Geraldine Brooks – on life, love and loss – at the Library

Geraldine Brooks remembered the day her father took her to see the newspapers.

This was in her native Australia. She was little, maybe 8. He was a proofreader at the paper, an American who settled in Down Under after a singing career, and he took her to the pressroom floor, where the heavy linotype machines whirred and clanged and the noise was unbelievable.

“The foreman hit the button for the afternoon edition and this paper’s just spinning across the room and the newspapers start landing on the conveyor belt and Dad reached out and got one and handed it to me and it was … hot off the press,” she laughed. “I looked down on those big black headlines and I thought, ‘I am the first one that knows what’s going on in this city right now.’ And I just wanted that.”

Reader, she got it.

Some six decades, 10 books and many an international byline later, she recounted this origin story to a delighted crowd in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium on a recent night.

Brooks, the 2025 recipient of the Library’s Prize for American Fiction, has been a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal; then a mom who wrote novels since she couldn’t travel so much (and won a Pulitzer Prize); and, most recently, a memoirist looking back at the shock and grief left behind after her husband, journalist and author (and fellow Pulitzer winner) Tony Horwitz, died seven years ago.

Horwitz collapsed due to heart failure — he was 60 and in apparent great health — on Memorial Day, 2019, during a book tour. The aftermath provided the soul-scraping work of “Memorial Days,” her most recent book.

Both in the book and in her talk she explained importance of persevering with one’s craft through the canyons of grief, summed up in advice she attributed to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Supreme Court associate justice: “Do your work. It might not be your best work, but it will be good work, and it will be what saves you.”

It was a draining period. She retreated for a time to Flinders Island, a small dot in the ocean between Australia and its southern state of Tasmania. Fewer than 1,000 people live there. And there, far from the United States where her husband died but close to home, she found the place she could set down the aching grief she had for the future life she and Horwitz would have had together.

“At home now, I make more time for the beauty,” she writes. “I make it a point to notice the trees, in all their various seasonal personalities. To be with the critters that share my space. A nest of baby rabbits, a coin-sized painted turtle hatchling, a fluffy mallard duckling out for its first swim — these encounters, more than almost anything else, have the power to elevate me out of sadness.”

Brooks was in conversation with book critic Ron Charles, who worked for years at The Washington Post and is now on Substack. He asked about the transition from writing high-octane journalism — foreign correspondence from war-ravaged countries — to writing the kind of historical fiction that has defined her career over the past three decades. She’s sold millions of copies of her novels around the world and seen them translated into dozens of languages.

“March,” which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize, melded her journalism and fiction skills. The book is her imagining of the absent father in Louisa May Alcott’s post-Civil War classic, “Little Women.” In Brooks’ novel, March, the father, is an idealist who goes off to fight for the Union; after a shattering experience, he returns home to a family who has no idea of the horrors that have changed him.

“In journalism — to me — the purpose of the work was to show how the decisions that are made in the White House or in Whitehall (the London area that is home to the U.K. government) actually plays out in the lives of human beings,” she said.

“But often when you’re reporting, you know more than you can prove. You can’t find the two confirming sources that you need to put something in print. In fiction, you can follow the line of fact as far as it leads. But when the historical voices fall silent — or when those voices never had a chance to tell their own story — you can do all that research and figure out what you think might have happened and you can just write it. It’s tremendously liberating.”

She’s written fiction as wide-ranging in time and geography as 3,000 years ago in Israel (“The Secret Chord”), 1990s Bosnia (“People of the Book”), 1600s Britain (“Year of Wonders”) and a tale that covers the United States from the middle of the 19th century to the  21st (“Horse”).

The trick to making all those eras seem real, she says, is to keep your narrative eye on what’s timeless.

“I mean hate and love and fear and wanting to live and wanting to see your children live,” she said. “Those are the things that shape our consciousness, not the material goods, not whether the tables are made of oak or synthetic plastic … The thing isn’t important. It’s the human emotion — and that, I believe, doesn’t change.”

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