Richard E. Grant’s tribute to his wife leaves us shattered for his loss

Richard E. Grant pulls off a feat here. The title is twee but the content isn’t. With unselfpitying dash the actor-writer recounts caring for his wife, the dialect coach Joan Washington, through lung cancer last year (‘Living grief. Raw. Savage.’). He thoughtfully interleaves the heartbreak with glitzy showbiz recollections which help keep our peckers up, so we ricochet through time, from the Golden Globes to the Royal Marsden, from sedative injections to Star Wars. It’s an unusual structure, but it works – so, to use one of the author’s expressions, ‘Why bloody notsky?’

Grant’s daily diary-keeping is what makes the book. The quotes are verbatim, the chronology precise and studded with the details one otherwise forgets, or blanks out: Joan, very unwell, speaking German out of the blue; or the shock when the nurse delivering an intravenous radiation drug asks them to ‘lie still and not talk’ for an hour. What? ‘Yakety-yakking is the modus operandi of our marriage.’