ABI MORGAN 20 November 2pm
about yourself or putting yourself onto the page, that’s a separate emotional experience from writing fiction.” Kate hopes to continue the conversation started by books like Lady Into Woman and others similar to it, enabling a dialogue between generations. “It was a wonderful thing to discover that I thought I was treading new ground, but actually, I was just following in my great-grandmother’s footsteps,” she reflects. ON THE LIGHT SIDE Abi Morgan, the scribbler behind Suffragette and Shame , made her first foray into book writing this year, though she still crafted it very much with the screen in mind. This is Not a Pity Memoir documents a harrowing few years after her partner Jacob, who has multiple sclerosis, suffered brain inflammation as a side effect of a trial he was part of years earlier. After being put into an induced coma for seven months, when he woke up, he no longer knew who Abi was, and a few months later Abi herself became ill with breast cancer. “When I came to write, I was experiencing my life through the eyes of a screenwriter,” says Abi. “There was an element of comedy in the way I saw situations. People weren’t just people and doctors weren’t just doctors, they became characters. It was slightly out-of-body and I think that’s something that happens with trauma. A natural survival mechanism, when you go through trauma, is to lean towards the joy where you can find it.” The book deals with this distressing experience using a light touch, peppered with humour and acute observations. The title grew out of Abi’s first encounter with Jacob at a dinner party, where they bonded over a shared love of Ruth Picardie’s
PICTURE THIS Abi leaned on her screenwriting pedigree in order to complete this touching memoir
Before I Say Goodbye – dismissed by their companions as a mere ‘pity memoir’. “The book is a kind of thesis to understand why I had to write this,” Abi explains. “I feared that it was going to be a pity memoir, but what I came to realise is that there’s no such thing as a pity memoir; it’s just words on pages, and if it means something to someone, then it’s worth being said.” The techniques Abi draws on are in the vein of her screenwriting. “Although the book is a piece of prose, it’s also a dialogue with the screenwriter in me, and the way I seek form amid the chaos through screen techniques,” Abi says. “I was writing with a sense of cut, edit, scene changes and wanting to drive character forward and through. But what I loved about it was the simplicity, being just you and one reader. It was a very personal place from which to start writing. And, in a way, I didn’t have to worry about an audience in the same way as with screenwriting.”
Primarily, Abi’s audience was Jacob. “I was writing the whole time because I wanted him to be able to read it, to tell him about what had happened.” During this experience, Abi was also hard at work on hit BBC series The Split , with themes of mortality and the importance of family seeping in. “ The Split has been my running partner for a lot of this experience. It’s helped me draw a line under a crazy few years,” says Abi. The book itself has also been a way to process emotions. “There’s a sense of containment, that somehow it’s been held somewhere. I feel relieved that the feelings from that time have found a home.” Now she’s flexed her book-writing muscles, a novel may be on the horizon. In the meantime, she has plans to adapt her memoir into a film, going beyond the book to cover her and Jacob’s wedding last year, and his recovery. “There are still things I’d like to explore – this final chapter, in many ways, that’s not in the book,” Abi says.
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