As a child growing up in Zimbabwe, Peter Godwin saw neighbors murdered by guerrillas during the civil war that broke out during the fight for independence from Britain. Before he turned 18, he was conscripted into the army. Later, he wrote about conflicts from South Africa to Bosnia to Ukraine, practiced human rights law and was left for dead near a refugee camp in northern Somalia.
“I’m on more than nodding terms with death,” said Godwin, an award-winning war correspondent and author, filmmaker and Guggenheim fellow. “It’s something I’ve had a front-row seat to my whole life.”
The subject is also at the center of his most recent book, “Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss and Occasional Wars,” published by Summit Books on April 8. After chronicling childhood and civil war in Africa in “Mukiwa,” and the chaos in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian rule in “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun” and “The Fear,” Godwin, 67, now wrote about the death of his mother, the end of his marriage of nearly two decades to the media executive Joanna Coles, and the disorientation of finding himself, in his sixth decade, adrift without the stabilizing anchor of family.
His editor in the United States, Judy Clain, who — like his British editor Ellah Wakatama — is from Zimbabwe, worked with Godwin on “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun” and “The Fear.” Clain said she connected deeply with the grief and the humor in “Exit Wounds,” and that the book is a departure for him because, unlike his previous memoirs, it’s not rooted in Africa.
“The book is about home and belonging and longing and secrets,” said Clain. “It’s about letting go not just of his mother and his marriage and coming to terms with the death of his sister, but also mourning the idea of being an exile. I almost feel like he won’t write about Africa again. I feel he’s turned a corner in some way.”
“Exit Wounds” is Godwin’s seventh book and third memoir — and a book he tried really hard not to write, he said. He didn’t want to tell a story about personal loss that was “wallowing in self-pity.” But, as his mother lay bedridden in England, suffering from dementia, his wife surprised him one morning in Manhattan by telling him she wanted to end the marriage. Amid this emotional chaos, Godwin said, he couldn’t help himself. He did what any memoirist would do: He started taking notes.
Scribbling down banter that you overheard as your mother lay dying in a London hospital might seem callous to some, but writing about death, even as it’s happening, can be a deep expression of love, he said.
“It was Dickensian,” he said of the deathbed drama unfolding around him. During the days and hours he sat at his mother’s bedside, writing down the dialogue was “distracting in a good way.”
Plus, the conversations between his mother, a physician who cared for patients in Zimbabwe for over 50 years, and the colorful cast of characters who came in and out of her London hospital room, were often absurdly funny.
There’s Kitty, the deeply tanned alcoholic in the next bed whose age could be “anywhere from a well-preserved 70 to a ravaged 40.” Before she left, Kitty told the nurse she’d rather get discharged in her hospital gown than borrow clothes from the charity cupboard. “Won’t be the first time I’ve walked down Caledonian Road in me nightie!” she declared. After Kitty left, Bessie, who almost certainly was the godmother of some sort of London crime mob, replaced her. One night, Godwin and his sister Georgina smuggled a bottle of Chenin Blanc into the hospital room and shared their bounty with another patient, Vera. They sipped the wine from paper McCafé cups from a nearby McDonald’s.
During those hospital visits, Georgina knew her brother was taking notes, and that he’d likely write a book about the experience even before their mother died. That awareness helped her process her grief.
“Knowing that everything could go into a book one day helped with what I was feeling in the moment,” she said. “It makes your grief lighter.”
Godwin has experienced enough loss to know that humor and grief can, and should, occupy the same space, just as it did in that hospital room — and over the course of his life.
In addition to witnessing bloodshed as a soldier and a journalist, Godwin has also lost his eldest sister, Jain, who was killed along with her fiancé and their best man in an army ambush in 1978, just weeks before her wedding. And he’s written about the death of his father in 2004, soon after Godwin discovered that this man he’d always known as a stoic British patriarch was a Polish Jew who’d escaped the Holocaust. In “Exit Wounds,” these past traumas inform the way he grapples with the decline of his mother’s health and the breakup of his relationship.
He was raised to be stoic like his parents, he said, to role-play the stiff-upper-lipped Brit and carry on even in the face of deep emotional pain. “Growing up in ‘colonial’ Africa,” Godwin wrote, “we were taught that sentimentality was to be despised, that we had to be tough, to bear our mantle of responsibility.”
Through the work of writing “Exit Wounds,” he said, he came to understand that family had become the sturdiest pillar of his identity, but when that pillar came crashing down through death and divorce, he found himself completely unmoored, unsure of who he was or where he belonged.
He’d been living in New York for over twenty years but was still uncertain whether he belonged to his childhood home, Zimbabwe, the English towns of his ancestors, or somewhere else, a place not yet discovered. In some ways, he wrote, writing “Exit Wounds” was an attempt push back against the “well of sadness and loss” that bound his family and discover where he belonged. It also became a love letter to New York.
“I’m resistant to people talking about writing as catharsis or therapy,” said Godwin. “But I see this book as a literary Heimlich maneuver. I had something stuck in my gullet, and I had to get it out before I could move on and do other things.”
To get unstuck, he started therapy for the first time, including ketamine therapy to help him confront P.T.S.D. Talking about feelings wasn’t exactly in line with the whole stiff-upper-lipped approach to life, but it allowed Godwin to shake off his ancestral impassivity, to face what came before and to live a little lighter in the present, he said.
“I’m tired of wearing an invisible lei of loss around my neck like some secret garland, some slow acting noose,” he wrote.
Writers have an ability to step back, observe and write through moments of suffering or pain, Godwin said. He likens it to the ability to widen an aperture, shifting one’s worldview. Witnessing death has a similar effect, he said — it also reveals new layers of empathy and understanding, an entirely different way of walking through the world.
“Most writing is done from the periphery,” Godwin said. “If you’re in the middle of the party all the time you’re not noticing things. Most writers are just slightly on the edge and it’s from that vantage point that you can really see.”
