Conversations with women (over 40): Abi Morgan

The Emmy-winning screenwriter of The Iron Lady and The Split, on love, trauma and finding herself and her family, reluctantly, centre stage

Abi, photographed in 2022 by Ruth Crafer

Throughout her thirty year career, Abi Morgan has written some of our most memorable drama: Shame, Sex Traffic, Iron Lady, The Hour, for which she won an Emmy, Suffragette, and most recently the BBC one hit, The Split. In her work, female characters took centre stage long before that became the fashionable thing to do. But now Abi, 55, has been forced to take centre stage herself. Five years ago she returned home one lunch time to find her partner of twenty years, Jacob, collapsed on the bathroom floor. It was the start of a sequence of events that would up-end their family forever and it's the subject of perhaps the most extraordinary memoir I have ever read, This Is Not A Pity Memoir. It's about love trauma and ultimately about hope. Last Spring, Abi joined me on The Shift podcast to talk candidly about the cataclysmic impact of Jake's illness, the long – and ongoing – journey to rebuild their family and how, in the midst of all that, she coped with her own breast cancer diagnosis. If you prefer to listen, paid subscribers will find the audio above. (This is a transcript of our conversation, slightly edited to remove ums and ahs!)

Sam: So, how are you feeling now the book’s imminent?
Abi: Well, it's quite strange because I've had a week where my other show, The Split, that I write for the BBC, has been out and that’s been the backdrop of my life for the last five, six years. I wrote this book a year ago and it's sort of been hovering, like a muppet on my shoulder! I feel relieved that the story has gone on from the book in many ways. I've read so many amazing books recently – in the last year there have been some amazing memoirs – so in the grand scheme of things I feel incredibly nervous, but I'm glad it's coming out in the world now. I think it's probably ready to come out in the world.
Sam: You’re so used to being the writer in control of the story. How was that? I guess the story is in control of you in this instance.
Abi: When I was prepping for this interview – obviously I know your work but I hadn’t listened to your podcast, and oh my god, what a delight it is. I love your questioning and I love how open people are with you. Because I think there's always that feeling – and maybe that's what’s liberating about podcasts, is that it doesn’t feel like they have the same agenda as traditional journalism, so there is a freedom I can hear in the conversation. I listened to Delia Ephron – I was always a massive Nora Ephron fan and a massive fan of Delia’s screenwriting, so I thought the way she has used the prism of her life and realized there’s drama gold there and that every kind of mishap can be converted into a story. I really connected with that.
I think it was Nora Ephron who said, “Above all be the heroine in your life not the victim,” and that was definitely going round my head when I was writing. I was just like, I have to write out. When I listened to Delia, she said, “If you can sing, if you can dance, if you can knit, just do anything, but try and find a way to process what you're going through.” So I felt like my writing really saved me amidst utter chaos. It’s a bit like there’s this crazy Sudoku – it’ll be Wordle now – that you’re trying to put together the whole time, and I always felt like I was trying to just put together a puzzle. Which is inherently what you do as a writer anyway, with any kind of narrative, any kind of research, you’re trying to work out a way of telling the story. And, I guess, in many ways, in starting to write the book I was just trying to work out why I wanted to tell the story. You know, when the kids were in bed, when I’d done my work, after I’d been either at the hospital or caring for Jake, why did I want to sit down at my kitchen table until two, three in the morning and get it out? It became such a comfort to me. So I wrote it as a comfort and to make sense of it and, I guess, to get back control of something that felt uncontrollable.

Sam: Can you just tell us a little bit about the day that it happened. The line between, as you put it, Before Catastrophe and After Disaster?
It was June 2018. It was a really normal day. Jake hadn’t been feeling well. (Jake’s my partner, we’d been together at that time nearly eighteen years, we've got two teenage children.) It was the last day of my son's GCSEs, it was an incredibly hot day and Jacob had been in bed – I think I'd slept in the spare room that night – and when I came up to see him, it was a sort of familiar routine that we sometimes go through. Jake’s got an underlying condition of MS, he's in the relapsing-remitting phase so he's been very lucky, he’s been pretty high functioning. But that day he just had an excruciating headache and what I thought was a cold and maybe an early sign of a relapse. So I did my usual: just threw him some Paracetamol and stomped out to work and picked him up some medication. When I came back after lunch, about two o’clock, I found him collapsed on the floor of our bathroom. 
And really that was just this pivotal moment of change in our life. I don't think I knew just how radically our lives were going to change after that, but also how radically different life was going to be for Jacob. Very quickly it became apparent that Jacob had – and was in the process of having – a series of tonic clonic seizures, which are a kind of grand mal seizure, and what was extraordinary was it felt like within five, ten minutes we had such a huge gang of medics and ambulance and then we had an air ambulance…