This Is Not A Pity Memoir
Abi Morgan
John Murray, £14.99
As an award-winning screenwriter, Abi Morgan is used to writing about the curveballs life throws at her characters. So perhaps it’s no surprise that when her own life suddenly and irrevocably changed course, she put pen to paper.
The result is this astonishing, terrifying, heartbreaking account of what happened when her partner Jacob developed a devastating brain disease.
It’s a story where everything divides into before and after. Before, Abi, whose screen credits include The Iron Lady, Brick Lane and BBC drama The Split, and Jacob, an actor, lived a happy and comfortable life with their teenage children in North London.
Then one morning Abi leaves the house to run some errands, including picking up steroids for Jacob, who has MS and has been complaining of a headache. When she returns home, she finds him collapsed on the bathroom floor.
Everything else is after. In hospital, Jacob starts having seizures and his condition quickly deteriorates. As doctors struggle to work out what is wrong, he is placed in an induced coma in the hope of calming “the dark thunder-clapping universe spinning in [his] head”.
The family is left in limbo, with neither diagnosis nor prognosis. It’s a dire situation.
“I like to know how my story is going to end. And when I don’t know, there is a kind of blind panic that unsettles, unnerves, terrifies me,” writes Abi.
Her terror pours off the page, reflected in, at times, fragmented prose. But, as well as grief and fear, there is humour, tenderness and so much love – this is as much the story of Jacob and Abi before as it is the medical nightmare after.
Their situation goes from bad to worse and this isn’t a tale with a neat fairy-tale ending. But, supported by friends and family, it ends with hope for the future.
This is not an easy read. It’s intense, raw and brutally honest. But it’s also a profoundly moving exploration of what happens when everything changes in an instant. “It’s not like this in the movies,” concludes Abi.