Swaziland-born English actor Richard E. Grant (The Wah-Wah Diaries: The Making of a Film) is known for playing characters who tend toward the bitter, withering, and weaselly (see, among others, Withnail and I; Gosford Park; and Can You Ever Forgive Me?). Offering proof of his formidable talent for playing against type is the gallant A Pocketful of Happiness, a memoir-cum-cancer spouse's diary, in which Grant's true character emerges: it turns out he's a humble gent and a real softy. Of course, readers are catching Grant at a vulnerable time: A Pocketful of Happiness charts the eight months during which his wife of nearly 35 years, dialect coach Joan Washington, battled lung cancer. Pulled from Grant's diary, the text takes readers through Washington's diagnosis, treatment program, and 2021 death. Into this bleak landscape Grant somehow manages to seamlessly insert diverting anecdotes from his career, and there's an endearing eager-schoolboy quality to the telling. He tosses around exclamation points like confetti, and he doesn't drop names so much as release them on cushions of air.
Grant never lost his infatuation with Hollywood, nor with his wife, although he's honest about the strains of overseeing her end-of-life care: "I love this woman so, so much, but it's as if she's permanently jet-lagged, premenstrual and menopausal, at once." His secret to a long, happy marriage? "We began a conversation in 1983 and we never stopped talking, or sleeping together in the same bed." It was an amazing conversation, as A Pocketful of Happiness attests. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer