Description:
The Silence Of Your Name tracks one woman's journey from her young husband's unexpected suicide during their trip to Ghana all the way through to her life as a writer, finding love and redemption at home and abroad.
Brief description: Alexandra Marshall's essays and short fiction have appeared in AGNI, Five Points, Hunger Mountain, Literary Hub, Ploughshares, The American Prospect, The American Scholar, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and in several anthologies. She has published five novels (Gus in Bronze, Tender Offer, The Brass Bed, Something Borrowed, and The Court of Common Pleas) and a nonfiction book, Still Waters. With the publication of this work, earlier versions of The Silence of Your Name: The Afterlife of a Suicide have at last achieved a Beginning, a Middle, and an End.
Review Quotes:
"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