Richard E. Grant pulls off a feat here. The title is twee but the content isn’t. With unselfpitying dash the actor-writer recounts caring for his wife, the dialect coach Joan Washington, through lung cancer last year (‘Living grief. Raw. Savage.’). He thoughtfully interleaves the heartbreak with glitzy showbiz recollections which help keep our peckers up, so we ricochet through time, from the Golden Globes to the Royal Marsden, from sedative injections to Star Wars. It’s an unusual structure, but it works – so, to use one of the author’s expressions, ‘Why bloody notsky?’

Grant’s daily diary-keeping is what makes the book. The quotes are verbatim, the chronology precise and studded with the details one otherwise forgets, or blanks out: Joan, very unwell, speaking German out of the blue; or the shock when the nurse delivering an intravenous radiation drug asks them to ‘lie still and not talk’ for an hour. What? ‘Yakety-yakking is the modus operandi of our marriage.’ They gaze at each other for a bit instead, then get the giggles.

Nigella Lawson sends over taxis bearing Tuscan bean soup, risottos and cakes. Rupert Everett brings home-grown flowers and freshly laid eggs. Cate Blanchett, gardenias. Carole Bamford, a giant, white-flowered crucifix at the end. Gabriel Byrne helps lug a rented hospital bed up the stairs. Lynda La Plante arrives full of good cheer and malapropisms, looking around their house packed with objets they’ve collected at antiques markets over the years and saying: ‘You must have this house recorded on film, for prosperity!’

The King, then Prince of Wales, became a friend after asking them to Highgrove 20 years earlier, and visits bringing a bag of mangoes and a bunch of sweetly scented roses from his garden. His consideration contrasts with others who fail: ‘Since sharing our news with all of our friends two months ago, am finding it difficult not to judge the ones who haven’t been in touch whatsoever.’

Richard and Joan met in 1982 when he signed up for her course at the Actors Centre. He had just emigrated from Swaziland (now Eswatini) and was waiting tables at Tutton’s in Covent Garden. She was a highly regarded accent coach with Rada and the RSC, his senior by a decade: ‘Boiler-suited, Kicker-booted and sporting a Laurie Anderson spiked haircut, she was a charismatic and formidable presence.’ Soon he was ‘begging’ her for private coaching.

She was ‘the Colonel’ or ‘Monkee’; he was ‘Swaziboy’ or ‘Swaz’. Their love letters are ecstatic: ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall, we are the luckiest of them all.’ Their daughter Olivia, known as Oilly (an in utero nickname that stuck – something to do with wondering if she would look like Olive Oyl), is born in 1989 after multiple miscarriages and a stillbirth during the first week’s rehearsals of Withnail and I.

Over 38 years, they developed codes. Repeating old stories? They’d cut one another off with ‘banana’. Arguing, pronunciation was the nuclear option. She’d ‘go Henry Higgins on me with an accent correction’, he explains – apparently that would always get him laughing in the end. The third wheel in their marriage was Barbra Streisand, whom Joan wisely accommodated:

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.

Grant is so likeable, heartfelt and open. Joan’s moods in a day, he says, can encompass all the Seven Dwarfs:

I was speaking to a friend on the phone and used the dreaded word ‘terminal’. Unbeknownst to me, Joan had overheard and went ballistic. ‘I never use that word. Ever. To anyone. Please just say I have stage four lung cancer.’ I stupidly tried to explain that most people don’t know what the stages signify, which causes confusion and means that they offer ‘I’m sure it will all be fine’ platitudes. She is having none of this and is absolutely furious.

She forgives him 24 hours later with a head-waggle and a cockney ‘I’m still ’ere.’

Skipping back to the 2018 Oscars is a change of pace. Grant is nominated as best supporting actor for Can You Forgive Me? and sings his heart out to ‘Life on Mars’ at Olivia Colman’s karaoke afterparty with Oilly by his side (who now works in casting), but Joan has opted to stay at home. One wonders if she was already feeling sub-par or just unimpressed. ‘Unlike Joan, who is anti-starstruck, I still feel like a kid let loose in the Sweetie Shop of Fame.’

There is a fillip when a letter of condolence from Streisand arrives, and an appendix to the book reprints testimonials to Joan. But the way Grant writes about his bereavement leaves us shattered for him. His pal Julian Wadham delivers the eulogy at Joan’s funeral, ‘far better than I ever could, knowing that I’d be incapable of doing so myself’. Joan told him to find ‘a pocketful of happiness’ every day – and one hopes he finds sacksful.