‘All these Memoirs …’

‘All these Memoirs …’ by Ms Paige Turner.
We are rained down with memoirs. Plentiful, pouring forth and post-pandemic. I’ve worked it out.
March 2020. Lockdown. Celebrities can’t perform. Write. For 9 months to a year.
March 21. Send to publishers. Who WFH.
Autumn 22 – Memoir launch/TV appearances/
In time for Christmas.
I am writing this way as I am reading the Swazi, star-struck Richard E Grant’s memoir ‘A Pocketful of Happiness’. Written in diary form. Like this.
I am, of course, mesmerised. Grant recounts his wife’s final year – from her diagnosis of terminal lung cancer to her death in September 2021. His wife was the dialect coach and phonetician – Joan Washington. But she was much more, we learn.
I know Joan was much more than a dialect coach. She changed the trajectory of my life. When I was finishing my training at the Central School of Speech and Drama she told me there was an ad for a voice coach in Montreal. It was on the tutor’s noticeboard. But she thought I could do it. She was right. And she wrote to me my whole year in Montreal.
She was also my Teaching Practice Tutor visiting me in my third Central term when I was on practice in an inner London primary school. I was beside myself. One child attended the nit clinic every Friday to have her hair cleaned. By Monday the nits were back. I was in despair. The class was nitted to the brim. I looked at Joan. She looked at me. Then she scratched her head and burst out laughing. We sat in that Bethnal Green classroom and hooted.
I’m not through Grant’s memoir yet but it’s gruelling when you read about someone facing a terminal illness who had such an influence on your life. Everyone wanted to be Joan. Or become Joan. Or sound like her: a voice with rich chocolate shades of brown. Rather like the Queen – ‘I will not look upon her like again’.
The anthology ‘When This is All Over …’ can be bought here:
https://amzn.to/3xi8iay
My novel ‘Shakespeare’s Clock’ can be bought here:
https://www.waterstones.com/book/shakespeares-clock/jan-moran-neil/9781912964635
https://www.cranthorpemillner.com/product/jan-moran-neil-shakespeares-clock/
https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/shakespeares-clock,jan-moran-neil-9781912964635
I am also available for readings from the novel if you wish to book me in person or virtually!