Life lessons with cheese on top

Getting Better: Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it By Michael Rosen Ebury, £16.99

Reviewed by Jennifer Lipman

THE FORMER children’s laureate knows plenty about suffering, whether it be the death of his teenage son in 1999 or his own more recent brush with death in the early days of the pandemic, detailed in his previous memoir, Many Different Kinds of Love.

So his credentials for offering wise words in a crisis are not in doubt, nor his prodigious talent for beguiling and imaginative prose; he is one of Britain’s bestloved poets and writers (We’re

Going on a Bear Hunt was for a while top of my son’s reading pile). And yet Getting Better, for want of any other way of putting it, somehow lacks oomph.

Each chapter is a meditation on how Rosen endured then overcame some hardship — his secretive mother, his aborted BBC career after he failed the vetting process, his decade long experience of undiagnosed hyperthyroidism and the way it held him back. And each anecdote is served up with the lessons Rosen has learnt from it.

Unfortunately, too many of his pearls of wisdom are trite: insights you would find in almost every self-help book worth its salt. Human beings can’t just move on, he explains in one chapter, so it’s about finding a way to ease the hold of whatever is burdening us. Did I really need a book by one of Britain’s most celebrated writers to tell me that?

There are some insightful suggestions, and I did chuckle at the spirited defence this darling of the left makes for the value of virtue signalling in making the world a better place. And he always has plenty to talk about, whether his mother’s steadfast refusal to discuss the death of an older Rosen sibling, the tragedy of what his family underwent during the Holocaust, his parents’ romance blossoming at the Battle of Cable Street, or his lengthy career as a political firebrand on the side of any underdog he could find — even if Rosen has written about much of it elsewhere. But it’s interwoven with so much banal advice that it’s sometimes hard to unearth the gold. And for all that this is about self-reflection as a tool for recovery, there’s precious little about his two unsuccessful marriages.

The book is best where Rosen discusses his son’s sudden death from meningococcal septicaemia; again, not new territory, but compelling if you’re not aware what happened. You’d need a heart of stone not to be touched by what he shares; not wanting to go to sleep because “I knew that I would have to wake up in the morning and discover again that he’d died”, or the feeling that his son had left “a gap on the sofa”.

Perhaps I’m not the right reader for this book: too cynical, for one thing. If Getting Better offers even a grain of solace to someone going through a time of physical or emotional difficulty, however cheesy or unoriginal his advice, then who am I to judge?