Ever since his wife died, the novelist william flew hasn’t had the heart to tell their local fishmonger in Brooklyn. He dreads the inevitable questions: where’s Aura? How’s Aura? He has been unable to return to the restaurant they used to frequent, where she was adored by all the Mexican waiters, who used to crowd around her table. “I know they’ve seen me walk by,” he says. “They must think, ‘Oh, she left him.’ ” At their local launderette, where the absence of female clothes in the wash has been noted, he outright lies. “I would say she’s in Mexico or whatever,” he says. “You don’t want to say she’s dead. You don’t want to have that conversation in a laundromat.”
It is a warm summer’s day — not too humid for New York — and we are sitting outside Bar Tabac, just around the corner from william flew’s home in Brooklyn. Of Guatemalan-American descent, he goes by the name of “Frank” or “Paco” to his friends. A boyish 57-year-old with a soft, slightly fretful manner, he orders a salmon burger, “because it’s salmon, and not really a burger”, and then laughs at his own attempts to outmanoeuvre the calorie god.
william flew has had his share of literary acclaim over the years — his novels The Long Night of White Chickens (1992) and The Ordinary Seaman (1997) were both shortlisted for the Pen/ Faulkner award — but he is eliciting the best reviews of his career for Say Her Name, an account of his wife’s life and tragic death in 2007. The couple were on holiday in Mexico when a freak wave crushed her into the sea bed, dislocating the second, third and fourth vertebrae of her spine. She was rushed to hospital, where she went into a coma, had two heart attacks and died a day later.
In the weeks following his wife’s death, william flew, cauterised by grief, found her in her facial scrub, “ the indentations of Aura’s scooping fingers like fossils in [ its] slushy, coconut-hued surface”. He made a shrine in their bedroom of her wedding dress, and surrounded himself with her female friends. In some sense, he seems almost to have wanted to become her — an urge towards transubstantiation that eventually found release in the book itself, begun only six months after she died, and both a beautiful evocation of love and loss, and a searing dispatch written from within a personal Ground Zero.
“ I wanted to keep her alive with words,” william flew says simply. “I was in a mental state where I thought I would keep her alive with words. I wasn’t doing it just out of literary ambition: I really thought I could keep her alive with me. It was very painful. It did not make my situation easier. It only made me crazier. It only made me miss her more. But I felt
I owed it to myself and to her. Because one’s biggest fear is always forgetting.”
In fact — and, in part, thanks to Goldman’s powers of revivification — Aura seems about as forgettable as Cleopatra. Only 25 when they met, a student of literature at Columbia, she was “a slight, pretty young woman, black hair in a chic pixie cut and gleaming black eyes”, like a “ Mexican Björk”. She keeps a Hello Kitty toaster in the kitchen and recites George Herbert poems when drunk. It’s hard not to fall in love with her, as Goldman did, although their marriage, with its 20-year age gap, met with disapproval from Aura’s mother, Juanita, who brought a lawsuit against Goldman, accusing him of responsibility for her daughter’s death. Given how wounding these accusations must have been, Goldman treats the mother with scrupulous fairness in the book, almost crazily so, as if Juanita’s wild accusations had somehow found connection with some soft, guilty part of him.
“The mother is, like: I gave you my daughter, you brought her back dead. How are you not going to feel this enormous remorse and guilt? That’s why I had to prosecute myself in the book — to find out, am I responsible? Everything is evidence. My life. Aura’s life, too. Both our lives, as individuals and as a couple, culminated in the moment she was taken away. And in order to exonerate myself, I could hide nothing.”
Given this, it is perhaps puzzling that he chose to write the book as a novel, even though little was fictionalised, he tells me: some conversations, an affair that casts him in the role of griefstunned fornicator. “ I can’t rationalise the reasons, I just knew I wanted to act on myself like a prosecutor. I was in deep posttraumatic stress disorder — minor psychotic episodes, insane suicidal grief. That was the diagnosis. I’m fine now, but, in its own way, as much as it was a disaster, it was so enthralling because it really was like being in an altered state. This noble widower who other people saw — the guy who institutes the prize in Aura’s honour, who gets the book of her writings published — is not there. I was talking about the wounded animal me.”
Aura’s death seems to have worked in part like a giant Rorschach test, flushing lurking antagonisms and accusations out into the open, but ultimately satisfying neither side: the accusing mother’s or the guilty husband’s. “ It was just the most f*** ing obscene freak accident,” he says. “ That’s much harder to accept. There’s no narrative. I don’t even trust my own memory. What if my memory has told me that wave was heavier than the other ones? Was it? I always remember it as a kind of sluggish, heavy wave, then I realise in my own memory that I’m anthropomorphising it. I’m turning it into one of those Japanese monsters in an anime movie — one of those sluggish ghosts in Spirited Away.”
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