Morgan is about to publish her first book, This Is Not a Pity Memoir, which tells the story of everything that happened to her family between June 2018 and June 2021. A day like nothing else begins, as most stories of disaster and loss do. else. This morning, her best husband, actor Jacob Krichefski, who has multiple sclerosis, does not feel fantastic, but Abi, who is tired and just wants to be able to leave her children at school and go to work , is not like: has, wants to know, took a paracetamol? It is an evil – “you are a bad nurse”, he says, just before he leaves – that he will soon regret. When he gets home that afternoon, Jacob is lying on the bathroom floor, his lips blue, with dried blood around his mouth. It is called an ambulance and has blue lights all the way. When you think you are going to die, it becomes very clear what you need to stay alive and you do not need as much as you think At the hospital, Jacob has a series of seizures and his behavior becomes more and more strange and erratic, so strange and erratic, in fact, that he is soon transferred to the intensive care unit at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London in Queen Square. from the best neurological departments in the world. All scans and tests return fine. Maybe his experts can solve the mystery. But no. For now – it will be months before he learns that the withdrawal of a supposedly miraculous cure for multiple sclerosis, for which Jacob was part of a trial, has caused him to collapse (he is one of only 22 patients to suffer this catastrophic answer) – the mystery continues and his condition worsens. Sliding in and out of his senses, his body begins to close. The treatments being tried by the growing body of doctors around him – he has been found to have a type of brain inflammation called anti-NDMA receptor encephalitis – are failing. His blood pressure fluctuates, his breathing becomes shallower. In the end, it is decided: Jacob must be put in a provocative coma, a sleep from which he will not wake up for seven months. And when he wakes up, it’s not the end of the story. Another story is just beginning. For months, Jacob will be in detox. In the end he will spend 443 days in the hospital. A changed man will return home. Someone who needs 24-hour care. Someone who does not recognize the woman who has spent so much time next to his bed, feeling terrified. Meanwhile, a bell “rings” inside her. Something is wrong. She does not feel well either. In April 2019, shortly after Jacob was released from a coma, but while still in the hospital, he was diagnosed with a rare and predatory form of breast cancer. Her treatment for this – mastectomy and chemotherapy – continues until the fall, although she continues to drive to the hospital as often as she can to see Jacob, and lasts until February 2020, when she is home. but the Covid-19 pandemic is about to land. This will make everything more complicated, both for them and for everyone. It will also mean that when Jacob relapses – breathing problems – no one will be able to visit him in the hospital. Morgan, to put it mildly, does not feel sorry for himself. Her book, even when things are at their gloomiest, is also very funny and as promotional as a thriller, in real time with adrenaline, which is impossible to put down. But then, as he observes, in times of crisis it is useful to be a writer. As huge as her heart is – her book, not without reason, billed by its publisher as a love story – there is no doubt that it also contains a frozen chip that makes almost everything a fair play as material. “How do I feel about the book now?” she asks. “I feel like you’re really drunk and the next day you wonder: what the hell did I say? I would be lying if I told you I was not worried about invading Jacob’s privacy. My sister was his first reader, after my children and then Jacob’s family. I knew that before I went to any publisher everyone had to be comfortable. But I’m also a playwright and Jacob is an actor. “We are used to being fascinated not only with the lives of others, but – at the most narcissistic level, probably – with our own.” After waking up from his coma, Jacob experienced, for a moment, an illusion that Morgan was not his partner for three decades and the mother of his children, but a swindler: “When this happened I remember thinking: to gain custody of him. . The [writing] he was almost in retaliation. “ What was it like for him not to recognize you? “It was like a bad party. There was something really strange, creepy and scary about it. It really shocked me. Trembling literally. And having rubbed myself, I have a little delusion now. ‘It’s real?’ sometimes I think [when I’m with Jacob]. Are you really back? You know me;” Was it loneliness that I lived with him through it? “Oh, I was so lonely. Only when he looked in the mirror and saw that he did not recognize himself did I stop feeling so alone. But I fought it. I was so indignant about it, so angry with the delusion, that I thought: screw you. I went crazy, trying to get him back. I would go out with him. I would bite him and punch him. I would be annoying. “I would move things – I would drag his bowl of porridge to the other side of the table – as a way to get him to recognize me.” Abi Morgan and Jacob Krichefski on their wedding day. Photography: Story Wedding Photography If the trauma is “incredibly boring” in its relentlessness, it is also, he believes, “incredibly stimulating”. But writing the book was more than a creative act. in many ways, it was an anchor. “Mostly I did it because I was losing my mind and trying to keep my sanity,” he says. “I was very, very scared and I did not want my children to be scared. I thought that if I could keep everything and write it down for them to read… that they could feel it [a book] it was a safe place, as if it were there, rather than here. ” And then there was Jacob. Not only did he want to write down what he was missing, everything he would never remember. She longed to be able to speak to him. Writing was the best substitute available for discussion. “I was not talking to Jacob now. I was talking to Jacob before he collapsed. “I was almost shouting inside the cave, to hear what was echoing behind me.” Whose story is it really? He fights with it. “I grin slightly when I see it called a love story. But it is. If it is brutal, the person for whom it is most brutal is me. When my daughter read it, she said, “Mom, are you okay that people don’t like you?” And there is a truth to that. “ But I can not imagine, even for a minute, any reader to oppose it. Personally, she is very likeable, the kind of woman you want to make your girlfriend. I like her big, round glasses and her denim shirt with her inflatable sleeves. I like talking about diets and all the questions she asks me about my life (you could tell her anything – and I do). And so it is on the page. She looks as lovable, without even trying, as her children and her extended family. The couple has so much support, so many good friends. I’m ashamed to say that I felt (almost) envious. It pulls a face. “I say in the book that I fell in love with Jake’s dad before I fell in love with him. We have walked side by side in his care. But if everything sounds a little Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I would like to punch someone in the face who sounded like that. There was also a huge amount of anger. I was very territorial towards Jacob. “I understood why widows are thrown into coffins, trying to be physically held by someone.” What about her children? They seem to have done so well. “It was 14 and 16 when Jacob collapsed. It was on the verge of cooking and I do not know how we would have done it if it were tiny. “But yes, they were amazing running partners.” Meet Jacob at a party. He always swore not to get involved with an actor, but there he was: they collided with “absolute speed”. By their fifth date, he had almost moved. Their relationship was not without its complications – their daughter was a baby when they first got counseling – but she was also confident about him, this asset, chasing a man’s joy. Her parents (her mother is the actor Pat England, her father the playwright Gareth Morgan) divorced when she was young, although they remained friends, and in a way this worked in her favor. “I always felt less, than more, likely to break up,” he says. “Although I’m curious about the legacy of divorce, about children.” She once said that her father’s decision to leave his marriage contained courage. Is it still …
