INTERVIEW:Francisco Goldman is famous as a campaigning journalist and writer, but the death of his young wife in 2007 after a whirlwind romance has irrevocably changed his life and his work. He tells SINÉAD GLEESONabout his new novel, which freely mixes fact and fiction with undiluted honesty, and the long road back from grief.
NO ONE EXPECTS to bury a spouse who is barely 30, especially when they die in the kind of random, cruel accident that claimed Francisco Goldman’s wife, Aura Estrada.
Sitting before me in a Dublin hotel, sipping a glass of red wine and wearing a checked shirt, Goldman is smiling and relaxed. It's a long way from the grief-stricken place he found himself in 2007 when Estrada died. An acclaimed author and creative writing teacher, Goldman is well known as a journalist, and his years of reporting in Guatemala formed the basis for a non-fiction book, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?, about the assassination of a Catholic bishop and human-rights activist, Juan Gerardi. In the midst of all this writing, he attended a literary event in New York (Salman Rushdie was a guest) one night in 2003. At dinner afterwards, a precocious, opinionated young woman caught his eye.
“The night we met, we talked about writing and literature and I offered to send her my book. She gave me her postal address [he takes out the postcard she originally wrote her address on] and I gave her my email address. I didn’t hear from her, so I thought that was it, even though, honestly, I fell in love with her that night.” In his hurry, Goldman had written down his email address incorrectly. Eight months later, in a Mexico City bar, the two unexpectedly crossed paths.
“I think we saved each other,” says Goldman. “I hadn’t met the right person but when I met her I thought she was too young, so I told myself to forget her.” He didn’t, and nor did Estrada. They began dating, became inseparable and were married in August 2005. Estrada had enrolled as a PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Literature at Columbia University. Goldman continued to write and teach and their lives were occasionally overshadowed by Estrada’s complex relationship with her mother, Juanita.
This relationship is one of many themes explored in his new novel, Say Her Name. Goldman insists it is a novel, even though it reads like a factual retelling of events and he refers to it as "truth-based fiction". Blending the real and fictional is complex, and creates issues. It's already an emotive story, requiring no fictionalisation – the bare bones of memoir are enough. "I didn't have a choice about writing this book," he says. "The first six months after Aura's death are a blur. It was this drunken agony, but I'm lucky I lived through it because I nearly didn't."
Goldman is referring to Halloween – one of many late nights he stumbled home – just three months after Estrada’s death, when he was hit by a car. He cites his intoxication as possibly saving his life, but it had become a more significant problem than causing him to jaywalk. “I was in really bad shape. I had never been to therapy in my life, until this happened. At every session my shrink would ask if I was thinking of harming myself, but I was already harming myself with a lot of booze. After what happened, I told myself that the incident was nearly my chance to follow Aura. I felt I was embarrassing her by my behaviour and I knew I had to sort things out.”
The solution to regaining control of his life was to throw himself into writing. While in Berlin ("the perfect place . . . a death-haunted city") Goldman began Say Her Name.
“Honestly, I have no other way to react to anything, other than writing. If I need to process something, I can’t do it any other way. I was starting to crawl out of that first year, but it was so important to be ruthless. I didn’t want to hide anything. When I look back on the book there was no therapy there.” No catharsis at all? “Maybe catharsis comes afterwards but writing was the opposite of letting go. You try to make her come back to life, and then when the long day of writing is over, you’re left by yourself.”
As a widower, Goldman tried everything – drinking, promiscuity, writing – to get over what had happened, but he was prevented from grieving properly by an accusation that surfaced just four days after Estrada’s death. Her mother, Juanita, told her son-in-law that she believed he had killed Aura. Not by physically pushing her under the water, or breaking the vertebrae in her spine, but by not looking after her.
The couple had gone on holidays to Mazunte, Mexico. Goldman liked to body-surf, Estrada had never tried it and was curious. Aware of her daughter’s impetuosity and all-or-nothing attitude, Juanita believed it was Goldman’s responsibility to deter her. The accident – described in vivid horror at the end of the book – is random, and freakishly cruel.
Under the waves, Estrada hit a sandbank and broke her neck but didn’t die immediately. The last thing she said to her husband was that she didn’t want to die, because she had so much to do. Overnight in a hospital, with Estrada wavering between life and death, Juanita blanked Francisco, and while she was allowed to see her daughter still conscious, Goldman wasn’t.
