Screenwriter Abby Morgan, best known for The Iron Lady, Shame and Suffragette, and more recently for the much-loved BBC series Separation, works in a small apartment in a perfumery in Islington, north London. Its rooms, pale and elegantly minimalist, not only smell wonderful, pink geranium and vetiver helpfully soar; they, too, for a writer, are extremely neat. The casual visitor would not have thought for a moment of difficult commissioning meetings and hasty deadlines if it were not for the small squares of paper that outline one wall, on which the episodes of her latest project are neatly summarized. But like Morgan, this calm may be deceptive. While she also radiates a warm, external calm, her interest extends to everyone she meets, internally it’s a different story. Sometimes it’s as if a bomb has exploded deep inside her. “I’m exactly the same and profoundly changed,” she says, sitting at her white table and turning her white coffee cup in her hand.
Morgan is about to publish her first book, This Is Not a Pity Memoir, which tells the story of everything that happened to her family between June 2018 and June 2021. It begins, like most stories of disasters and losses , a day like any other. This morning, her now-husband, actor Jacob Krichevsky, who has MS, doesn’t feel fantastic, but Abby, who is tired and just wants to be able to leave her kids at school and go to work, isn’t cute: she wants to. to know if she took paracetamol? It’s a fragility – “you’re a bad nurse,” he says just before she leaves – that she’ll soon regret. When she arrives home that afternoon, Jacob is lying on the bathroom floor with blue lips, dried blood around his mouth. An ambulance is called and blue lights shine all the way.
When you think you’re going to die, it’s very clear what you need to stay alive and you don’t need as much as you think
At the hospital, Jacob suffered a series of seizures and his behavior became more and more strange and erratic, so strange and erratic in fact that he was soon transferred to the intensive care unit at Queen Square National Hospital of Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, one of the most the best neurological departments in the world. All scans and tests continue to return well. Maybe its experts can solve the mystery. But not. For now – it will be months before she learns that the withdrawal of an alleged miracle cure for MS, for which Jacob was part of a trial, caused him to collapse (he is one of only 22 patients to suffer this catastrophic reaction) – the mystery continues and his condition is deteriorating. Entering and exiting consciousness, his body begins to shut down. The treatment that the growing team of doctors around him is trying – he has been found to have a type of brain inflammation called anti-NDMA receptor encephalitis – is not working. His blood pressure fluctuates, his breathing becomes shallower. Finally, it is decided: Jacob must be placed in an induced coma, a dream from which he will not wake up for seven months.
And when he wakes up, that’s not the end of the story. Another story is just beginning. Jacob will be in rehab for months. Eventually, he will spend 443 days in hospital. He will return home a changed man. Someone who needs round-the-clock care. Someone who doesn’t recognize the woman who spent so long at his bedside in horror. Meanwhile, a bell is also ringing in it. Something is wrong. She’s not feeling well either. In April 2019, shortly after Jacob came out of his coma, but while still in hospital, she was diagnosed with a rare and predatory form of breast cancer. Her treatment for this – mastectomy and chemotherapy – continues in the fall, even as she continues, as often as she can, to drive to the hospital to see Jacob, and continues until February 2020, when he is home, but the Covid pandemic -19 is about to land. This will make everything much more complicated, both for them and for everyone; it will also mean that when Jacob relapses – breathing problems – no one will be able to visit him in hospital.
Morgan, to put it mildly, does not feel sorry for himself. Her book, even when things are at its darkest, is both very entertaining and propulsive as a thriller, ticking in an adrenaline-fueled real time, impossible to dismiss. But then, as she notes, in times of crisis it is useful to be a writer. As great as her heart is – her book has been published as a love story by its publisher for good reason – it cannot be denied that it also contains an ice chip, which makes almost everything fair play as material. “How do I feel about the book now?” She asks. “I have a feeling that when you get really drunk and then the next day you wonder: what the hell did I say?” I would be lying if I told you that I did not bother to invade Jacob’s private life. My sister was the first reader, then my children, then Jacob’s family; I knew that before I took it to a publishing house, everyone had to be comfortable. But I’m also a playwright, and Jacob is an actor. We are used to being fascinated not only by other people’s lives, but also by – on the most narcissistic level, probably – our own. ” After waking up from his coma, Jacob was deluded for a time by the delusion that Morgan was not his partner for three decades and the mother of his children, but a fraud. . That [writing] it was almost like revenge. “
What was it like not being recognized by him? “It was like a bad party game. There was something really strange, scary, and terrifying about it. It really shook me; I was literally trembling. And after I was deleted, I now have a slight delusion. ‘Is this real?’ sometimes I think [when I’m with Jacob]. “Are you really back?” Do you know me? Was it lonely to live with him during that? “Oh, I had great loneliness. It was only when I looked in the mirror and saw that I was unrecognizable that I stopped feeling so lonely. But I fought. I was so outraged by this, so angry at the delusion, that I thought: fuck you. I went crazy trying to get it back. I would fuck with him. I would pinch him and stab him; I would be annoying. I would move things – I slid his bowl of oatmeal to the other end of the table – as a way to get him to recognize me.
Abby Morgan and Jacob Krichevski on their wedding day. Photo: Story Wedding Photography
If the trauma is “incredibly boring” in its ruthlessness, it also finds it “incredibly stimulating.” But writing the book was more than a creative act; in so many ways it was an anchor. “I did it primarily because I was losing my mind and trying to keep my sanity,” she said. “I was very, very scared and I didn’t want my children to be scared; I thought that if I could keep it all and write it down so they could read it … that they could feel it [a book] it was a safe place, as if it were there, not here. And then there was Jacob. Not only did she want to write down what he had missed, but all the things he would never remember. She longed to be able to talk to him. Writing was the best substitute for conversation. “I haven’t talked to Jacob now. I talked to Jacob before he collapsed. I almost screamed in the cave to hear what echoed back. Whose story is it, really? She’s struggling with that. “I grimaced slightly when I saw it was called a love story. But it is. If he is brutal, the person he is most brutal about is me. When my daughter read it, she said, “Mom, are you okay with people not liking you?” And that’s true. “
But I can’t imagine a reader opposing it for even a minute. Personally, she is extremely nice, the kind of woman you want to make your friend. I like her big round glasses and her denim shirt with puff sleeves; I like her stories about batty diets and all the questions she asks me about my life (you’ll tell her everything – and I do). And so it is on the page. She looks so loving without even trying, as do her children and extended family. The couple has so much support, so many good friends. I am ashamed to say that I felt (almost) envious. She pulls her face away. “I say in the book that I fell in love with Jake’s father before I fell in love with him. We walked side by side in caring for him. But if it all sounds a little Seven Brides for Seven Brothers… I would like to hit someone in the face who sounds like that. There was also great anger. I was very territorial compared to Jacob. I understood why widows threw themselves on coffins, trying to physically detain someone. What about her children? They seem to have done so well. “They were 14 and 16 when Jacob collapsed. They were on the verge of cooking and I don’t know how we would have coped if they were tiny. But yes, they were amazing running partners. “
She met Jacob at a party. She had always sworn not to mess with an actor, but here it was: they faced “absolute speed.” By their fifth meeting, he had practically moved. Their relationship was not without complications – their daughter was a baby when they first had a consultation – but she was also sure of him, this energetic, joyful man. Her parents (her mother is the actor Pat Ingland, her father is the theater director Gareth Morgan) divorced when she was young, although they remained friendly and somehow it works in her favor. “I’ve always felt less, not more, probably separated,” she says. “Although I’m curious about the legacy of divorce for children.
She once said that her father’s decision to leave the marriage involved courage. she still …
Add Comment