Joan’s distinctive “gravy” voice—full of rich, delicious brown notes—has begun to alter, as her breath support has halved, and sounds more like her Scottish mother, sometimes leaping into a higher octave. Her Central School of Speech and Drama–trained standard English accent is sounding more Aberdonian than I’ve ever noticed before.

Grant hadn’t been aware that his wife had taken part in Scarborough’s project. But this in itself was very Washington. It wasn’t that she kept information from him; rather that she dispensed it on a need-to-know basis. This meant that throughout their long relationship, she still retained the capacity to surprise him, casually dropping into a conversation a previously unbroached event from her life, or the name of someone she’d once slept with. I am an inveterate name dropper as you have just very politely pointed out. I left it to the editor to decide whether something was too much of a weird gear shift and she just said, “That is a reflection of how your brain works.” Brutal to witness Joan telling Oilly that “more tests are required, chemotherapy is likely, as I have an as yet undiagnosed form of lung cancer.”I went to "An Evening with Richard E Grant", in which Grant talked for over an hour about the book's content, answered audience questions for another hour, and sold and signed copies of the book afterwards. This is a review of his performance of the book. Blushed and offered up the tulips, which thankfully turned out to be more than acceptable. Fired off lots of questions which she answered unreservedly and, in turn, asked me as many, mirroring my curiosity, which culminated in her casually asking, “Are you in a relationship?” while taking a casserole out of the oven.

It’s as if we’ve made an unspoken pact not to family-fall-apart and go about prepping food for tomorrow. Those old clichés “business as usual” and “the show must go on” apply. The CT scan has revealed a dark mass on your left lung, Joan, so we need you to go to the Marsden Hospital in Sutton for a PET scan at eight fifteen tomorrow morning.” In early 1983, when Joan was coaching on three different productions at the RSC and National Theatre and I was doing a lunch-hour play in a pub theatre on a profit share basis, which meant zero pay, she wrote me a letter, declaring that:

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She never tired of teasing me about my adolescent-adult obsession with “Babs,” and it’s a true measure of how secure our love is for each other that she wasn’t threatened by my fantasy idolatry, even after I’d commissioned a two-foot-tall sculpture of Streisand’s face for the garden. There are lots of famous names being dropped in this book and that is interesting in itself. I loved that my favourite actor, Paul Rudd, is himself a major fan of Richard E. Grant, in the way that Richard is a fan of Barbra Streisand - funny lot we are, humans. KELLY: Yeah. It comes across so clearly in the book what a very public life you led. And the book is exceedingly private. It reads almost like your diary, from the period that Joan was diagnosed to what would have been your 35th wedding anniversary, right before she died.