EXIT WOUNDS

A courageous journalist faces hard truths at home.

The author, born in what is now Zimbabwe, was “a teenage combatant drafted into the Rhodesian civil war” and, later, a war correspondent. Godwin still has shrapnel in his face and back, but his battlefield experiences were well behind him when he recognized, with a therapist’s help, that he seems to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Godwin’s vivid sentences about “choking on…the gristle of grief” are powerfully relatable. Meanwhile, he recounts fundamental shifts elsewhere in his life. After decades as a doctor in Zimbabwe, Godwin’s mother, Helen, is dying in an English hospital. Godwin deftly blends sorrow and humor, sharing his amusement at Helen’s late-in-life adoption of an upper-crust accent and his fear that she felt “the wrong child” died when his sister, Jain, was killed. His mother had long been one of Godwin’s “twin pillars.” The other: his wife, Joanna Coles, the former editor of Cosmopolitan, who chides Godwin for writing about relative unknowns instead of George Clooney’s charitable work in Darfur. One day, “apropos of nothing,” Godwin recalls, Coles says she wants to end the marriage. In part, their eventual split happened because “she feels more successful than me.” He adds, “She may be right.” Godwin writes evocatively about the “ineffable sense of loss” he feels as a white African living in England and the U.S. Though his fixation on alliterative cuteness gets old—out walking his dog, he searches for “a pristine poop port”—he has lots of memorable anecdotes. He once wrote what he thought “was a rave review” of a J.M. Coetzee book. The Nobel Prize winner might have disagreed; a later Coetzee novel, Godwin writes, features a “dull, defensive, ill-informed and pompous” character. His name? Peter Godwin.

A buoyant memoir about death, divorce, and war’s psychological toll.