If Not For You
Georgina Lucas Little, Brown £16.99
★★★★★
It’s not easy to read a memoir about death at the best of times. Harder still when the subject of the book dies at only three weeks old. Yet in Georgina Lucas’s harrowing memoir about the life and death of her second child, there is a narrative pull that propels the reader forward. Her writing is clear and unfussy and she structures the book like a diary, detailing in the first chapters seemingly every conversation in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) after the birth of her son, Grey Atticus Fox, by emergency C-section at 31 weeks.
This makes for a somewhat slow start as we grapple to get to know her and her husband Mike and to care about their tragedy. But as their personalities emerge, beyond the pointers of their middle-class lifestyle (Mike buys clams and cooks linguine alle vongole for supper the night before Georgina is admitted to hospital, Georgina admits to dressing her 18-month son in a ‘chic, understated’ way with the boldest colours in his wardrobe being burgundy and mustard), then we begin to get drawn in.
Mike has a wicked sense of humour that he throws around at nurses and doctors, making inappropriate jokes at tense moments, while Georgina reveals a self-awareness that her career in fashion journalism seems frivolous compared to the jobs of the NICU nurses. She recognises the unending support of her mother and the relative ease with which they can both release themselves from work responsibilities and drop everything to care for the newborn.
In her hypnotic recounting of the days of waiting for something to happen, for trisomy results to return, for an MRI, for a prognosis, we are involved in their world. So when the news finally comes, when we realise how bad it is for them, we get swept up into their tragedy. By the time I was at the passage about her pumping breast milk on the morning of her son’s funeral, I found fat tears dropping on to the page.
This is a niche but important subject for a memoir and it will speak loudest to those who can relate to the experience. Most of the book takes place in the prepandemic months of late 2019 and early 2020 and the story is filled with the warm hugs of strangers, nurses and family members. At one point Georgina is in John Lewis buying a stuffed octopus for her toddler and tells the woman at the checkout that it’s to match his brother’s, who is in NICU. The woman reveals that her son, too, was in NICU and demands to hug Georgina over the counter. They agree they are part of a ‘secret world’ of people who understand the pain of having an infant in intensive care.
If anyone is going through this trauma in the current socially distanced hospitals, this book will be in lieu of all those hugs. A message from one mother to another, reminding them they are not alone.