Me After You by Lucie Brownlee

Me After You by Lucie Brownlee
Buy Me After You by Lucie Brownlee at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Autobiography
Reviewer: Zoe Page
Summary: A young widow comes to terms with the sudden death of her husband in this captivating read
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 320	Date: July 2014
Publisher: Virgin Books
ISBN: 978-0753555835
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People die all the time. I’m not trying to be crude, they just do. It’s the circle of life, or some less Disney-fied sentiment. And if everyone whose partner or parent died wrote a book about it, well, to say that would be less than good would be a severe understatement. For a book on such a theme to be worth reading, it has to have a pull, a twist, something to make you look twice. In Lucie’s case it’s the fact that her husband Mark was only 37 years old when he died. And not only that, he died during a bit of nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Talk about going out with a bang.

This is not a pathetic book, about someone holding a pity party. It is an insightful, entertaining, endearing and unique tale of how a young widow comes to term with the first everything as a newly single mum: first day at school for her daughter, first birthdays, first shag with someone other than her husband for over a decade. It’s raw and it’s full of emotion, but it’s, bizarrely, a very uplifting book and Lucie is a skilled author.

There are lots of taboos to do with death, and Lucie works through these in turn, starting with the funeral planning (how low cost can you go without being cheap?) It was so refreshing to read an honest account of this difficult time that removes the euphemism and the niceties and just tells it how it is. What’s more, she doesn't put Mark on a post-humorous pedestal and make him out to be more saintly that he was (though the incessant use of capitals in Him and His gave it a sometimes odd, quasi-religious flavour at times).

It seems wrong to say you enjoyed a book about the death of someone’s spouse, but I really and truly did. It was a refreshing read with the slickness of a well-crafted novel combined with the real emotion that only comes from a true story, and it's one I'll be recommending far and wide.

Thanks go to the publishers for supplying this book.

The Way I See It by Nicole Dryburgh is another surprisingly uplifting read.

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