Richard E. Grant emigrated from Swaziland to London in 1982, with dreams of making it as an actor. Unexpectedly, he met and fell in love with a renowned dialect coach Joan Washington. Their relationship and marriage, navigating the highs and lows of Hollywood, parenthood, and loss, lasted almost forty years. When Joan died in 2021, her final challenge to him was to find a "pocketful of happiness in every day." This memoir is written in honor of that challenge.
The Hollywood sections take away from the intensity of the book ... The woman in the book whom I could easily do without is … Barbra Streisand ... I could have done without all of that, because, like Richard E. Grant, I just wanted more of the feisty, unvarnished, irritable, generous, wise, unimpressed Joan Washington. You cannot read this book and not miss her very much.
The book is not so much a memoir as it is the anatomy of a love story and partnership ... An endearing read, A Pocketful of Happiness, gets progressively harder to digest emotionally as the illness marches to its inevitable conclusion. But it’s worthwhile all the same.
A brutal read ... Grant’s pain is still pushed right up against these pages ... Interspersing Grant’s account of Washington’s illness, though, are entertaining diary entries about his work ... Brutal, yes, but a necessary description of going behind the curtain and seeing what is pulling the ropes.
