Loss and love
In her posthumously published memoir, Sarah Hughes celebrates life and unflinchingly faces her own mortality, writes Gwendolyn Smith
From an early age I was obsessed by death,” writes the late journalist Sarah Hughes in her beautiful posthumous memoir Holding Tight, Letting Go. As a child, she enjoyed storming off after arguments, imagining how distraught her family would be if she died; as an adult, she wondered which of her social circle would be the “one friend who dies earlier than expected”. When she was diagnosed with cancer aged 45, she had a horrible realisation: it could be her.
Devastatingly, it was. Hughes died last April, after living with the disease for three years, during which time she started planning this memoir. Made up of her journalism as well as original essays and contributions from her loved ones, it pieces together her life through topics as diverse as Jilly Cooper, restaurant meal kits, having cancer during Covid and Game of Thrones.
The sections written by her friends vividly portray Hughes at various stages in her life. Novelist Harriet Tyce recalls the Rimmel eyeshadowfuelled friendship she and Hughes began in their Edinburgh schooldays; another friend, Adrian Berry, remembers Hughes at St Andrews University and the “100 per cent proof enthusiasm” of her student journalism. In the moving endnote, Hughes’s husband, Kris, writes about their “inseparable” marriage.
Yet Hughes’s own writing remains the most poignant. Her article about the stillbirth of her daughter, Iris, has stayed with me ever since I read a version of it when it was first published, and the reworked piece is even more affecting, having been expanded to include Iris’s brother, Rory, who was also stillborn in 2012. Hughes explains how she has come to think of Iris and Rory as “playful shadows running in front” of her two living children, Ruby and Oisín.
It is typical of how she stares death straight in the eye – elsewhere, she notes that “while we cannot control every circumstance what we can do is acknowledge that there is a quiet strength in accepting that and letting the darkness in”.
The memoir is marked out by its bravery. I’ve never read a book written by someone so soon before they died which rings with such awareness of that prospect. Of course, this also means there are omissions: we are told in the introduction that Hughes planned chapters on teenage rebellion, gambling and friendship, and their absence is a stark reminder of everything she could have written, had cancer not intervened.
The book is also distinguished by Hughes’s refusal to take herself too