Sorry, should have said, I like to smell everything in sight. Always have done. Ever since I can remember. Can’t understand why everyone doesn’t. You’re a brilliant cook.” This honest and frequently hilarious memoir is written in honor of that challenge—Richard has faithfully kept a diary since childhood, and in these entries he shares raw detail of everything he has experienced: both the pain of losing his beloved wife, and the excitement of their life together, from the role that transformed his life overnight in Withnail and I to his thrilling Oscar Award nomination thirty years later for Can You Ever Forgive Me? It's is a remarkable mix of humour and tragedy, sprinkled with name-dropping, and delivered with insight and charm.

My father’s advice to me as a teenager was: “What a woman says she wants, and what she actually wants, are two entirely different things.” Summarily dismissed by me as advice from an unevolved olde-school brontosaurus. Until I saw how disappointed Joan was! I can still feel the gigantic Jurassic imprint of putting my foot in it and never tried that ploy ever again. I can only begin to imagine the emotional strength it must take to write, publish and promote a book within a year of the death of your life partner. And Richard E Grant’s love and admiration for his wife, Joan Washington, shines though every paragraph.Thank you Mr. Grant for this gorgeous book, this intimate look into the wonderful life that was your marriage to Joan Washington [and by the end, I was so very sorry that I never had an opportunity to meet such a fantastic person] and the extremely intimate look into her illness and death. Even though I cried serious ugly tears throughout much of this book, I would read it again for the first time in a heartbeat. I would read it again for a second time right now if I was told to. It helped me with my own grief and indeed I think anyone who has dealt with grief in any way imaginable, will get something from this book, even if it is an amazingly cathartic cry.

The majority of what I did in it was literally looking down the barrel of the camera and talking as though I’m talking to the viewer, on my own. Obviously, at lunchtime, we’d all meet up, but generally I was on my own. Allow the BAFTA-winning screen legend to reveal what you need to know about the new, most escapist show on telly…Stay up with Oilly and Florian watching TV as the rest of the world whoop and firework their way into 2021, around the globe. Tongue-tied, I can only slowly nod in agreement. It’s the first time that either of us has dared utter that toxic “C” word. I was an out-of-work actor from the southern hemisphere, from nowhere, earning a subsistence wage as a waiter, schlepping home after midnight, listening to “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” on my prized Walkman. Not exactly a “catch” of any kind— and pipe-cleaner thin. Joan on the other hand was already a legend in her field. Such was the success of Richard Eyre’s landmark National Theatre production of Guys and Dolls in 1982, and Joan’s accent coaching, that Barbra Streisand enquired, “Who are these American actors I’ve never heard of?” Which resulted in Joan being interviewed to coach Mitteleuropean accents for Streisand’s directorial debut movie, Yentl. As I’ve been a Streisand fanatic for half a century, the details she recalled of their first meeting have been imprinted, like a talisman, on my memory ever since.

Again the frustration of not being able to be by her side when she’s having the scan. She reappears twenty minutes later.Probably a very good thing that I didn’t know any of this when we first got together, otherwise she might have run for the Highlands at the prospect of having to accommodate three people in this relationship. Herself, Barbra, and me! As with all celebrity autobiography, Grant is a victim of his own success. My mind wandered to other people who have experienced what Grant has without the exuberant wealth and high society support network that reaches the echelons of King Charles. Whilst you feel for Grant as a human, the way in which the book darts between trivial celebrirty anecdote and personal moments is emotionally draining and confusing.

Was there a temptation to not keep a diary during his wife’s illness, so that it wouldn’t seem real? I didn’t want it to be, 'Oh, she was marvellous and everything was so wonderful’ because that’s not how life isOilly brings us breakfast in bed and questions Joan about how long she’s felt breathless and had a cough. It’s a completely honest and open exchange, which enables us to share everything that the doctors and scans have revealed. The parental push-me-pull-you of wanting to protect our grown-up child, by withholding detailed medical information, is subverted by her open-hearted need to know and share everything. Large-lettered CANCER RESEARCH CENTRE sign panics Joan. Reach for her hand. Park up, hug her, and whisper love and assurance as best I can. Walk arm in arm into the deserted reception. Eerie. As though everyone has been vacuumed away. The staff are incredibly kind, soft-spoken and gentle, which underlines the gravity of our situation. Form filling then ushered into a small room where a nurse asks her to lie down and injects a saline solution into her arm, followed by a radiation drug that will circulate through her bloodstream, taking an hour to fully absorb, during which she has to lie still and not talk. This book is a celebration of love and friendship. Including the community who reached out and supported the family through the darkest moments of the final year of Joan's life. Friends, health professionals, palliative care specialists, neighbours. It also exposes the profound heartache when two lives so deeply intertwined are severed. Richard must find a way forward on his own without Joan, after 38 years together. We don't document or talk about death as a society. This book however, gives us insight into the process of dying. As soon as I saw any of the other actors, I always had hundreds of questions for them, I was asking, ‘What’s going on? What have you been doing?’ That was a unique experience for me, because normally you’re interacting with other people all the time. I was like somebody who had Coronavirus, I couldn’t be with other people, I just had to be with the camera on my own.” I ask if he thinks this is because he grew up in Eswatini (then called Swaziland) before moving to London in his 20s, so although he can charm his way into English society – even going to Prince Charles and Camilla’s wedding – he is always standing a little to the side, trying to understand it. He smiles kindly at my armchair analysis: “It’s always a little odd to hear oneself defined by someone else, but that makes perfect sense. Yes, exactly.”