“A Pocketful of Happiness” by Richard E. Grant (Simon & Schuster)
The title of Richard E. Grant’s memoir, “A Pocketful of Happiness,” is both misleading and utterly truthful. On the one hand, the book is full of charming anecdotes which are indicative of the Swaziland-born, British actor’s sunny disposition, but, on the other, it charts the grim journey of losing his wife of 35 years to lung cancer in the span of 10 months.
As iconic director Eileen Fisher asks Grant — in one of the book’s anecdotes — Why would anyone write their memoir in the day and age of the internet? — he finds a cogent answer in his own. The book is not so much a memoir as it is the anatomy of a love story and partnership. The 10 chapters are each based on a month starting with December 2020 when the couple got the grim news until Joan Washington, dialect coach to the stars extraordinaire, died in September 2021.
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.
The actor’s lifelong habit of keeping a journal comes in handy to his retelling, especially for the minutiae of Joan’s decline and the emotional turmoil engulfing the couple and their stalwart daughter, Oilly. The kind friends who look after them he names (shoutout to cooking goddess Nigella Lawson, who sent them many a dish, Gabriel Byrne, Rupert Everett and King Charles III who visited Joan’s bedside). The ones who seem too uncomfortable to interact with them, he silently curses but keeps anonymous. It’s hard to imagine Grant with any negative emotion but his grief and load is palpable throughout.
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 endearing read, “A Pocketful of Happiness,” gets progressively harder to digest emotionally as the illness marches to its inevitable conclusion. But it’s worthwhile all the same.
