Getting to Know Death: A Meditation

by Gail Godwin

Overview

"Getting to Know Death could just as easily be called Getting to Know Life. As a meditation, it is both unsentimental and full of wonder. As a piece of writing, it stands beside the best of Godwin's fiction. Extraordinary." -Ann Patchett

From New York Times-bestselling, three-time National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin, a consideration of what makes for a life well lived-for readers of Oliver Sacks's Gratitude and Deborah Levy's Cost of Living.

I can't see a way out of this.

Things will not necessarily get better.

This is my life, but I may not get to do what I want in it.

Ingmar Bergman once said that an artist should always have one work between himself and death. When renowned author Gail Godwin tripped and broke her neck while watering the dogwood tree in her garden at age eighty-five, a lifetime of writing and publishing behind her and a half-finished novel in tow, Bergman's idea quickly unfurled in front of her, forcing her to confront a creative life interrupted. In Getting to Know Death, Godwin shares what spoke to her while in a desperate place. Remembering those she has loved and survived, including a brother and father lost to suicide, and finding meaning in the encounters she has with other patients as she heals, she takes stock of a life toward the end of its long graceful arc, finding her path through the words she has written and the people she has loved.

At once beautiful, biting, precise, poetic, and propulsive, Getting to Know Death is her own reckoning with the meaning of a life, the forms of passion that guide it, and how the stories we hold can shape our memories and preserve our selves as we write our own endings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639734443
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	06/11/2024
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	153,554
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Gail Godwin is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of twelve critically acclaimed novels, including Violet Clay, Father Melancholy's Daughter, Evensong, The Good Husband and Evenings at Five. She is also the author of The Making of a Writer, her journal in two volumes (ed. Rob Neufeld). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gail Godwin lives in Woodstock, New York.

Visit her website at www.gailgodwin.com

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/22/2024

Bestseller Godwin (Grief Cottage) delivers a powerful and poetic reflection on death, dying, and what constitutes a good life. At age 85, Godwin fell while watering a dogwood tree, breaking her neck and forcing her into a brace for six months. With little to do but meditate on the implications of her injury, Godwin reacquainted herself with a speech she’d given at a literary festival a few years earlier, which included a particularly prescient line: “This is my life, but I may not get to do what I want in it.” Taking that sentiment to heart, she turned her gaze backward, asking herself whether she was happy with the first eight and a half decades of her life. She found answers in memories of relationships both romantic and familial, including her absentee father’s offer to pay for her college so she could escape her abusive stepfather. Godwin also reflects on the deaths of friends and family, including her beloved colleague Rob Neufeld, who edited two volumes of her journals even as he suffered from ALS. Throughout, her tone is curious and vaguely wonderstruck, resulting in an account that’s full of insight and free of platitude. This is a gift. Agent: Moses Cardona, John Hawkins & Assoc. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Getting to Know Death could just as easily be called Getting to Know Life. As a meditation, it is both unsentimental and full of wonder. As a piece of writing, it stands beside the best of Godwin's fiction. Extraordinary.” —Ann Patchett

“Old friends now, Gail Godwin and I met as students in Kurt Vonnegut's writing class. With insightful reflection, as she prepares herself for the inevitable, Gail has recalled the loved ones she's lost-in the same crystalline prose that distinguishes her fiction. This book makes me remember the loved ones I've lost, in all the good ways. I wrote Gail that I especially loved the part about the man who thought she was a nun. He just mistook her dedication to writing for a different kind of devotion-one that also requires sacrifice.” —John Irving

“Radiant ... Without her accident, Godwin would never have met individuals she now cherishes, her roommate at a rehabilitation center and her home health care worker chief among them. It is this that endures for her, along with writing and reading: not a power base in money or wealth or reputation, or an identity founded on any of that, but the possibility of newness and discovery in the ever-surprising form of other people. This, at least, never gets old.” —Laura Miller, Slate

