This is not the book that Sarah Hughes intended it to be. Aged just 46, the journalist learned that her recently treated breast cancer had not only returned and spread, it had become incurable. She went on to defy statistics and live with it for more than two years (the median is just 11 months) but it wasn’t long enough to complete the work she had originally outlined. And yet, while they’re clearly as nothing compared with some of her life’s other incomplete endeavours – most poignantly, the raising of her two children – missing chapters such as Financial Advice from an Unrepentant Gambler and The Secret Lives of Catholic Saints are also fully eclipsed by what she did manage to achieve.
Here is a volume that packs in wisdom and wit, grace and frivolity. It isn’t purely a cancer book, either. Yes, it’s broadly about living with the disease, dying from it even – a neglected topic, she observes – but these memoiristic essays also yomp across food and high fashion, bonkbusters and box sets. Equally, though she allows for sorrow, her voice and insights – her sheer elan – set them soaring.
“From an early age I was obsessed by death,” begins her opening essay, It’s My Funeral and I’ll Cry If I Want To. As a quick-tempered child, she was prone to flouncing off and indulging in melodramatic fantasies about how devastated her family would be were she to die. Fuelled by reading Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe, these imaginings later extended to gothic funerals, and as an adult, she’d ponder who among her circle of intimates might die young. Then “death, the dancer I had tempted and taunted all my life, finally heeded my invitation and knocked at my door”.
It’s a striking image – rueful, edgy, and with a supernatural tinge somehow evocative of her childhood Catholicism, a faith she kept. Those same traits surge through a powerful essay about the stillbirth of her third child and the miscarriage of a fourth the following year. She’s come to think of the pair as her “shadow children”, she explains.
Her writing never fails to console, but it does so without cushioning reality’s jagged edges. In Scars, she yields to an atavistic need to “bear witness”, standing before a mirror late at night and surveying her changed body. Among its “trophies” are pale lines that testify to a teen flirtation with cutting during a miserable spell at a private school. Some of her classmates were much more serious about it, and she admits to feeling shame for having appropriated their coping mechanisms instead of trying to help. Occasionally, however, it’s acceptance that washes over her when she sees those scars. As she notes: “Teenagers should feel things strongly”.
Throughout, she is bracingly candid. Upon learning that her cancer had metastasised, for instance, her first thought was that she didn’t want to leave her husband and children. Her second? That she may never find out how Game of Thrones ends – the books, not the TV adaptation she blogged about, earning the nickname “Lady Sarah” among her many fans.
It’s to books that she turns again and again in challenging moments – invariably titles that a less expansive reader might be snobby about. As a teen, for instance, she found Virginia Andrews epiphanic. Later, Jackie Collins taught her that you can only get from life what you put in. And when her illness was first diagnosed, it was Jilly Cooper that she reached for.
Interspersed with these nine essays are chapters written by friends, including professional writers, offering glimpses of Hughes at various stages of life – at boarding school and the University of St Andrews; starting out as a journalist in Manchester before moving to London and contributing widely to both this newspaper and the Guardian; falling in love and living in New York. Though they inevitably have the ring of eulogies, sometimes jangling oddly with the vivacity of her prose, they demonstrate how those close to her have taken her words to heart – words whose sustaining message is summed up by the book’s title: Holding Tight, Letting Go.
It is a book about letting go, and in that respect is as much for the dying as it is for those who love them. But it’s also about holding tight to each moment of pleasure, even when those moments endure only in memory. It’s Hughes’s talent for doing just that that blazes most brightly from these pages.
• Holding Tight, Letting Go by Sarah Hughes is published by Blink (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
