned up, having turned away from the art life swirl. She’s married but unhappy. Returning to the home where she grew up is jarring and brings up the many issues from her childhood that she thought she had successfully repressed. A writer named Peter (James Aaron Oliver) sets his sights on Fiona and tries to seduce her, adding to her confusion and discomfort. Marv responds violently to any discussion of what to do with the house and his estate in terms of end-of-life planning, with Fiona as the target of his rage. 

There are hints of Serge Gainsbourg in the music and vibe of the film. As the drug-addled ambiance of the continuous party progresses, Fiona is seemingly re-initiated into the shared solipsism of this bizarre congregation. The visions and chaos swirl around her as she and Freya try to find some path forward for how to deal with their father now, and after he’s gone. Was his life truly art, or was it narcissistic self-indulgence? Will they take his legacy and make something meaningful of their own lives or follow him into nihilistic madness? Will they have a choice?

“… estranged sisters forced to confront the past and each other… “

With the availability of inexpensive digital color cameras, a filmmaker choosing black and white owes the audience a solid explanation of why that needs to be clear in the film itself. If the black-and-white aspect of the film isn’t a critical element for that particular story, then it comes off as faux-arty and pretentious. Whether Carter pulls this off is a question left to the viewer. She’s clearly calling back the best non-color films of the French New Wave, which is a bold comparison to make for a debut filmmaker. The composition of the shots and the movement does present a beautiful image, and the flow of the shots is elegant.  

The performances are a delight to watch. Hammond, Danielle, and Calland provide three anchor points of the experience, and the real meaning of the film can be found in their dynamic. Danielle does the heavy lifting as Fiona, portraying the discomfort of someone coming back to a place and people she’d left behind. 

This film is meant to make you feel before you think, and it achieves that goal. This requires a viewer to allow themselves to be lulled into the tone of the piece rather than trying to intellectualize what’s happening. The soundtrack of swinging jazz contributes to the overall texture and sets the stage for the wild party backdrop of the story. In Her Name has delightful moments of pure gold that rise above a scattered base layer of homage to an older film style.

In Her Name (2024)

Directed and Written: Sarah Carter

Starring: Erin Hammond, Ciera Danielle, Philippe Caland, etc.

Movie score: 7/10

"…delightful moments of pure gold"

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Nancy Pelosi’s Just-Released Book Is Already Surging Up The Amazon Charts

By Jonathan Zavaleta

Jonathan Zavaleta

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Rolling Stone may receive an affiliate commission.

Nancy Pelosi may no longer be the leader of the House Democratic Caucus, but there’s little doubt that she still wields enormous influence in the party. It’s widely believed that she played a key role in President Biden dropping his reelection bid , and her behind-the-scenes push to get Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to choose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate may have tipped the scales in his favor.

Her latest book, The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House provides a behind-the-scenes look at instrumental moments in her nearly four decades in Congress, with a focus on the legislative accomplishments she achieved as Speaker of The House. It was published on August 6 by Simon & Schuster, and it’s already the #1 Best Seller in Women’s Biographies on Amazon and in the top 10 bestsellers on Amazon overall .

The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House

In addition to instrumental legislative achievements, the book details the horrific moments of political violence Pelosi experienced. She details her account of the January 6 insurrection from inside the Capitol, which Donald Trump has incredulously blamed Pelosi for . She also discusses her family’s experience following the brutal attack on her husband in their San Francisco home in 2022.

Ever cautious and calculated, Pelosi has disputed the characterization of The Art of Power as a memoir. But the book does detail bookend moments in Pelosi’s life, including her decision to get into politics in the first place at the urging of her daughter.

It also discusses what she sees as her signature legislative accomplishment, the passing of the Affordable Care Act, and she recounts Senator John McCain’s admission to her that he would cast the deciding vote against its repeal.

The book does not discuss any possible role Pelosi may have played in Biden ending his reelection bid , and in a recent interview with NPR , she insisted that “I didn’t call one person, people called me,” to dispute the idea that she was actively pushing for Biden to drop out.

The Art of Power is rapidly climbing up the book charts, including landing in the top 10 on Amazon’s bestseller list and the top 10 on Barnes & Noble’s bestseller list . It’s available in hardcover, Kindle, audio CD, and audiobook formats .

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Fact Checking Trump’s Mar-a-Lago News Conference

The former president took questions from reporters for more than hour. We examined his claims, attacks and policy positions.

