An unusually honest account of the jumbled-up feelings of sadness and madness that grief produces ... Runcie describes his book as a 'love letter', and one danger of grief memoirs is that love ends up replacing the deceased person with a saint or a Stepford wife ... Here, Runcie generously fulfils the promise of his title, which he explains was one of his wife’s favourite expressions when greeting friends... because his memoir is full of good things: stories that reveal Imrie’s sharp intelligence, her bold fashion sense, her glee at pricking the bubble of pretension ... Runcie is also touchingly honest in recognising that his wife wasn’t perfect... while still marvelling at her ability to find good things even at the end of her life.
Runcie has written a love letter to the woman who, when he announced to his parents that he was going to marry her, prompted a less than ecstatic response ... Runcie... credits Imrie with turning him into a novelist. For all her lavishness of speech... she had a scalpel sense when it came to text. She encouraged Runcie to cut anything slack or sloppy from his drafts, so what was left was the pure essence of character and the logical energy of a story that could only end one way. These are qualities that Runcie brings to this memoir.
This is by no means a depressing read ... [Runcie] deploys those literary powers to impressive effect, adroitly conveying the tragedy of Imrie’s decline without ever becoming mawkish or defiling the dignity of a woman who couldn’t bear for friends to witness her deterioration ... Given their shared immersion in the theatrical world, Runcie’s narrative makes liberal use of stage terminology ... Over 200 luminous pages, we get a powerful sense of a vivacious, clever human being who enriched the lives of her friends, family and even we strangers.
One of the book’s many achievements is its description — unsparing, blackly comic — of nursing someone through a disabling and terminal illness in a world of Zoom consultations and social distancing ... Runcie... is too good a writer to settle for fridge-magnet aphorisms about grief. Literature is his guide, Dr. Johnson and David Hume his references for widowerhood ... He is attuned to the practicality of living in, and through, sadness, grounding his prose in the grubby detritus of pain and grief, their dull bureaucracy ... His triumph is that his pragmatic collecting of such fragments for literary use never evinces Graham Greene’s notorious image of creative detachment, the 'splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.' This book is an act of thawing, a refusal to freeze.
It’s no comedy, but there are moments of humour throughout ... It’s a deeply affecting account, and never mawkish. Nor is there any nonsense about the heroism of suffering. Marilyn does not achieve a stoical acceptance of death. Despair predominates ... The book that he has written for her, like his life now, might be a ghost story of sorts, but the ghost that haunts him is not an unhappy one, and will never leave him.
A widower turns grief into a profound appreciation of his wife’s legacy in this poignant elegy ... A moving exploration of a great marriage and its ability to nourish the mind and heart.
A deeply emotional memoir of their 35-year marriage and a moving meditation on grief ... Overwhelmed with loss after her death and angry at facile remarks that some people offered as consolation, Runcie took to writing as a way to keep her close ... Sorrow imbues a tender, intimate memoir.
