Say Her Name

In 2005, celebrated novelist Francisco Goldman married Aura Estrada at a Mexican hacienda. More than twenty years his junior, Aura was a gifted young writer on the cusp of her own brilliant career, and the two were deeply in love. Then, a month before their second anniversary, Aura broke her neck bodysurfing while they were on vacation. Goldman was blamed by Aura's family-and crippled by his own grief and self-recrimination. In the aftermath of the accident, he wrote Say Her Name, pouring his feelings of love and unspeakable loss into a fictionalized account of their brief time together. Hungry to keep Aura alive in his memory, Goldman collects everything he can about his dead wife. From her childhood and university days in Mexico City with her fiercely devoted mother to her studies at Columbia University, through the couple's time in New York City and travels to Mexico and Europe, Goldman seeks her essence and grieves her loss, using the writings she left behind as his prism.