TRAGIC TALE WITH A RAY OF HOPE

Comedy writer Carl Gorham is a nifty drummer, a soccer fan and a hands-on dad. But while barely in his mid-40s, he finds himself defined by a different label: widower. Losing his lover of 25 years to breast cancer unmoors him. He and Vikki may have shared responsibility for everything but she was always the ‘skipper’.

Alone with their six-year-old daughter in the rural home they made together in Norfolk, eastern England, Gorham is stunned by the finality of his wife’s absence. ‘She is a terrible silence. She is a past tense… She is a never,’ he writes. The grief memoir is a blossoming mini-genre and Gorham’s contribution is a modest, domestic account of learning to cope, its pages filled with the administrative chores that death bequeaths the living and the challenges of animating a lost parent for a child. Any humorous interludes are decidedly dark (think Cardboard Mummy, a life-size craft project).

In alternating chapters, he tells a love story that began in Oxford where he and Vikki were students. After graduation, they moved into a dank London flat-share, and spent evenings debating whether mobile phones would catch on over egg-and-chip suppers.

Soon, Vikki was shooting up the ranks of a fashion retailer, while Gorham scored a hit with an animated sitcom. By their 30s, they were jetting off to Hong Kong and LA, and meeting for passionfuelled weekends in New York. But then came the evening when Vikki told him she’d found a lump.

Just making it through another day ‘is the equivalent of winning the Booker, an Oscar and a knighthood’, says Gorham of the bereaved person’s struggle. His book never feels that way to read, and the glimmer of hope with which it closes shines all the brighter for being so understated.