Say Her Name

Product Information

Di su nombre" es un libro que te lleva por distintos sentimientos, las primeras 200 páginas podría decir que odié a su narrador. Más leía más lo odiaba. Pero, se entreveía que habría algo más. Y así fue. I was simply spellbound by his story and his prose. Although this book is non-fiction, you will be instantly gripped by the love story and the angst of it. It is a book that haunts you. Es una historia de amor como no hay otra igual…". Es una historia de un amor interrumpido por el destino. Por el destino fatal que a todos nos espera. No hay más. Once, looking for comfort in my own blinding grief, I sought solace in the book "Grief" by C. S. Lewis. I simply couldn't find any books on the market that could reach the level of agony I was experiencing, nor could I find another human being who could relate to it. "Grief" failed to comfort me with it's intellectualizing the process of grief. Grief of losing my husband had left me crying out for understanding--for some relief from the pain. Grief is emotional and physical agony...it's not something that just dissipates as the days go by like people say it does. It's something that rewires you, shatters your whole life and changes you forever. Finally, Francisco Goldman has touched the ends of that agony and is capable of sharing it with us. There is hope for those who need that comfort now...both for women and men.

And it’s unfortunate, because Goldman does offer a moving portrayal of his grief, and the difficulty of battling with his mother-in-law on everything from evicting him from an apartment in Mexico, to her withholding Estrada’s remains from Goldman. I was particularly moved by his descriptions of using Aura’s toiletries, his reluctance to use her shampoo, of eroding what’s left behind of her, of his fascination by the grooves her fingers left in her jar of body scrub, these are all truly touching. Hay una parte brutal casi al final de las poco más de 400 páginas que te dan la certeza de porqué era necesario acompañar al narrador durante todo ese viaje. This is the true story of Francisco's courtship and then very brief 2 year marriage to a much younger mexican PhD literature student with aspirations to become a well-known writer, before she dies tragically in a sudden accident. I didn't realize it was a dead-spouse grief book and probably wouldn't have bought it if I'd investigated further. There were some touching moments but otherwise just on and on stories of their time together and how he is dealing or rather not dealing with it and other people who were in her life after the accident - I skimmed very fast the last third of the book. Everything starts on Halloween night where a group of teenagers tell each other not-so-scary ghost stories. Sadie tells a story about an ex student at Pipers Hall (their boarding school), these days she's known as Bloody Mary, and because everyone thinks it's a stupid story she dares them to say her name five times in front of a mirror while the room is only lit by candles. Only three did it, our main character Bobbie, her best friend and roomate Naya and a handsome boy from another school, Caine. At first it's all fun but suddenly weird things are happening and Sadie goes missing and each of the three gets the same message: Five Days. I liked the discussions it had on identity and belonging, alongside the main thrilling storyline of trying to solve the crime/mystery at it’s heart. Speaking of, every time I thought I knew where this book was going I was wrong. The twists and turns got me every single time and my predictions were completely off. A lot more sinister than I anticipated, but it made for a fun and unpredictable read.

I was quite pleasantly surprised by Say Her Name. It was probably the most plausible horror book I've ever read, and it had such a wonderful cast of characters. I've never been a huge fan of horror books because they are often ridiculously cheesy or have rather stupid protagonists. Say Her Name managed to defeated both of those stereotypes, however, and rewrote the Bloody Mary legend in a entertaining fashion. Eva’s husband (like I don’t even remember his name, that’s how vaguely his character was placed) is a whiny baby who lies and then drops his wife the second things get hard, like a little b*€#. Suddenly a widower, Goldman collects everything he can about his wife, hungry to keep Aura alive with every memory. From her childhood and university days in Mexico City with her fiercely devoted mother to her studies at Columbia University, through their newlywed years in New York City and travels to Mexico and Europe—and always through the prism of her gifted writings—Goldman seeks her essence and grieves her loss. Humor leavens the pain as he lives through the madness of grief and creates a living portrait of a love as joyous as it is deep and profound. Like mentioned in Say Her Name, the Supernatural episode. That episode aired in, what? 2005. That would make me 12. The only scariest thing I'd seen up until then was the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters. Pero aquello fue un desgraciado accidente, todos los testigos coincidieron, ella estaba nadando y… fue un caso de increíble mala suerte. Y usted… claro, ahora recuerdo, usted es su marido. Perdón, su… viudo, lo siento.

no longer him. No longer a husband. No longer a man who goes to the fish store to buy dinner for himself and his wife. In less than a year I would be no longer a husband than I was a husband." Bobbie wondered if that's how long you truly live for - until the last person who remembers you, until the final bouquet on your grave.” The ending was okay, but I was glad I had finished. I did think the ending was left quite open though, and I’m not sure whether this was just to increase how scary the ending was supposed to be, or whether the author is thinking about leaving things open for a sequel. I certainly won’t be rushing to read it if there is a sequel though. The Urban Legend of Bloody Mary is one that I can't talk about a lot (literally) or even look into because I'm scared to type the name (it's a surprise I actually did here). Confession time, friends: I love dead spouse stories. While I typically vomit at the trauma-porn stylings of Cathy Glass or Dave Pelzer, something about widows and widowers always draw me in. I don’t know what it is, maybe I’m trying to prepare for the worst, but I’ll always give them a read, from Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking to Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mixtape. The form would seem to dictate the author take one of two approaches: testify their own love for the deceased, or convince the reader to love them as much as the writer did. The latter approach rarely works, which is unfortunately the one Goldman takes.Goldman’s anguish over losing the love of his life is a paradox of the truest romance perhaps ever written. He found a true love and in typical romance fashion he lost it. His message to the world is this: I've been saving Say Her Name as a Halloween read for god knows how many years, and I finally got around to it! Needless to say, I zoomed through this YA horror in a couple of sittings, and surprisingly it did get to me a bit!

This paragraph describes the joy and excitement of love better than any I've read in recent years...the visual, the spiritual, the psychological, the senses, the joy: The storyline in this was okay, but it wasn’t scary, in fact in places I was pretty bored. There were a couple of interesting moments, but for most of the story I was bored, and the pace was way too slow. At 8% of the way in I felt like I’d been reading for hours already. Me llamo Francisco Goldman, norteamericano con domicilio en Nueva York, escritor y periodista, cincuenta y cinco años. I've always found the myth of Bloody Mary (and anything to do with bloodthirsty ghosts in mirrors) to be quite unnerving - I was terrified of going into my bathroom alone when I was in P4 (age 7-8) after a girl in my class told me about Candyman, and even as an adult I won't say 'Bloody Mary' however many times into a mirror. I mean look at this book - people who don't believe it say it and it happens! Sí. Necesito quitarme este peso de encima, decir lo que siento, lo que ella fue, y es, para mí. Necesito mantener vivo su recuerdo. Necesito saber cómo vivó Aura esos cuatro años conmigo, qué significaron para ella. Pero sobre todo necesito comprender, y el dolor es tan grande que es incomprensible, por eso son necesarias tantas palabras, y tan bellas, para iluminar incluso aquello que nos ha destrozado. No para ayudarnos a trascender o transformar esa pena en algo más sino primero y sobre todo para ayudarnos a verla.The plot was a well worn trope of who was related to the murder victims and why. There were Some nice twists, that should have been obvious to the protagonist if she wasn’t always crying. The obsession with crying and emotional angst took up most of the book. Francisco Goldman fell in love with the much younger Aura, a graduate student from Mexico, studying literature at Columbia University. To his surprise, she agreed to marry him and they lived a very happy life. He recounts their short life together in his fictional memoir Say Her Name. Well.... I've been spoiled rotten by reading Mary: Summoning by Hillary Monahan because that duology was an exceptional take on the Bloody Mary story. This story, 'Say Her Name', was a good book. It was more of a slow burn though. There wasn't a lot of action. The story itself was a 3.75 star rating and I did like the ending. My first impression of this book was that it was magnificent. I could only read a tiny bit at a time because of the crushing weight of the loss that the author experienced after the untimely death of his wife. The book gets two stars for this part alone. The rest was crap. And in the process, he captures our attention, rather like Samuel Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, until the reader is literally as fascinated and transfixed with Aura Estrada – Francisco Goldman’s young and doomed wife – as he himself is. It is a masterful achievement, hard to read, hard to pull oneself away from.