Exit wounds A story of love, loss and occasional wars

In this stark memoir, combat journalist Godwin (The Fear) muses on the links between his high-stress work and his rocky personal life. Godwin was born in colonial Zimbabwe in 1957, when the country was roiled by civil war. When he was six, his parents sent him to a boarding school to keep him safe. He hated it there, and developed intense animosity for his parents when they kept him enrolled despite his protestations. In coping with that anger, Godwin developed a knack for emotional compartmentalization that helped him in his career as a war correspondent. The "controlled schizophrenia" he developed by detaching from the daily horrors he reported on led to predictable consequences: "drinking and drugs, depression and divorce." Much of the account explores how those struggles intersected with the end of Godwin's marriage and his attempts to reconcile with his 90-year-old mother before her death. In both cases, he eschews simple answers, writing that "too many farewells may have broken me, so that I no longer have a coherent character," though stints in therapy have helped him better understand his emotional defenses. Godwin's eloquence and bracing candor make this more than a mere pity party. It's a nuanced and fearless self-portrait. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Apr.)

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 ofCosmopolitan, 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.