“A powerful and poetic reflection on death, dying, and what constitutes a good life . . . Throughout, [Godwin's] tone is curious and vaguely wonderstruck, resulting in an account that's full of insight and free of platitude. This is a gift.” —Publishers Weekly

“[Getting to Know Death is] treasure trove of remembrance and candor . . . For Godwin, the author of 14 novels and two collections of short stories, writing is a form of prayer. Her faithfulness to her craft and the immersive nature of that craft allow her to probe profound questions.” —Washington Independent Review of Books

“This slim book is a very rich memoir. It's poignant and resonant. We see how the author struggles to continue to manage a creative life and to negotiate new ways to hold on to the passions from a long life and shape them in ways that allow her to continue to write stories with new beginnings-but also with endings that she can continue to accept through her thoughtful meditation.” —Texas Public Radio, "Book Public"

“Infused with courage and clarity, her meditation is brightened by the kind of clins d'œil one often finds in Godwin's universe-observations that are uplifting in their unsentimental realism, sometimes sharp and sardonic, but always heart-felt, life-affirming, and even humorous. Godwin's clins d'œil are stars that illumine the darker and greater firmament of observations on life and death in Getting to Know Death.” —Southern Literary Review, "Read of the Month"

“Getting to Know Death is full of grace and humor, memories of friends and people Godwin has outlived . . . If Godwin felt any despair during her recovery it was displaced by her endless curiosity . . . Her creative mind still skips and leaps, pirouetting from present to past, from people and books that have influenced her to the novel she's in the process of writing.” —California Review of Books

“Godwin makes for good company, and the text sparkles with flashes of insight and humor. A tart, mordantly witty glimpse at losses past, as well as those to come.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Godwin's volume proves the lasting power of the writer, deploying her skill as a weapon, even while staring down death.” —Chronogram

“[A] short, powerful meditation on death, considered from many angles.” —Alabama Public Radio

“Godwin's latest book explores two great themes, love and loss. She writes about her extraordinary friend Pat and her many family members, including her partner, who have died. And she writes with courage and honesty about her own suffering at 86. Moving through life's journey, I look for role models for how to best live in each life stage. Godwin is now a role model for me.” —Mary Pipher

“Like everything the marvelous Gail Godwin writes, her meditation on mortality is vigorous, erudite, sharply witty, and deeply pleasurable. Getting to Know Death is brimming with life.” —Hilma Wolitzer

“Getting to Know Death may be the most uplifting, riveting book about 'death' you'll ever read-probably because it's actually about life, work, friendships, and love. Beautifully written, it also provides, directly and indirectly, insights about aging that can help us all live better now and through old age.” —Louise Aronson, Pulitzer finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Elderhood

From the Publisher

2024-04-19
The veteran novelist looks with a clear eye at her declining health and the loss of many of those she has loved.

In the summer of 2022, just before her 85th birthday, Godwin, a three-time nominee for the National Book Award, went out to water the dogwood tree in her garden, slipped on the gravel, and fell and broke her neck. Confined to a rehabilitation facility for a few weeks, she had to wear a neck brace for six months; when that didn't work, she underwent partially successful neck surgery. The period gave her plenty of time to reflect on her past and observe her present. In fragmented passages, organized in no evident pattern, the author reflects on her long friendship with a woman who died in 2021; the deaths by suicide of her father and brother; the tentative friendship she formed with her roommates at the rehabilitation facility; the loss of her husband two decades earlier; experiences of despair; a friendship with the home health aide who helped her after her release from the rehab center; and her less-than-cordial interactions with her blunt doctor, who told her, “You have too many issues for surgery”—and then, reluctantly and grumpily, changed his mind. Because much of the narrative revolves around the relationship between incidents in Godwin’s life and the ways in which she transformed them into parts of her many novels—and takes for granted that readers will be familiar with those novels—the book will be best suited for those already acquainted with the author’s work. While those looking for a coherent narrative or a tidy conclusion will be disappointed, Godwin makes for good company, and the text sparkles with flashes of insight and humor.

A tart, mordantly witty glimpse at losses past, as well as those to come.

Kirkus Reviews