In June of 2022 Gail Godwin was watering a young dogwood tree when she slipped, fell, and broke her neck, c2. She was almost 85 years old. The accident very nearly killed her, and this catastrophe naturally got her thinking about her mortality. She wrote “Getting to Know Death,” her recovery memoir, published in 2024.
The forced physical inactivity also set her thinking about her past. Godwin had thought she would get to work on her eighteenth novel, but she had been reading old journals and diaries, especially of the 1960s, which engaged her, and she was becoming horrified by political developments in the present moment.
She was reminded that in 1960, while a reporter at the “Miami Herald,” she was present when Bebe Rebozo announced that Nixon had had the election stolen from him. Nixon, however, did not contest the election. As vice president he did his duty and certified the electoral ballots.
She writes in her preface that in 2024 one-third of Congress were election deniers. She begins writing this memoir on August 25, 2023. Godwin was horrified by the possibility of a Trump comeback and began writing daily for the next 15 months until the election.
Interspersed with these new entries are musings about her life in the sixties when she lived for six years in London, and was briefly married to a psychiatrist specializing in Scientology. Back in the USA, she enrolled in the Iowa Writers Workshop. Godwin over the years would publish 17 novels–most notably “A Mother and Two Daughters,” which sold a million and a half copies.
Her entries from 2023 on are an emotional mix. She notes happily: “Yesterday at dusk in Georgia, Trump’s motorcade arrived at Fulton County Jail and in twenty-one minutes he was fingerprinted, booked, given an inmate number and had his mug taken.” Within hours the mugshot T-shirt was on sale.
She laments how politics can cause serious rifts in families. She and her brother were estranged for four years when he did not vote for Hillary Clinton.
Her entry for May 30, 2024 is especially jubilant and brief: “Convicted on all 34 counts.” Godwin writes: “This deserves a page and a chapter all its own.”
There is a hopeful entry on September 7, 2024 when former Vice President Dick Cheney announces he will vote for Kamala Harris. She is encouraged when Harris seems to defeat Trump in debate. The reader knows how this story has to end, however.
Her last chapter, written on the morning of November 6, explores what comfort she can wrest from Psalm 52. God will destroy the “mighty man.” Nothing can save him.
But “I am like the green olive tree in the house of God.
I trust in the mercy of God forever and ever.”
