Pete Chapman and Christopher Fowler on their last holiday together in July 2022 in Bodrum, Turkey. Photograph: Courtesy of Pete Chapman Chris chose to blog about his cancer rather than talk about it. The first I heard about this was when a friend called to ask me about his illness. I was so annoyed at the time. He had not disclosed his diagnosis to anyone else, and then he suddenly decided to blog without warning me. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Rather than tell everyone over and over again what was happening, he decided to do it once. His literary blog turned into a kind of cancer blog. It was not where I wanted to discuss things. I avoid social media and do my very best not to engage with any of it. Chris and I were like gin and tonic: completely different but perfect together. It was the foundation of our partnership, no matter how testing it could be for both of us at times.

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Access to standardized English voices with diverse features, such as: listening with a timer, audiobooks playing on screensaver, subtitles with each word highlighted in time with the vocal recording,... Harder and more poignant for me was the personal stuff. Of course, I lived part of the cancer journey with him. There was lots of discussion about wills, power of attorney, funeral arrangements. Treatment options. Saying goodbye to friends and family. The thing was, Chris did not like talking about those things. His imagination was so vivid, he said the more he knew and thought about these mundane and miserable things, the worse the nightmares he endured nightly would be. Chris and I always talked about his writing but the one thing he never let me do was read anything before it was published. So I hadn’t yet read Word Monkey – which I started referring to as THE BOOK – when Chris died of bowel and liver cancer at the beginning of March 2023, three weeks short of his 70th birthday.

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The week that followed was another unexpectedly difficult period. As I digested what I read, a number of thoughts started to occur to me. I worried that he’d left out various important details about what happened and that certain things didn’t happen exactly the way he described. We often had vigorous discussions about this sort of thing in the pub or with friends over dinner, when he was telling a story or we were dissecting something he’d written. His retort was always, “Never let facts get in the way of a good story.” I always have a lot of questions and I had more than usual this time. Normally we would have discussed these together and debated. This time I chose to call the handful of people I knew who had read advance copies. Friends, his agents and other writers. I needed to understand what they thought and how they interpreted the book.