THIS IS NOT A PITY MEMOIR

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.