In most professions, bereavement leads to time off work, bureaucratically expressed as "compassionate leave". It seems to me that those in artistic jobs, though, tend to work on through – in an effort to work out – their loss. This week, Barbara Want publishes Why Not Me?, her account of the death of her husband, the Radio 4 broadcaster Nick Clarke. It joins in the bookshops two 2010 bestsellers: Antonia Fraser's Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter; and Christopher Reid's Costa prize-winning A Scattering, a sequence of poems about the death of his wife, Lucinda.
Although very different, these three narratives of losing a partner to cancer have all received widespread media attention and immediate feedback from readers, evidence of the way in which bereavement memoirs connect very directly with audiences. There was also a strong response to Julian Hendy's recent BBC2 documentary, Why Did You Kill My Dad?, which investigated the death of his father Philip, killed in 2007 by a mental health patient with a long history of psychosis.
It's revealing that the titles of Fraser's and Want's books and Hendy's film all end in interrogation marks. The genre of grief memoir is by definition questioning: trying to come to terms with what happened and whether anything else might have been done. But it's also clear that the genre provides answers to audiences as well as authors.
Both Fraser and Reid were surprised – though grateful – about the volume of letters they received from others who had been bereaved, often in quite different circumstances, and who felt helped by works that had been entirely personal in motivation. This is surely because although bereavement is always individual – and no external words can entirely ameliorate the effects – it has universal elements, so these works can offer catharsis. There may also be a snobbish section of the audience (in which I happily include myself) which would never read one of the self-help guides with titles such as Living After Death but is happy to achieve the same means through poetry or high-end memoir.
As a literary form, these works are intriguing because they combine autobiography and biography: Pinter and Clarke will already be known to most readers of their widows' books, and may be a reason for buying them, while Reid's wife and Hendy's father achieve a wider life for the first time in these posthumous accounts.
Because a bereavement involves two stories, this literary form raises ethical questions: whose death is it, anyway? Want, in her book, is candid about her concerns over whether she has the right to write it. But, as she points out, her husband had made a radio programme about his illness and had begun a book on the subject. Always a brilliant reporter, Clarke would surely have understood that a story has more than one teller. Reid is clear that Lucinda knew what he did for a living and that her death would become part of this.
Harold Pinter, it's true, was a private man, who had been pained by details of his private life in the diaries of contemporaries. But he greatly admired his wife's writing and, as he was irritated by the newspaper stereotype of him as a humourless hothead, would perhaps have welcomed the surprise expressed by many critics and readers at the wit and warmth revealed in Must You Go?.
Another complication is that a writer is only one of the mourners. Newspapers have tried to persuade other members of the Fraser and Clarke circles to criticise the publications; but both books, perhaps because the writers are conscious of their sensitive status as second wives, are delicate in their dealings with others. A biographer from outside the families would surely have said far more about the other wives and children. Fraser and Want are also impressively frank about their own failures of grace and tact.
But, however well-written these books are, a risk of this phenomenon – which Reid has raised in interviews – is that writing which engages with personal pain is seen as having a special validity. Because of our fear that writing and reading are fundamentally trivial activities, a background of actual tragedy can inflate a book's weight. Anyone who has judged a literary prize knows the moral anguish that comes from trying to vote against the cancer diary or posthumous publication on a shortlist of the fit and living. When Fraser returns to biographies of kings and queens, or Reid knocks out a sonnet about happiness, some of their new readers are likely to be disappointed.
Books should not be judged purely by how heartfelt they are, or the extent to which they echo the experiences of their readers. Grief is just one subject, and personal testimony a single form of storytelling. But, in these affecting accounts of loss, these bereaved relatives, by not taking time off their work, have given us compassionate leavings.
