Silence of Your Name: The Afterlife of a Suicide
Silence of Your Name: The Afterlife of a Suicide
Silence of Your Name: The Afterlife of a Suicide
Description
Description
The Silence Of Your Name revolves around the suicide of Marshall's charismatic and idealistic young husband, Tim Buxton, while they were in Ghana with Operation Crossroads Africa - a progenitor of the Peace Corps. Marshall weaves in her husband's hidden family history, one tied to Boston's wealthy social scene and the deaths of notorious Black Sun publisher Harry Crosby and Tim's aunt Josephine Rotch Bigelow. By allowing readers to experience these distinct periods of time in great detail, Marshall illuminates the toxic effects of denial across classes and generations.
As Marshall moves on with her life, now a novelist and young widow, she must navigate her way in the '70s publishing world with the guidance of her friend Philip Roth, while still processing the grief of losing her husband. Decades later, Marshall finds herself in the footprints of her past, journeying to Ghana and reuniting with a royal Queen-Mother and the steadfast community that offered her its support decades earlier. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Megan Marshall writes, she "is relentless in her quest for understanding and release from grief and guilt [...] but wisdom comes incrementally and her readers partake eagerly at each stage until we, too, have learned that grief may be transformed into love - and brilliant, soothing prose."
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"Beyond personal grief, the memoir examines the pervasive nature of denial within familial and societal contexts. By unraveling her husband's concealed lineage and its ties to historical tragedies, Marshall highlights how unaddressed secrets and suppressed emotions can reverberate through generations, shaping identities and influencing future relationships." Tal Gur, Elevate Society
Elinor Lipman cited The Silence Of Your Name as the "last great book she read."
Excerpts from The Silence of Your Name:
"We know that denial plays two roles in human life: the positive force that allows a person to rebound from a disabling loss, and the negative force that buries the truth in order-or so we believe-to make life livable. In addition to accommodating the family's longstanding and hard-won reliance upon denial, the challenge for me was to finally understand my own relationship to denial."
-Alexandra Marshall, LitHub
"I can feel myself giving way, giving in, giving myself over to the mystery that, after all these years, I still long to understand. What I do understand at last is that, here, I am accepted and embraced-I am taken at my word-and with the gift of this blessed recognition I feel such heat generated from within that, for the first time in my life, I think I might faint."
-Alexandra Marshall, The American Scholar
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
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