By The New York Times

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Former President Donald J. Trump held an hourlong news conference with reporters on Thursday at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, during which he attacked Vice President Kamala Harris, his general election opponent, criticized the Biden administration’s policies and boasted of the crowd size at his rallies. We took a closer look at many of his claims.

Trump claims his Jan. 6 rally crowd rivaled the 1963 March on Washington. Estimates say otherwise.

“If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech. And you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people. If not, we had more.” — Former President Donald J. Trump

This lacks evidence.

Mr. Trump was talking about the crowds gathered for his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, and for the “I Have a Dream” speech the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered during the March on Washington in 1963. While it is difficult to gauge exact crowd sizes, estimates counter Mr. Trump’s claim that the numbers gathered were comparable. Dr. King’s speech drew an estimated 250,000 people . The House Select Committee responsible for investigating the events of Jan. 6 estimated that Mr. Trump’s speech drew 53,000 people.

“She wants to take away your guns.”

— Former President Donald J. Trump

Ms. Harris, in 2019, said she supports a gun buyback program for assault weapons, not all guns. Her campaign told The New York Times recently that she no longer supports a buyback program.

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Peter Baker

“They take the strategic national reserves. They’re virtually empty now. We have never had it this low.”

This is exaggerated..

President Biden has indeed tapped the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try to mitigate gasoline price increases , drawing it down by about 40 percent from when he took office, and it is currently at the lowest level since the 1980s. But it still has 375 million barrels in it now , which is not “virtually empty” nor is it at the lowest level ever.

“The vast majority of the country does support me.”

Mr. Trump never won a majority of the popular vote in either of the elections he ran in and never had the approval of a majority of Americans in a single day of Gallup polling during his presidency. An average of polls by FiveThirtyEight.com shows that he is viewed favorably by just 43 percent of Americans today and has the same level of support in a matchup against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Alan Rappeport

“They’re going to destroy Social Security.”

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have pledged not to make any cuts to America’s social safety net programs. Mr. Trump suggested this year that he was open to scaling back the programs when he said there was “a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting.” He later walked back those comments and pledged to protect the programs. But if changes to the programs are not made, the programs’ benefits will automatically be reduced eventually. Government reports released earlier this year projected that the Social Security and disability insurance programs, if combined, would not have enough money to pay all of their obligations in 2035. Medicare will be unable to pay all its hospital bills starting in 2036.

Coral Davenport

“Everybody is going to be forced to buy an electric car.”

While the Biden administration has enacted regulations designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032, the rules do not require consumers to buy electric vehicles.

“Our tax cuts, which are the biggest in history.”

The $1.5 trillion tax cut, enacted in December 2017, ranks below at least half a dozen others by several metrics. The 1981 tax cut enacted under President Ronald Reagan is the largest as a percentage of the economy and by its reduction to federal revenue. The 2012 cut enacted under President Barack Obama amounted to the largest cut in inflation-adjusted dollars: $321 billion a year.

“They’re drilling now because they had to go back because gasoline was going up to seven, eight, nine dollars a barrel. The day after the election, if they won, you’re going to have fuel prices go through the roof.”

The price of gasoline reached a low of $1.98 per gallon in April 2020, when Mr. Trump was president, chiefly as a result of the drop in driving in the first months of the Covid pandemic. It rose to a peak of $5 per gallon in June 2022, but has since steadily dropped to $3.60 per gallon in July 2024. The United States has steadily increased its oil production over the last decade, becoming the world’s largest producer of oil in 2018, a status it still holds today .

“If you go back and check your records for 18 months, I had a talk with Abdul. Abdul was the leader of the Taliban still is, but had a strong talk with him. For 18 months. Not one American soldier was shot at or killed, but not even shot at 18 months.”

Mr. Trump spoke with a leader of the Taliban in March 2020. In the 18 months that followed, from April 2020 to October 2021, 13 soldiers died in hostile action in Afghanistan.

“Democrats are really the radical ones on this, because they’re allowed to do abortion on the eighth and ninth month, and even after birth.”

No state has passed a law allowing for the execution of a baby after it is born, which is infanticide. Moreover, abortions later in pregnancy are very rare: In 2021, less than 1 percent of abortions happened after 21 weeks’ gestation, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report based on data from state and other health agencies. More than 90 percent of abortions happened within 13 weeks of gestation.