“Already a successful novelist, Alexandra Marshall has written a thrilling memoir that redefines the genre. It pairs diversity with aristocracy in an unprecedented way. Everyone who wants to write should read this book!”
The Silence of Your Name
by Alexandra Marshall
The Silence Of Your Name revolves around the suicide of Marshall’s charismatic and idealistic young husband, Tim Buxton, while they were in Ghana with Operation Crossroads Africa. Marshall weaves in her husband’s hidden family history, one tied to Boston’s wealthy social scene and the deaths of notorious Black Sun publisher Harry Crosby and Tim’s aunt Josephine Rotch Bigelow. By allowing readers to experience these distinct periods of time in great detail, Marshall illuminates the toxic effects of denial across classes and generations. As Marshall moves on with her life, now a novelist and young widow, she must navigate her way in the ‘70s publishing world with the guidance of her friend Philip Roth, while still processing the grief of losing her husband.
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
Alexandra Marshall
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.
What people are saying about The Silence of Your Name:
“The Silence of Your Name is a moving and heartbreaking memoir, a beautiful and haunting exploration of love and loss — and love again.”
“A rare form of memoir. Deeply introspective, insightful, surprising, gripping — and gorgeously written.”
“An eloquent countermove against the erasure that follows a suicide, Alexandra Marshall’s tender, layered memoir is an exploration of how her first husband’s death shaped her without being allowed to entirely define her. The burnished clarity of her narrative is an honor to him, to herself, and to her readers. ”
“Alexandra Marshall’s powerful and beautifully moving memoir is a courageous and compassionate meditation on life and one woman’s journey to make sense of a shocking loss, while also paying generous attention to the lives around her and to the future.”
“Marshall is relentless in her quest for understanding and release from grief and guilt. The journey takes a lifetime, but wisdom comes incrementally and her readers partake eagerly at each stage until we, too, have learned that grief may be transformed into love — and brilliant, soothing prose.”
