This is such a powerful book that made me cry and really challenged every perception of marriage and what it means. Abi Morgan is such a brilliant writer and I know so many people I will be heartily recommending this too.

I thought this was really interestingly written, and I went in not knowing what to expect (but loved the cover). Abi has a really thoughtful writing style, and I was compelled to keep reading.

This is a remarkable book. It is very sad but it is also filled with hope.
It is such an emotional read. It’s a book that everyone should read

Crying laughing fuming relieved. Thankyou Abi for sharing you and your family’s lives with us. I loved the book and enjoyed so much listening on bbc. Nicola Walker had to be the one thankyiu

I have heard so many good things about this memoir but unfortunately I could not get on with it. As sad and moving as the central story is, I found the writing unengaging and disjointed and could not finish it.

I found this memoir and addictive and profound read! Can you imagine one day your partner collapsing and then spending over 400 days in hospital? And then when he wakes up he doesn't believe you are his long term partner? And you also go through great cancer and treatment during this time!
This was raw, honest, funny, heartbreaking, powerful and so moving. I'm not sure how Abi kept it all together at times. This was a tough read but it was also about recovery, survival, hope and ultimately love.

This is Not a Pity Memoir is an incredibly personal and moving account of the author, Abi Morgan and what happens after her husband Jacob falls ill with a neurological disease that will change their lives forever. It’s love letter to their past life, to Jacob and an incredibly raw and honest look at the impact of such a dramatic illness. You can’t help but feel incredibly moved by the book and I really do admire the author for how she coped with what seems like an unimaginable series of events.

I listened to the audiobook, although I did receive a free copy as well via NetGalley. I think as with a lot of other memoirs though, listening to them works so well and you feel like you are drawn in even more. I have seen that some reviewers struggled with the writing style but that’s not something I really noticed with the audiobook.

I also think it’s incredibly hard to rate this type of book without it seeming like a reflection on the authors life! This isn’t the type of book you can enjoy reading, but I am glad I read it.

Somehow Abi Morgan has written a book about cancer and serious illness and made it neither depressing or schmaltzy or oversentimental. It is funny and matter-of-fact, beautiful and devastating and heart-wrenching. It is an absorbing and entertaining look at love and family and what it means to love and fight for the person you love. But as the title says, it absolutely is not a pity memoir.

This memoir by Abi Morgan was absolutely gorgeous!
It is an incredibly vulnerable story of her partners and her own illness. You can tell she is a screenwriter as the book flowed so well and had many funny and poignant moments threaded together seamlessly.
A huge recommendation! Loved it!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC to review. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was beautiful, gripping, and very emotive. Thought-provoking in a very sensitive and most sincere way.

Brutally honest and beautifully written this is a difficult book to rate and review. I had to read this in small chunks as parts are quite harrowing. The author grapples with the minutiae of day to day life caring for someone you love with tenderness and doesn’t shy away from the negative emotions and feeling of helplessness. This is not an easy read but ultimately has a strong message of resilience and hope.

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book.

This is a difficult book to write a review, I would recommend it to anyone who is grappling through illness, a caregiver for someone you love, or going through medical issues. However I wouldn't say it was enjoyable to read. I finished the book quickly and the story will stay with me but it is not a light hearted read and is more someone expressing thoughts and feelings on paper but I think some people will find it relatable and nice to read something like that.

This was such a good read; I was totally immersed in the storyline.

Thank you NetGalley for my complimentary copy in return for my honest review.

A beautifully written, poignant memoir to love. It recalls her husband Jakob's illness, hospitalisation and difficult recovery and jumps chronologically between moments in their lives as a couple pre-illness and the reality of living life while your spouse is in a coma. As a reader I wondered how Abi managed to continue, giving her own diagnosis and treatment for a serious illness. This is as much about endurance and resilience as it is about love.

A truly amazing read, not a word too many. Not as sentimental as I feared, or triggering. I had to read it through twice to make sure I didn't miss anything. That's a special talent in a book.

Abi and her family deserve the very best in life after what they have all been through. I will gift this book far and wide this Christmas!

The title is correct - this is not a pity memoir. It is the account of the author's husband's illness, and its devastating impact on their family. It's the story of how when Jacob finally wakes from his six month long coma, he no longer recognises his wife. It is the sometimes brutally honest story of how that family manages to navigate a new normal, and all the change that entails.

Although heartbreaking, this is a memoir which is told plainly, and doesn't come with a ribbon tied around it at the end. it's real and it;'s painful and I found it utterly moving.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for granting me a free ARC copy in exchange for an honest review.

Great characterisation, funny dialogue, and a brilliant premise. This is going to be a huge hit.

I found this book incredibly moving.

This Is Not a Pity Memoir by Abi Morgan details what happened when her long-term partner, Jacob, collapsed in summer 2018 and spent seven months in an induced coma and 443 days in hospital where he was eventually diagnosed with a rare form of encephalitis caused by injections he had been taking to treat multiple sclerosis. When he woke up, he no longer recognised Morgan and treated her like an imposter. Morgan is the award-winning playwright and screenwriter of several films and TV series including ‘The Split’ and ‘The Hour’. She is careful to avoid cliches in her writing, wryly noting that if this had been a fictional plot, her subsequent diagnosis of breast cancer in late 2019 would have been criticised for coming too soon after Jacob’s health issues. Instead, while the events in Morgan’s life haven’t always provided optimum narrative convenience, her account is often bleakly funny and demonstrates real resilience. Many thanks to John Murray Press for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

There's no denying that Morgan went through a lot. Her partner, Jacob, has MS. He took an experimental drug and developed anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis that left him in a coma. When he woke up, he didn't recognize her and declared her an imposter (Capgras syndrome). In the meantime, she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent treatment.

