A Pocketful of Happiness

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Again the frustration of not being able to be by her side when she’s having the scan. She reappears twenty minutes later. It was at this point that I suddenly felt for him. The guy who goes to the Oscars is the same guy who sits alone in a chain restaurant in Salisbury waiting for his béarnaise sauce to arrive. To have someone always beside you – or even just on the end of the phone – who understands these dizzying shifts and all their attendant lonelinesses, and who loves you wherever in the world you are, is a precious thing indeed. I think he wrote his book too soon, but I also see that he needed to do something, the gap in his life being so unimaginably huge, so very hard to bear. As soon as I saw any of the other actors, I always had hundreds of questions for them, I was asking, ‘What’s going on? What have you been doing?’ That was a unique experience for me, because normally you’re interacting with other people all the time. I was like somebody who had Coronavirus, I couldn’t be with other people, I just had to be with the camera on my own.” Joan’s birthday. We are unabashed Christmas-aholics, and the house is baubled-up, tree kissing the ceiling, and enough fairy lights to host a Tinker Bell convention. For the past week she’s mentioned feeling breathless and has to pause halfway up the stairs. Nothing more than that. Un-characteristically, for a doctor’s daughter who has resolutely resisted any and every encouragement to see a medic about anything, she suggests calling the doctor, a first in our decades together. Once you've stepped off the running machine, it's suddenly clear where you're actually standing and who is standing with and beside you. And who ISN'T."

Joan had been in Tahiti coaching Mel Gibson on The Bounty. We hadn’t even moved in together yet, and my career prospects were provincial to put it politely, compared to the stellar company she was keeping. But she never allowed that to come between us, even though I felt it keenly. His decision to form the book’s narrative jointly out of the most enchanting highs (the Oscars, karaoke with Olivia Colman in a house formerly owned by Bette Davis) and the bleakest lows (Joan’s diagnosis, her fury when Grant inadvertently used the word terminal one day to describe her illness) came, he said, out of his desire to accurately capture what most people’s lives are like… [Richard and Joan’s] relationship is the fascinating central pillar of the book.” This honest and frequently hilarious memoir is written in honor of that challenge—Richard has faithfully kept a diary since childhood, and in these entries he shares raw detail of everything he has experienced: both the pain of losing his beloved wife, and the excitement of their life together, from the role that transformed his life overnight in Withnail and I to his thrilling Oscar Award nomination thirty years later for Can You Ever Forgive Me? This brilliant actor who I enjoyed in The Scarlett Pimpernel, the animated Doctor Who (sadly never got a chance in the flesh which is a missed opportunity IMHO) and one of my favorite shows Hotel Secrets comes with a heartbreaking autobiography about the loss of the love of his life. It is a book that certainly shows the love and torch he carried for his wife Joan. I entered into this book under the notion it would be solely focussed on Grant’s experience of losing his wife. Understandably so, given the memoir’s title is the parting advice upon her death, in addition to Grant’s press tours where he continually touted this as a memoir on Joan’s terminal cancer.Come on, my inner cynic said. Grant has worked with everyone: Coppola, Scorsese, Altman. Would he really self-combust over a tweet from Streisand? Also, I knew full well he’d met her before: in With Nails, he describes – in some detail – talking with her at a party while he was making The Player in the 1990s. And yet, just minutes after Grant yelled at me at the Oscars, he was then “introduced” to Streisand, and uploaded photos of him looking delirious with happiness next to her. What a phoney, I grumped at the time. The details of Joan’s diagnosis with lung cancer, the various tests and treatments she undergoes, how she and her family come to terms with her terminal prognosis, and her death are all described with an honesty that I know many readers will appreciate. It is great to hear that they were so well-supported by the NHS and by their friends so that Joan could die at home.

Initially, when I decided to write this book, I thought I wouldn’t write anything about the illness part of Joan’s life,” he says. “But then I remembered some advice Bruce [Robinson, writer and director of Withnail and I] gave me about screenwriting. He said: ‘Write about something that has happened today that’s never happened before,’ and nothing had ever been more life-changing for us than Joan’s diagnosis.” You just have one sound that you need to be aware of—when you say ‘basin’ or ‘council’ or ‘pencil,’ you overcompensate and say ‘bay-SIN,’ ‘coun-CIL,’ and ‘pen-CIL.’ Instead, say ‘pen-SULL’ rhyming with ‘pull’ and throw it away.” I ask if his friends have started trying to fix him up with eligible women. “Some have, yes. And I find that absolutely bizarre. It’s not something I could even conceive of at this point. It’s still too raw and present, and I am still having an ongoing conversation with my wife in my head,” he says. But it’s not, of course, the same as the real thing. Sorry, should have said, I like to smell everything in sight. Always have done. Ever since I can remember. Can’t understand why everyone doesn’t. You’re a brilliant cook.”

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Because Jason Segel is an actor, writer and director, he’s a triple whammy. He’s very articulate and persuasive. It just seemed worth taking a leap of faith, as Sally Field did as well. Not knowing how something’s going to end makes a change from shows where everything is predictable and you’re foretold how it’s all going to end. I liked that about it.” Probably a very good thing that I didn’t know any of this when we first got together, otherwise she might have run for the Highlands at the prospect of having to accommodate three people in this relationship. Herself, Barbra, and me! I can only begin to imagine the emotional strength it must take to write, publish and promote a book within a year of the death of your life partner. And Richard E Grant’s love and admiration for his wife, Joan Washington, shines though every paragraph.