Ghosts by Daylight

September 5, 2011
Di Giovanni, an American-born war correspondent (Madness Visible) who’s covered conflicts from Sarajevo to Afghanistan, met Bruno Girodon, a French photographer, whom she eventually married after a long, passionate, tortuous courtship, and they settled in Paris to raise their son, Luca, born prematurely after a difficult pregnancy. In beautifully deliberative passages, Di Giovanni depicts the elaborate concoction of her marriage, the renovation of a choice apartment, and the accoutrements of a privileged Parisian life—yet Bruno, her modern-day Ulysses, could not settle down. Obsessed by the safety of his family, by survival fears inculcated during wartime, he began drinking heavily, was plagued by depression, and eventually needed hospitalization. Conversely, while her husband seemed to be losing himself, Di Giovanni began to find autonomy for the first time in the strange country of the prickly, exacting French. (Her portrayals of perfectionist Frenchwomen who don’t breastfeed because “it ruins your breasts” is priceless.) Her rather scrambled, touching work is about trying to habituate herself within a mad, chaotic world where even love cannot be fixed in place—inviting enormous sorrow along with the joy.

August 1, 2011

A war correspondent's struggle to leave the battles behind and embark on a life of motherhood.

In this sweeping memoir, di Giovanni (The Place at the End of the World, 2006, etc.) offers a portrait of a love story abloom in wartime. While covering the Bosnian War in 1993, she became smitten with a French cameraman named Bruno, whose charm and charisma would forever alter her life. "Everything about falling in love during wartime, perhaps because our exterior world was so chaotic, was so effortless," writes the author. "It was almost adolescent in its lack of complication." Yet complications soon emerged, and after the pair endured one too many life-threatening assignments, they eventually married, di Giovanni giving birth to her son, Luca, soon after. While Luca's birth provided a momentary glimpse of normalcy in their lives, when Bruno returned to the war zones, he and the author's love story began to wilt. The once indefatigable cameraman began struggling with an array of physical and mental ailments, including a descent into alcoholism that took a dramatic toll on the family. As di Giovanni reflected on her decision to become a foreign reporter, she writes, "I had chosen to leave my home and my family and go as far away as possible, but I had no idea how desperately I would miss them." While her role as wife and mother provided a temporary fix, Bruno proved not enough family to make the world whole again.

A plainly told, occasionally exotic tale of love gone awry.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 1, 2011

For the last 20-plus years, Vanity Fair contributing editor Di Giovanni (Madness Visible) has been covering world hot spots from Sarajevo to Afghanistan and has won several journalism honors for her efforts. Along the way, she met and married a man named Bruno, who had been through hell and had the physical and emotional scars to prove it. Suddenly, Di Giovanni found herself caretaker to husband and newborn son--and terrified of the job she has always loved. Given where she's been, what she's done, and the quality of her previous writing, this memoir would seem promising.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2011
In her previous memoir, Madness Visible (2005), di Giovanni wrote of her years as a war correspondent covering the Balkans. Here we see the toll that experience eventually took on her personal life as she settles down in Paris with her husband, Bruno, a cameraman who also reports from war zones. Courageous in the face of danger, di Giovanni is overwhelmed by everyday life. When son Luca arrives, she becomes irrational, hoarding food and water, hiding cash, anticipating disaster. Just as she recovers from this bout with PTSD, Bruno is beset by nightmares and turns to alcohol for relief. The couple, initially drawn together by a powerful attraction, is gradually pulled apart by their emotional scars. In a lovingly written epilogue, di Giovanni returns to Sarajevo both to remember and to let go of all she has witnessed and the great love she has lost. An old friend urges her to live a happy life: We are not as broken as you think.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)