Abi Morgan is used to being in control of a story. One of the most respected screenwriters around, she isn’t afraid to tackle the big stories, map out clever plot twists and dig deep with emotionally complicated characters. She took on Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, sex addiction in Shame and women’s struggle for equality in Suffragette. BBC One’s The Split has just had viewers hanging on her every word. But, in 2018, the drama of her own life rivalled anything that she’s ever written.
It’s the subject of her first book, This Is Not a Pity Memoir, out this week – which follows Morgan’s family life after her partner’s sudden illness. It’s hard to imagine that she’s been through hell and back, as she rushes up to me cheerfully, putting her hand on my arm.
“Hi, I’m Abi,” says the 54-year-old, who won an Emmy for the period newsroom thriller The Hour in 2013 and a Bafta for Channel Four’s 2004 gritty Sex Traffic. I’d spotted her miles away, donning large round tortoiseshell glasses and a canary yellow cardigan. We’re meeting in a private members’ club in central London to discuss the book. It’s billed as a love story. Not that it’s particularly fun reading – even if, like Morgan, it has a lightness about it. Page by page, it’s full of urgency and pathos, written in a staggeringly frank, intimate voice.
In June 2018, her long-term partner of 18 years, actor Jacob Krichefski, who had been diagnosed with MS seven years earlier, suddenly collapsed in the bathroom of their north London house. He was rushed to hospital, where his symptoms suggested a brain injury. Along with seizures, he developed erratic behaviour: “He shapeshifted daily – from being mute, catatonic, to talking, talking, talking…” Morgan tells me.
As his condition worsened over the next two weeks, he was put into an induced coma. He woke up seven months later, in January 2019, but, alarmingly, he was convinced that Morgan was not his partner, nor the mother of his two children, Mabel, and Jesse, then 14 and 16, but an imposter.
By then, doctors had diagnosed him with Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis – a type of brain inflammation – caused by a reaction to the trial drugs he’d taken for his MS.
Could it get any worse? Sadly, yes. Morgan was at this point, writing the second series of The Split – the addictive divorce drama about the complicated professional and personal lives of the Defoe family of solicitors, starring Nicola Walker as the high-end divorce lawyer Hannah Stern, wrestling with a marriage in turmoil.
By the time series two was being filmed, when things seemed like they couldn’t possibly get any worse, Morgan found herself going through chemotherapy for breast cancer – and had a mastectomy.
She had felt something “wasn’t right” for some time and ignored the symptoms of chest pain before being forced to reassess her relationship with herself and focus on her recovery from cancer.
“I suddenly realised that for so long, I’d been trying to keep Jacob alive, but when my own mortality was threatened, and at the same time, he didn’t recognise me and my identity was threatened, that is when I thought, ‘I’ve got to start to really have a bigger vision than this man, Jacob. I’ve got to stay alive.’”
She adds: “The thought that my children would be two parents down was overwhelming on every level, you know, physically, financially, emotionally, practically… they weren’t quite cooked. So, that became very a real focus.”
The Welsh-born writer, who had a nomadic childhood travelling the UK with her rep theatre actor mum, Pat England, who appeared in Eighties BBC sitcom, First of the Summer Wine, somehow managed to survive the heartache. It was on Valentine’s Day 2019 that Morgan realised “absolutely 100 per cent” that Jacob didn’t know who she was any more.
“I presented him with a really cheesy red heart balloon in the hope that it would make him smile,” Morgan tells me about one trip to the hospital.
“And I said, ‘Happy Valentine’s’ and he looked at me blankly. When asked to acknowledge me, he said, ‘That’s not my wife.’ And, in a way, technically, I wasn’t at that time. As I talk about in the book, we weren’t married yet. So, I kind of kidded myself for a moment. But I very quickly realised he didn’t know who I was.”
When Jacob finally went home, he needed round-the-clock care. “We are taking home Jacob, but not Jacob. A stranger who is strange and yet no stranger at all. And I’m scared. I’m really scared,” she writes.
It took until January 2020 – about 18 months after his collapse – for tiny signs he was starting to recognise her. “He just put his hand in mine, and he said, ‘Well done, babe.’ And babe was the word he used to use.”
Jacob might now be “80 per cent” back to himself and Morgan has recovered from cancer – but the experience has profoundly changed her.
“I feel quite fearless,” says Morgan. “But then I also have respect for the fact I have no control, ultimately, of my mortality. And you know, as someone who’s worked to deadlines my entire life, I had forgotten about the ultimate deadline, which is death.”
She adds: “The stuff about googling one’s own name or caring about one’s place in the world – that feels less relevant or important to me.”
Nicola Walker as Hannah and Stephen Mangan as Nathan in Morgan’s ‘The Split’ – the couple just can’t seem to fix their marriage in the third and final series
Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in Morgan’s ‘The Iron Lady’ in 2011
