Abi and Me

The dust jacket is matt pink, scruffy black letters, which appear to have been scrawled with a sooty finger, or stick of crumbly charcoal, announce “This is not a Pity Memoir”. When the outer cover slips the sugar pink clashes with glossy bold yellow like a Battenburg cake full of E numbers. The words hidden beneath - “It’s a love story.” 

My copy is signed in the same scribbly hand – “To Sarah, Happy reading, crying (?) Abi Morgan”

Since trying to fashion my own story into a memoir I’ve been reading more true stories, especially those written by writers.

Abi Morgan is a screen writer and I confess I knew little about her except she wrote “The Split” for the BBC and I am a huge fan. Listening to her at discuss her memoir at the Primadonna festival with Kit de Waal I realised just how many similarities there are between my story and Abi’s.

Both of us were born in 1968 – I add her to the list of “famous” people born that year, Kylie, Jason, Catherine Tate and of course Daniel Craig. I note Abi’s birthday is in September, I am still just a smidge older than all of them!

Both us find our husbands collapsed after severe headaches – only Abi’s husband isn’t really her husband, they never married and the outcomes are starkly different.

Subsequently in the wake of one family trauma we both develop cancer – her breast, me bowel.

Yes, many similarities but also our stories are poles apart. We are like spinning tops which clash and career off in opposite directions rather than balloons benignly nudging each other on the breeze.

Am I waxing lyrical, of course, my writing so often coloured by the style of narrative I am reading, Abi’s stream of consciousness somehow taking my own words along with hers.

I didn’t like her style at first, I’m not sure I will enjoy this, I thought, but then something clicked, her lists, her pop culture references and her brutal honesty started to resonate as I tuned into her wavelength.

Grabbing some post-it notes I began reading like a writer (thanks Kit de Waal for that advice) not only noting what I enjoyed but marking the pages where our stories converged.

We had both written to Jim’ll Fix It – neither of us had our letters answered. We both count our blessings for that – phew! What charmed lives we led.

Although Abi never travelled abroad until she was eighteen, she has made up for it since and recounts many skiing trips and foreign family holidays. She even manages to take her two teenage children, one boy, one girl, away to their holiday home in Italy when her beloved Jacob is in hospital. 

Our family could never manage holidays when Andrew was still alive, I remember only too well the stress at the airport flying to Paris, defusing and calming what could have been a major incident. I still find holidays hard to do.

Do I envy Abi’s “glamourous” lifestyle? Perhaps - not really - I wish the home screen on my computer was Andrew and I standing somewhere more exotic than on Redcar beach. But that is my life and my memories, we can’t make anymore together because Andrew died.

Meanwhile Jacob lived and Abi wonders what it would be like if he hadn’t. Would life be better or just different? She ponders a carefree life as a widow - sorry love that's not all its cracked up to be!

I certainly don’t envy her looking after a man who is her “husband” and yet isn’t – he doesn’t even recognise her – she is NOT the REAL Abi Morgan. A side affect of his debilitating neurological condition.

My heart breaks at the thought and I know full well that I would not have handled that situation as well. If Andrew lived and needed full time care it would have driven me mad, I couldn’t have done it. Only I am allowed to say it but, I do believe it was for the best Andrew’s heart attack was fatal.

Jacob suffers from MS and then develops Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis – 80% of people have a good outcome with treatment, but his prognosis is not so great, they never get fully out of the woods.

I’m not sure what the percentage is of people having heart attacks fully recovering?  I daren’t look it up. It probably quite high and Andrew could have been perfectly fine but from family history I know that his dad was never the same after his first heart attack at the same age of 48. I know how stoic my mother-in-law was but how looking after her husband wore her down and how the ripples scarred the family.

Abi’s grief is so raw and visceral, you can still grieve if someone survives, you still mourn what was lost. 

Many of our challenges were different, I was spared financial worries, the mortgage paid off once I produced the death certificate – I burst into tears when the letter arrived.

Coming on top of all we both lost our cancer diagnoses seemed a cruel twist of fate, far too dramatic for even a weekly soap opera. 

We both think of our children and the unfairness of the situation, already being a family with “one man down”. 

Abi appears to have struggled more than me with the procedures of her own treatment, but she was also caring for Jacob, two hospital stories knotted together – how I admire her for that.

I had been a widow for eight years when I was diagnosed and I had my dad beside me during chemo, we sat side by side being drip fed our individual poisonous cocktails  – “family outings”, that my mum now admits she was weirdly jealous of.

It’s strange what you see in others, you wonder if you would cope differently. Be braver? Fall apart? Stay or leave?

Ultimately Abi’s story is not a pity memoir but a true love story, just as it says on the cover. You will never know how you might react until it happens to you and I pray it never does, at least not as dramatically. It makes a good story but up close and personal is almost too much to bear.

Abi Morgan you have my full admiration.

Everyone else – go read this wonderful, honest, life affirming book and hold you loved ones just that bit tighter in gratitude.