Review by Booklist Review
After rushing through a seemingly normal day in her busy life, playwright and screenwriter Morgan arrived home to find her partner collapsed on the bathroom floor and their lives changed forever. 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. "Life is a process of cause and effect," Morgan writes, "and however much you might sidestep the cracks, stay close to the edge, keep on walking past the open windows, no one can prepare you for the utter shock of the backflip, the left-field throw, the curveball." Morgan shares her life in hopes that her story may connect with readers carrying burdens of their own.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this raw and incandescent debut, screenwriter Morgan reflects on the emotional turmoil and growth of rebuilding a life with her partner after he was diagnosed with Capgras syndrome, a rare psychological illness that made him believe she was an imposter. When a seizure led her partner of 20 years, Jacob, to be put into a medically induced coma for six months, Morgan was informed that his "brain does not look like yours... anymore." Upon waking up, he slowly remembered their children and family, but not Morgan. With brutal and hypnotic prose, Morgan oscillates between the grueling processes of regaining Jacob's trust upon his return home ("One day I suggest he quiz me... I get every answer right") and providing him round-the-clock care while isolating due to the Covid-19 pandemic; the beginning of their relationship, when their passion was immediate and intense; and her own harrowing struggle with stage 3 breast cancer. "What no one tells you about proper unfolding tragedy is that it is scary, and adrenalizing," she writes. "But mainly it is boring." Delving into her "mawkish... relationship with mishap" and desperation to preserve the ephemeral, Morgan surfaces with 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. (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Morgan, screenwriter of Suffragette and The Iron Lady, has written a raw memoir about fragility, resilience, anguish, and hope. When her partner, actor Jacob Krichefski, complains one morning of not feeling well, little does she realize that they are embarking upon a long journey of illness and recovery. Krichefski had recently stopped taking a drug for his Multiple Sclerosis. Returning home to find him incapacitated on the bathroom floor, the family begins a year-long journey through hospitals, consultants, and medical teams. Supported by an extended network of family and friends, Morgan continues to work and hold her family's life together. Eventually diagnosed with Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis, Jacob begins his long recovery but then develops Capgras syndrome, which causes him to recognize everyone--except Morgan. He believes her to be an imposter and remains convinced that she is not whom she says she is. Then, as if this was not enough, Morgan discovers that she is quite unwell herself, and urgently needs treatment. VERDICT A powerful, fragmented journey through brain injury. This book will especially appeal to Morgan's fans, and to those who have experienced similar journeys.--Penelope J.M. Klein
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
