Say Her Name

Product Information

Ahora podría responder: "Léete algo como 'Di su nombre' de Francisco Goldman, y te darás una idea muy cercana de por qué leemos". The ending was a typical hammy television wrap up. The only feelings I had for this book were frustration and boredom.

Tell us you are willfully ignorant without telling us you are willfully ignorant: write a bad review of this book and say it’s “political”. 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. Even though it became clear immediately that the the bio-dad was shady AF, I was curious to find out how all the pieces fit together, and felt it was worth reading for that reason. Now, I'm usually not a fan of horror. All that doom-and-gloom and usually a dose of pure gore and violence... Not my cup of tea. And although this book made my toes curl and make me "Eeek!" plenty of times and made sure that I haven't looked in a mirror since I started it, I was definitely a fan of this one.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. Say Her Name is the best YA horror I’ve read in a long time. I love urban legends and ghost stories (even though I don’t believe in ghosts) so this was perfect for me. And yes, it is as creepy as promised! I really love Urban Legends and even though I heard of Bloody Mary while I was young (a British friend told me about it while in middle school once) in France we have an equivalent with La Dame Blanche -The White Lady- that you can call out in a mirror as well, and it is her whom I’m the most terrified about. Every time I walk in the streets at night and I see a white shadow I freak out (even my 25 yo self today) and I have never been able to call her in front of a mirror, even today. And the fact that I’m scared shitless of Bloody Mary/The White Lady made this story much more real and resulting in this book being one of the most plausible horror story I ever read about. 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.

Francisco Goldman is positively a man familiar with the agonies of grief. He knows the living death of grief. He knows the impossiblities of having to go on living after the death of the one person who makes life worth living. And, he is the most gorgeous and generous of tellers of that experience I have ever known to be alive in my time. He's a writer of the most profound gifts to share.

The author, Francisco Goldman, lost his wife and soul mate tragically at the age of 30. Francisco was much older and madly in love – maybe even somewhat obsessed. This book has been described by Colm Toibin as “A beautiful love story and an extraordinary story of loss.” It is that, but also more – and the “more” sometimes seems downright creepy. Everyone mourns differently, and for some the mourning period lasts longer than for others. But Goldman’s novel (yes, it is his story “novelized” – not sure where his reality begins and ends) makes us believe that he will mourn for the rest of his life. He dwells on the small aspects of loss that become meaningful to the survivor – like the indentations her fingers made in her face cream or visits to places that she enjoyed. These small details are described and fawned over so that Francisco never has to “let her go”, never has to allow her to escape from his memory. “Descending into memory like Orpheus to bring Aura out alive for a moment, that’s the desperate purpose of all these futile little rites and reenactments.” Vaya. Esto es un poco irregular, no sé si el procedimiento… ¡Pero oiga! Esto tiene casi quinientas páginas. En fin, se nota que es usted escritor. A ver… 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. Bobbie and her friends Naya attend a prestigious boarding school. On Halloween Night, they are dared to summon the ghost of Bloody Mary by saying her name 5 times into a mirror. Bobbie, Naya and a boy named Caine agree to the game, as they have never believed in ghosts. After they perform the summoning, strange things begin to happen and they realize that the legend of Bloody Mary may be true after all. 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.