Memorial Days

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, death, animal death, and substance use.

To help with tackling the family’s finances, Brooks hired an accountant and financial advisor. The financial advisor said that Brooks would remain financially stable if she continued with her writing. However, the statement wasn’t comforting since she was only halfway through writing Horse and hadn’t touched the manuscript since Tony’s death.

Brooks has brought four of Tony’s journals with her to Flinders. She wants to read them before sending them to Columbia University, which will house them. The first journal begins just before she and Tony meet in graduate school. It chronicles their meeting and early days together. She reads on about their first years of marriage and eventual move to Sydney. It follows them as Tony takes a job at The Sydney Morning Herald and develops an interest in writing books. It then moves on to the details of their move to Cairo, Egypt, their time spent as reporters for various newspapers throughout the Middle East, and Tony’s travel adventures. This is the kind of journalistic work that he’d come to love. Tony writes in his journal about his fear of never becoming a respected journalist, and Brooks laughs about this since he went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism.