A Pocketful of Happiness

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This resulted in experiencing ‘literary whiplash’ - pulled around from an emotional chapter to subsequently being regaled with glossy celebrity tales in the next one, and feeling slightly uncomfortable about how they could be within such close proximity of one another. Grant’s prose is charming and witty... An engaging story of life, love, and grief that will resonate with anyone who has ever loved and lost.”

Alex Dunkerley, the lung coordinator at Kingston Hospital, calls to say that the X-ray has revealed a “small abnormal knot in the right lung, which is likely to be residual scar tissue from when Joan had pneumonia a couple of years ago. I’d like to book her in for a CT scan this evening.” Somebody who read the book carved the title in wood for me so I have three of those around the house as reminders. And I have it on my laptop and my phone. She never tired of teasing me about my adolescent-adult obsession with “Babs,” and it’s a true measure of how secure our love is for each other that she wasn’t threatened by my fantasy idolatry, even after I’d commissioned a two-foot-tall sculpture of Streisand’s face for the garden. GRANT: Well, because they were the people that, you know, you've namedropped like I have done in my book... He doesn’t dwell much on his childhood in Africa, but touches lightly on his familial traumas; so lightly, one would be forgiven for not registering it. He also misses on expanding on his lifelong love of scents and the creation of his perfume line. He keeps it lean, meandering between years, his first and breakout role in “Withnail and I,” “Spice World,” “Girls,” “Star Wars” and “Loki.”An emotional rollercoaster - profoundly moving and wonderfully entertaining. A brilliant memoir about living, loving and losing.”

Distract ourselves playing Scrabble most of the afternoon, trying not to fixate on anything other than the here and now. But we know one another too well not to wonder and finally worry out loud— Stay up with Oilly and Florian watching TV as the rest of the world whoop and firework their way into 2021, around the globe. 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.Again the frustration of not being able to be by her side when she’s having the scan. She reappears twenty minutes later. His decision to form the book’s narrative jointly out of the most enchanting highs (the Oscars, karaoke with Olivia Colman in a house formerly owned by Bette Davis) and the bleakest lows (Joan’s diagnosis, her fury when Grant inadvertently used the word terminal one day to describe her illness) came, he said, out of his desire to accurately capture what most people’s lives are like. In 1986, the year he married Joan, Grant was a jobbing actor at best, cobbling together regional-theater credits and TV movies. After a miserable nine-month stint of unemployment, he was offered a role that Daniel Day-Lewis had turned down: the flamboyant, sozzled Withnail in Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical feature film. The job was a huge break. At the end of the first week of rehearsal, Joan, who was 27 weeks pregnant, went into premature labor. Their first child, Tiffany, lived only half an hour, her lungs too undeveloped to let her breathe on her own. “I don’t think you get over it,” Grant said. “You navigate your way around it.” Whilst you do feel sympathy and empathy for Grant and his experience, the author seems obsessed and entranced by the world of celebrity and class in a way which seems tone deaf to the scenario that he is describing. It is hard to come away from this without feeling like you have learnt as much about Grant's celebrity lifestyle and friends, and Grant and his wife's worth to these celebrities which he is een to stress, as you have about the love story that supposedly works as this book's spine. The CT scan has revealed a dark mass on your left lung, Joan, so we need you to go to the Marsden Hospital in Sutton for a PET scan at eight fifteen tomorrow morning.” The most career-related information is given to his awards campaign experience on “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” a film that earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor in 2019 (he lost to Mahershala Ali), while the most personal is reserved to his unabashed obsession with Barbra Streisand.

Come on, my inner cynic said. Grant has worked with everyone: Coppola, Scorsese, Altman. Would he really self-combust over a tweet from Streisand? Also, I knew full well he’d met her before: in With Nails, he describes – in some detail – talking with her at a party while he was making The Player in the 1990s. And yet, just minutes after Grant yelled at me at the Oscars, he was then “introduced” to Streisand, and uploaded photos of him looking delirious with happiness next to her. What a phoney, I grumped at the time. It was at this point that I suddenly felt for him. 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. 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. 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.

Customer reviews

Every gift given and opened, every memory shared, every carol sung and listened to, is supercharged with a poignancy so painful that it’s a titanic struggle not to go under. 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. One of the bravest, strongest, funniest memoirs I’ve ever read’ Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry

Eventually, Joan relents and is glad she did, admitting it "made me feel a lot better that I've taken ownership." Martin Amis once wrote that the very act of writing is an act of love, and that’s what I feel writing about Joan. The best responses I’ve had to the book so far are people saying they feel like they got to know who Joan is – was,” he corrects himself. On a more humourous note, Grant says Washington took measures to look out for him even after she passed — that is, she subconsciously laid the groundwork with her husband to ensure he didn't pursue any of their friends after her death. Grant jumps from vulnerable journal entries on Joan’s palliative care to recounting his glory days of ‘Withnail and I’, his 2019 Oscar nomination, glitzy party mentions and celebrity name drops. While his wife features in these chapters as a byproduct of their marital entwinement, Grant has made himself the star of the show in these scenes in true thespian style. 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.You just have one sound that you need to be aware of—when you say ‘basin’ or ‘council’ or ‘pencil,’ you overcompensate and say ‘bay-SIN,’ ‘coun-CIL,’ and ‘pen-CIL.’ Instead, say ‘pen-SULL’ rhyming with ‘pull’ and throw it away.” When I finally got a movie, Withnail and I in 1986, and had enough money to ask if she would marry me, some of her friends said to her, 'You should never marry this guy, because he's probably a gold digger who probably has no prospects,' or whatever. She only told me this subsequently. But she's never spoken to those people ever again." He details with evocative precision what it was like to care for Washington during her illness. Anyone who has ever looked after a terminally ill person will know exactly what he means when he describes her “lemony irritability” on a bad day, and I especially liked his description of Washington’s moods vacillating “like the cast of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, between Dopey, Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Bashful and visiting the Doc”. But slowly, he uses Joan's challenge as a guide through the grief and to navigate through the world without her.