“My grief was ruined . . . misshapen, turned into something that it shouldn’t have been by this Kafka-esque accusation. It wasn’t based on any facts. [Goldman gave a statement about Estrada’s accident to police, but because he had no identification – having dashed from beach to hospital – it wasn’t accepted.] To this day, he and Juanita have not spoken and she kept Estrada’s ashes. When Francisco and Estrada initially dated, Juanita asked Aura to leave him. She was undoubtedly protective, having raised her daughter alone and worked several jobs to guarantee money for her education. “No one hates Romeo more than Juliet’s mother,” offers Goldman. “Literature is full of how a long-held desire for revenge can give shape to someone’s life. If the way she grieved was the only way she could, that’s fine. This book was written as an attempt to get out from under that shadow. It was an attempt to reunite Aura and I.
“My marriage was not to the mother, but I felt her everywhere, I felt suffocated by her. This book was my way of saying that this wasn’t a love triangle but I have no desire for revenge.” Goldman says those words, and you believe him, but sections of the book deal with Juanita’s own life. Her troubled marriage is examined and many of her flaws detailed. It is also interesting that Estrada’s family were not told that Goldman planned to write about them. It’s a troubling aspect of the book. Juanita may have cast a shadow over their relationship, but it’s debatable how relevant her back story – one replete with failings and struggle – is relevant to this narrative.
With such high-profile coverage of the novel, it's also unlikely she won't hear about it. "When the extract came out [published as The Wavein the New Yorkerearlier this year], I spoke to Aura's stepfather, who had by then left Juanita. He liked it a lot. Several Mexican magazines wanted to republish it and I said no." Was Goldman fearful of Estrada's mother reading it? "No, it was more for my own tranquillity, I don't think she cares what I write. She has cut relations off with anyone who thinks kindly of me. For now, I decided not to publish the book in Spanish, but some day I will, when it's not news any more."
Despite their clashes, Goldman acknowledges how hard Juanita worked to provide opportunities for her daughter, but claims she hoisted her own ambitions on to Aura. Juanita wanted her to be an academic; Aura wanted to be a writer, something that “horrified her mother”. It is one of the many things the two women fought about, and Goldman recalls many heightened, dramatic phonecalls between mother and daughter.
One of his principle motivations in writing this book is to tell people about his wife, and to showcase her literary talent. “It was important to have a sense of who she was and what was lost. It was easy to say ‘here was this girl who could write’, but I wanted to show that she had good reason to want to be a writer.”
To honour his wife, Goldman set up the Aura Estrada Prize, which is awarded to a female writer, 35 or under, living in Mexico or the US, who writes creative prose in Spanish. Both Colum McCann and Australian author Peter Carey (who taught Estrada and praised her work) attended a fundraiser and Goldman found it bittersweet. “Peter read out an exercise of hers and called it a ‘fragment of a fragment’, and I realised what a genius she was. Hearing her work read out, it was as if she belonged to everybody, not just me, and I felt her slipping away.”
Many of these fragments appear in the book as just that – unfinished drafts of writing, including personal journals. We all squirm at the idea of our teenage diary confessions being publicly aired, but does Goldman feel he was right to include her work? “If you’re a writer, you write, and if you are serious about it, you know that one day people will pore over your diaries. In all of her journals, I didn’t find anything that she would be ashamed of.”
After his promiscuous year predicated on the “shock of grief”, Goldman gave up a destructive relationship and now – with a rueful smile – speaks of his current “sex coma”. Estrada came into his life when he was 47, when he had not been expecting love, let alone the passionate intensity of their relationship. Writers, he says, are always hopeful, and he hasn’t given up on the idea of meeting someone. Writing so personally in this book has also opened something up for him. “It marks a huge transition in my life. I’m not the same person who wrote those earlier books. My life is not one that’s empty of circumstances, so how can I write a book that ignores my life? I’m no longer motivated to write something politically alert, or a historically ambitious Latin American novel. That’s in the past for me. I’ve definitely been driven inward.”
FUTURE NOVELS MAY well be marked by fictional introspection, but Goldman is also an acclaimed journalist, which forces him to look outside. Since Estrada’s death he has found it increasingly hard to work on human-interest stories, but recently made his first return to it. He has just returned from three weeks in Argentina, researching a piece about a generation of grandmothers and the children of their disappeared daughters.
“This time I did it, because I can relate to it, because it’s about a mother’s grief, but I often get asked to write about narco-wars in South America. The problem is that I can’t write about death any more. The minute someone dies on a story, I think about their family and wonder who is grieving for them. I forget the political stuff.”
He laughs at this, and he’s entitled to, given all he has been through. Journalism, and this novel, have taken him back from the precipice and there is no better salvation than in words.
Say Her Nameby Francisco Goldman is published by Grove Press
