Don't Say Her Name

The Wave, the piece Francisco Goldman wrote about his much younger Mexican wife Aura Estrada's death in a bodysurfing accident in Mexico, was a small masterpiece. It was powerful and mysterious enough that I decided to buy the book, Say Her Name. The short piece was excerpted from the book and I was left wanting to know more. Alas, now I do know more, and I rather I didn't.

Aura comes across as vain, pretentious and needy. She marries Goldman, she makes him dye his hair for the over the top wedding while all the time protesting she'd rather get married at City Hall, she belittles him constantly . Goldman comes across as pathetically and foolishly besotted by her. They were only married for two years, together for four, and you know that she would have left him sooner rather than later for someone less slavishly adoring and much younger. She doesn't let him drop her off at graduate school because she doesn't want the other students to see she is with such an old man. She regularly tells him how ugly he is "Que feo estas." and how lucky he is to have her. He innocently finds this charming.

He even includes her dreadful writing fragments to show how 'wonderful' she really was. In his quest to keep her he runs up enormous credit card debt while he finds after her death that she had squirreled away quite a sizable separate savings account on her own. Just when you start feeling sorry for him in his widower status though (he has an altar in their apartment to her with her wedding dress still hanging there!) he starts sleeping with all her old friends and you lose sympathy. He whines and wallows in his grief and at some point you want to say "Have some dignity!'.

I will concede that he is very honest in his writing but it did not improve in an elongated book form. If he had just left it to the size of The Wave he would have kept his dignity and hers, as it is he did both himself and Aura a disservice by being so honest. Best not say her name anymore.