All this, plus Covid-marred years of recovery for both of them, has happened since 2018. I read A Lot of illness and bereavement memoirs, and I'm always a bit wary of the ones where the author has only let a few years pass before processing all the material, whereas Mary Karr prescribes seven. It can mean that you don't get the desired depth of reflection. This is casual and witty; a really easy read. However, it also reads as if it was written quickly, off the cuff. The paragraph structure and punctuation are nonstandard, like she's going for a stream of consciousness, or something halfway between a screenplay (she's an Emmy-winning screenwriter, after all) and narrative prose. The hybrid approach only annoyed me in the end.

Her editors let her off easy, too: there are dangling modifiers; she changes tense willy-nilly, sometimes even mid-sentence; and there are some rather embarrassingly bad typos, like "humus" for "hummus" and "tinkles on the ivories" instead of "tickles the ivories" (and both of those come on the same page!).

A remarkable story, certainly, and one worth reading about (if only through a couple of long magazine articles), but not a stand-out memoir for me.

A favourite passage:

"'Everything is material, right...'
But this, this is a little too close for comfort."

This is, without a doubt, my best book so far of 2022 and it’s going to take some beating (not that it’s a competition). I was immediately intrigued first and foremost by the title because I love a memoir but do also often mull the boundaries inherent in writing such a piece - who is it for, what’s its function for the writer and so on. I’m also aware that Abi Morgan is a writer for stage and screen and so I was interested in how her work might translate to the stage.

Perhaps one reason why I loved this book so much is because it really delivered on both these counts. Morgan writes so compellingly about the worst period in her life and often employs her expertise as a screenwriter by highlighting the moments that she would cut if she was writing a film, the elements of real life that wouldn’t have made it to the screen because of their messiness or inconvenience as a plot point. On one hand, as a fellow writer, this felt a little bit like being granted a masterclass from Morgan herself but simultaneously there was a very moving element of watching the author desperately try to make sense of her life in the way she knew best. She talks within the memoir of not having been sure how to tell the story - that she considered making a play before COVID hit and made that untenable.

Similarly, she explains why she chose the title This is Not a Pity Memoir, describing a dinner party at which a drunk woman derides what she called ‘pity memoirs’ when a young Morgan expresses an interest in adapting late columnist Ruth Picardie’s book into a movie.

‘Why share your fucking misery?’ the girl demands. ‘Who wants to read that’.
In response Morgan says: ‘I am so embarrassed. I am found out. “Me,” I want to shout. “I want to read it. Me.” But I don’t.’

Throughout the book she comes back to this issue. Is this a pity memoir? When is it the right time to write down everything that’s happening to her family? Is it years later? Is it of the moment and, if so, is that actually simply therapy? Who gets to tell the story? There are recordings her daughter makes and offers that Morgan turns down - that’s not her part of the story to tell. The play idea was going to include her husband onstage. The written memoir cannot, naturally. The final words of the acknowledgement come to some sort of conclusion on this matter:

Finally, Justine Picardie and the late Ruth Picardie, whose fearless writing and beautiful honestly showed me that there are no such things as pity memoirs, only words on pages and if they mean something to someone, they are worth being said.

The book is a love story at its heart. In June 2018 Abi Morgan got home to find her partner Jacob lying on the floor of their bathroom. They later discovered that he had suffered a now documented reaction to an injection he was receiving to treat his MS. From that day on life changed beyond recognition for Morgan and her family. Jacob was put into an induced coma and stayed in hospital for over 200 days. When he finally awoke from his coma after seven months he developed Capgras Sydrome, more commonly known as Imposter Syndrome. While he recognised their children and the family dog, he was under the delusion that Morgan was not the real Abi Morgan. The memoir follows the experience from Morgan’s point of view as she becomes a single parent household as well as her partner’s carer, all while maintaining her writing career and battling breast cancer. It’s a shocking story, over and over again it’s unclear what might happen next, and Morgan’s fortitude is impressive.

Although she’s honest about her own battles in the face of all this pressure, Morgan is generous with praise for others. For her children, her family and in-laws, the doctors, for Jacob. She’s also incredibly honest, sharing moments of self pity and even taboo thoughts over whether Jacob’s death would have been preferable at times. This is such an important element to the book, particularly in terms of her conclusion that ‘there are no such things as pity memoirs, only words on pages and if they mean something to someone, they are worth being said.’ To give voice to thoughts one shouldn’t have is powerful and will most certainly mean something to someone.

Lest I’ve made this book sound like an unrelenting gallop through misery, I’d also like to highlight how funny and witty is it. There’s the aforementioned dinner party, with the drunk girl becoming ever drunker and more irritating. There’s Jacob and Abi’s burgeoning love story, complete with unexpected baby and fusing of cultural traditions. There are snapshots of family life - Jacob’s enthusiasm for adventure, his relationship with his children and his talent of acting. As someone who often feels alienated by musical references in books it was also a delight to finally feel totally seen as Morgan shares her family’s love of theatre and Tim Minchin lyrics.

If I hadn’t hammered it home by now, just to confirm: Big fan of this book. It’s moving, sad, heartwarming, unexpected, funny and clever. Plus more. If you love a pity memoir - this is one of the best I’ve ever read.