This is Not a Pity Memoir by Abi Morgan
Abi Morgan at John Murray Press May 2022
Horrific and uplifting memoir about the experience of living, not just surviving, your husband’s serious illness
Imagine the unimaginable. You’re running out the door for the school run and your husband complains he has a headache. If you’re like me, and Abi Morgan, you probably aren’t blessed with a bedside manner, so you mutter something about paracetamol whilst rolling your eyes about man flu. But what if you came back some hours later to find your beloved husband of over 20 years unconscious on the bathroom floor?
This is a memoir about the recent tragedy of Morgan’s husband Jacob’s collapse one normal school-run-rushed morning. What followed was more than 400 days in hospital with encephalitis, during which Jacob spent seven months in an induced coma.
Maybe you’re thinking you need something cheerful to read in these tragic times? But weirdly, this story is cheerful, not because it necessarily has a happy ending (no spoilers) but because Morgan will make you laugh out loud. In addition because she’s written this with the reader (rather than her husband) in mind - it’s thriller-level gripping. I feel bad even writing that - but Morgan tells such a good story, that while reading this book I had to keep reminding myself that real people got hurt during the making.
This then, is a glowing endorsement of Morgan's ability to tell a good yarn - and she’s searingly open about both living through and observing the tragedy that unfolds, with a writer’s eye for something the reader will be interested in. It’s also a love story about a partnership that’s real - full of irritations, and transgressions, and doubts. And that’s very refreshing since it makes one feel better about one’s own irritations with a partner’s pants on the floor and propensity to re-stack the dishwasher as though following a how-to guide.
Photo by Olga Kononenko on Unsplash
‘Non-fiction memoir’ makes it sound like an amble through an idyllic 1940s Sussex childhood - this is gripping and visceral and raw
Many other people who face difficulty, are tempted to portray themselves either as a victim, or as a martyr to suffering, but Morgan is so unrelentingly self-aware, and self-critical on how she behaved at the time, on how she handled an impossibly difficult situation, on the less-than-Mother-Teresa-style thoughts she had about Jacob. I certainly did not end the book feeling sorry for her (despite the tragedy hers is a privileged life) but I did end it thinking she’d been breathtakingly honest, and brave, and spiky and funny. And also I am in awe of how despite the completely shitty few years she and her family and friends endured, they somehow still managed to live, and not just to survive.
Morgan’s title puts her both in and not in the pity memoir category, but her clearly immense skill as a writer succeeds in keeping the reader away from feeling you’ve wallowed in the mire of real-life horror. Think witnessing a car crash rather than like actually experiencing one. For that reason, and for many others, this book is in the rare category of the unputdownable. More than highly recommended.
Abi Morgan is a playwright and screenwriter. She’s known for, in particular, The Split (BBC) and The Iron Lady. She also wrote the absolutely gripping series The Hour, about a TV news room during the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. This was stuffed full of talent (Dominic West, Ben Whishaw, Romola Garai, Anna Chancellor, Juliet Stevenson) and was witty and thrilling, but which sadly did not get commissioned for a second season.
