A Shondalands' "Best Books for June 2022"
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"With her trademark deadpan, trenchant wit, and a deeply soulful mindfulness, Abi Morgan takes a breathtaking hike on the cliff edge of a life upended by illness. By turns harrowing, cracking sharp and heartbreaking, it is...comforting to accompany someone with her sense of humor and the absurd on this trip- (this) book is a gift to anyone who has been similarly unmoored by fate and the furies.” — Meryl Streep
“The kind of book you will find yourself saying urgently, over and over, to friends. “Have you read it? Have you read it?" — Caitlin Moran
"Morgan doesn’t, to put it mildly, go in for self-pity. Her book, even when things are at their most bleak, is both very funny and as propulsive as a thriller, ticking along in an adrenalised real time, impossible to put down." — The Guardian
“Gripping, funny and always honest.” — David Nicholls
"In This Is Not a Pity Memoir, the talented screenwriter welcomes readers into her world. With authenticity, she writes with a refreshing sense of honestly, frustration, and hope." — Shondaland
"From the very first line I couldn’t stop reading. Abi invites you in to what feels almost like a thriller, then quickly a heart bursting romantic comedy and a devastating drama. Even if this was fiction it would be impossible to stop thinking about this book long after reading. The fact that this is Abi’s real life experience brought forth as this astonishing piece of writing is truly breathtaking. It’s arrestingly honest, funny, profound and exquisitely written. I could not have loved it more." — Carey Mulligan
"There are no words. I was stunned, in every sense, by this heart-breaking, profound and deeply human memoir. Like CS Lewis on grief, Morgan finds truth and beauty in the darkest places. I feel changed by this book. I will never forget it." — Meg Mason, author of Sorrow & Bliss
“A profound look at the complexities of love, even at its most mundane. Equal parts savage and sublime, this obliterates notions of memory and intimacy with grace and precision….[A] raw and incandescent debut.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A candid, intimate memoir of a harrowing time.” — Kirkus Reviews
"Abi Morgan (Tiny Dynamite), an Emmy-winning British writer for film (The Iron Lady) and television (The Hour), knows good copy when she sees it. She also knows better than to reach for clichés. This Is Not a Pity Memoir is a tragedy chronicle whose success lies in the author's resolutely bromide-free treatment of the harrowing circumstances she lived through." — Shelf Awareness (Starred Review)
“A mash-up of all the things I love in a book – honesty, comedy, pathos and what- happens-next. It’s brutal – in a good way – but above all else it’s a testament to kindness, stickability and enduring love.” — Kit de Waal
"A powerful, fragmented journey through brain injury." — Library Journal
"One of Britain’s finest screenwriters, Morgan writes a very moving story about tragedy without ever becoming sentimental. A gripping read." — Bloomberg News
"(This Is Not A Pity Memoir) is a brutally honest autobiography of the catastrophic last few years of her life, when her husband, Jacob, suffered a brain seizure and went into a coma and she simultaneously was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer. What does this have to do with history, you might ask. Everything, as it happens." — Andrew Keen for Literary Hub
"In this emotional memoir, Morgan poetically writes about her husband’s long illness, her own battle with breast cancer, and how she learned to hang on to what matters most. Beautifully weaving the past with the present, she reveals the deep truths and challenging moments of caring for a partner that at times doesn't recognize her, raising two children, saving her troubled relationship, and navigating a successful career, all while living with her own illness and enduring the global pandemic." — Booklist
"An extraordinary tale told extraordinarily well." — Marina Hyde
"I wept. I dared to hope. I felt my heart crack. Exceptional." — Sam Baker
Gripping, funny and always honest.”
"An extraordinary tale told extraordinarily well."
"From the very first line I couldn’t stop reading. Abi invites you in to what feels almost like a thriller, then quickly a heart bursting romantic comedy and a devastating drama. Even if this was fiction it would be impossible to stop thinking about this book long after reading. The fact that this is Abi’s real life experience brought forth as this astonishing piece of writing is truly breathtaking. It’s arrestingly honest, funny, profound and exquisitely written. I could not have loved it more."
"With her trademark deadpan, trenchant wit, and a deeply soulful mindfulness, Abi Morgan takes a breathtaking hike on the cliff edge of a life upended by illness. By turns harrowing, cracking sharp and heartbreaking, it is...comforting to accompany someone with her sense of humor and the absurd on this trip- (this) book is a gift to anyone who has been similarly unmoored by fate and the furies.
"There are no words. I was stunned, in every sense, by this heart-breaking, profound and deeply human memoir. Like CS Lewis on grief, Morgan finds truth and beauty in the darkest places. I feel changed by this book. I will never forget it."
"Morgan doesn’t, to put it mildly, go in for self-pity. Her book, even when things are at their most bleak, is both very funny and as propulsive as a thriller, ticking along in an adrenalised real time, impossible to put down."
A mash-up of all the things I love in a book – honesty, comedy, pathos and what- happens-next. It’s brutal – in a good way – but above all else it’s a testament to kindness, stickability and enduring love.”
The kind of book you will find yourself saying urgently, over and over, to friends. “Have you read it? Have you read it?"
"I wept. I dared to hope. I felt my heart crack. Exceptional."
2022-03-22
A chronicle of despair and hope.
Award-winning Welsh playwright and screenwriter Morgan once planned to make a film adaptation of a memoir about a writer’s reflections on dying from cancer. When she mentioned the project at a dinner party, one guest remarked angrily, “I fucking hate those pity memoirs.” Morgan’s title alerts readers that her absorbing narrative of health crises is not meant to evoke pity, but nevertheless it is an illness memoir about pain and anguish. In June 2018, the author’s longtime partner, Jacob, collapsed. He spent seven months in a medically induced coma during a hospital stay of 443 days, in which he was subjected to numerous MRIs, CT scans, and “puncturing and infusing and drawing blood.” Finally, doctors found a cause for his seizures and mental deterioration: anti–NMDA receptor encephalitis—caused by injections he had been taking to control multiple sclerosis—which they began to treat aggressively. Morgan recounts the fears and anxiety that she and her two teenage children experienced during Jacob’s hospitalization, slow recovery, and her own treatment for breast cancer. Her distress was compounded by Jacob’s insistence that he did not know her even though he recognized others. After he returned home, although a “constant industry” of therapists and aides assisted, care fell largely to the author. Living with Jacob, she writes, was “like living with a ghost. He is part toddler, part elderly dementia-ridden patient, part frustrated teenager, part child, part Jacob.” Her discouragement was palpable. “Sometimes it feels as though I am pedaling a dynamo on a bicycle,” she writes, “trying to keep the lights on.” Morgan says she has written about the experience for Jacob, her children, and, she hopes, for a reader, like herself, “who Googles at night needing to find someone who gets the aching terror of the person they love hanging between life and death.”
A candid, intimate memoir of a harrowing time.
