Ghosts by Daylight
In graduate school I had a friend whose father鈥檚 affluence protected her from the need to work. She enjoyed many summer vacations living abroad at various language schools.
The day finally came, however, when she faced the need to take on a 50-weeks-a-year, nine-to-five office job, one to which she commuted every day by train. I saw her after a few months of the new routine and she looked pale and shaken. 鈥淥rdinary people,鈥� she whispered to me, gripping my arm as though she were confiding a hard-won and painful truth. 鈥淥rdinary people are heroes.鈥�
I thought about my friend a number of times as I was reading Janine Di Giovanni鈥檚 memoir Ghosts By Daylight. Di Giovanni is a writer who spent many years as a war correspondent. Chaos, destruction, and peril became as normal to her as putting out the garbage on trash night is to the rest of us.
But when Di Giovanni finally decided to settle down and try a quiet domestic life as a mother and a wife 鈥� that was when the terror hit her.
It all began 鈥� fittingly, in the context of Di Giovanni鈥檚 life 鈥� in a war zone. She met her husband 鈥� Bruno, a French photographer 鈥� during the siege of Sarajevo. They flirted, fell in love, and then proceeded to drive each other crazy.
Over the course of 鈥渕any years and a dozen wars鈥� there are 鈥渆ndless phone calls, three miscarriages, much of what the French call malentendu, breakups, a breakdown, and a lot of alcohol鈥� played out against the backdrop of 鈥渟everal fallen cities, countless rebel armies ... and frenzied meetings in Dakar and Tora Bora.鈥�
Finally, however, these two moths who have by now spent several years circling multiple flames and each other, decide that what they really want is matrimony and a child.
After a false start in the Ivory Coast (a coup there plunges them into a another whirl of death and destruction), they settle in Paris, where their son, Luca, is born.
There, Di Giovanni discovers a disturbing truth: 鈥淚 was not afraid when I was in the middle of chaos. It was real life with its vast responsibilities and wells of insecurities that frightened me.鈥� Ordinary domestic life, she realizes 鈥渋s a foreign country, the strangest one that I had ever visited,鈥�
Di Giovanni is a graceful writer, blessed with the kind of lucid prose that might trick readers into imagining that penning a compelling memoir would be easy. Her skilfull blending of the lovely (鈥淢y first street in Paris smelled of yeast: of baking bread, of cakes鈥�) with the gritty (her husband鈥檚 alcoholism, the disintegration of their marriage) gives her book a very authentic kind of texture (not unlike that of another of my favorite titles released this year: 鈥淏lood, Bones, and Butter,鈥� the superb culinary memoir by Gabrielle Hamilton.)
In the end, Di Giovanni must face the fact that she and Bruno may never be, as author Isabel Allende puts it, 鈥渢he kind of people who fit under the umbrella.鈥� But given the courage and clarity that she displays throughout her memoir, the truth may be that the world needs Di Giovanni just as she is.
Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor鈥檚 book editor.
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