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A Pocketful of Happiness

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Funny, moving and perceptive, A Pocketful of Happiness is an insight into the life of a much loved British actor. When Joan died in 2021, her final challenge to him was to find ‘a pocketful of happiness in every day’. I was not happy to read the details of Joan’s diagnosis and dying, but those sections of the book are genuine and compelling. In 1982, aspiring actor Richard E Grant met and fell in love with renowned dialect coach Joan Washington.

Even as I admired Grant for his obvious devotion to, and care for, his wife at the end, I was uneasy: suspicious, you might say. Darkness falls on us all eventually, even on those who know Elton John well enough to receive his condolences by phone. View image in fullscreen Richard E Grant with his late wife, Joan Washington, at a party in Richmond, London, in 2010. One is Joan Washington, whom we get to know as passionate and commanding, a great teacher, a wonderful mother, a smartass and a woman who understood and loved her husband, deeply. They felt they needed the support of their huge circle of friends: anything else would be too lonely.

It is she who, while dying, instructs him to seek a “pocketful of happiness” every day after she is gone. But this territory is also, I think, somewhat uncomfortable for the reader, particularly since Grant pads out his narrative with glitzy memories of 2019, when he was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Can You Ever Forgive Me ? There is a too-muchness about him, a Tiggerish-ness born of his desire to please (a trait common in those whose parents divorced when they were children, as his did).

To have someone always beside you – or even just on the end of the phone – who understands these dizzying shifts and all their attendant lonelinesses, and who loves you wherever in the world you are, is a precious thing indeed.Their relationship and marriage, navigating the highs and lows of Hollywood, parenthood and loss, lasted almost forty years. He is so… untrammelled, his feelings for everyone and everything so immediate, so absolute and always blasted out undiluted. he then quotes various journalists and publicists about the charm and disarming candor of his enthusiasm. Nevertheless, those things that he is able to describe – the sight of her tapestry kit by their bed, the way he still talks to her even though she is no longer in the world – have a universality about them, an ordinariness that resonates.

All this is carefully described by Grant in his new memoir, A Pocketful of Happiness, which takes the form mostly of the diary he wrote in the last year of his wife’s life (Washington, a celebrated voice coach, died in September 2021, two months before their 35th wedding anniversary). Convinced of his own persuasiveness, he once tried, he tells us, to get a part exchange, not on a car, but on a loo seat. If the initial age verification is unsuccessful, we will contact you asking you to provide further information to prove that you are aged 18 or over. When he’s seated next to Camilla, the then Duchess of Cornwall, at dinner, they’re “instant friends”; when he has psychotherapy, his problems are fixed, seemingly within minutes. When his beloved wife Joan died in 2021 after almost forty years together, she set him a challenge: to find a pocketful of happiness in every day.

Told with candour in Richard’s utterly unique style, A Pocketful of Happiness is a powerful, funny and moving celebration of life’s unexpected joys. Sometimes, it took the form of practical help: on Sundays, Nigella Lawson would send supper over in a taxi. I would have been happy to go on reading about their life and their marriage, and even their shared adoration of their “longed-for, miracle, baby,” Olivia, who seems to be an impressive woman, very supportive of them both, during the fears and misery of Washington’s Stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis and the “tsunami of grief” that Grant describes. The most revealing moment in his book comes late on, when Grant spends a night alone in Salisbury, where he has been filming Persuasion with Dakota Johnson.

The guy who goes to the Oscars is the same guy who sits alone in a chain restaurant in Salisbury waiting for his béarnaise sauce to arrive. But it’s also possible that he hopes to make the reader understand that it doesn’t matter how many glamorous friends a person has if their true love is dying. And then there are a few more quotes from friends who tell him how gifted and wonderful he is, as he ultimately does not win the Academy Award. Since then, he has gone on to star in a wide variety of films, including his Oscar nominated performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me?But he is too thrilled with all this to hold any of it against him, even as the Hollywood sections take away from the intensity of the book. Perhaps this is the kind of behaviour his friend Bruce Robinson had in mind when he described Grant as “in fact, mad” (Robinson wrote and directed Withnail and I, the film that made Grant famous). It is a certain pleasure when Grant makes a very rare negative remark, usually about someone he tactfully does not name. I think he wrote his book too soon, but I also see that he needed to do something, the gap in his life being so unimaginably huge, so very hard to bear. It’s enough for him simply to tell us, over and over, how happy he and Washington were together, that they mated, like swans, for life.

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