About this episode

Abi Morgan discusses her journey through trauma, illness, and rebuilding her life in her 50s.

This episode first aired in May 2022. Today’s guest is a woman I’ve admired for the longest time: stage and screenwriter Abi Morgan. Throughout her thirty year career Abi has written some of our most memorable drama: Shame, Sex Traffic, The Queen, Iron Lady, The Hour (for which she won an Emmy), Suffragette and, most recently, the BBCone hit, The Split. In her work, female characters took centre stage long before that became the fashionable thing to do. But now, Abi has been forced to take centre stage herself. Four years ago, she returned home one lunchtime to find her partner of 20 years, Jakob, collapsed on the bathroom floor. It was the start of a sequence of events that would upend their family forever. And it’s the subject of perhaps the most extraordinary memoir I have ever read - This is Not a Pity memoir. And it isn’t. It’s about love, trauma and ultimately - weirdly! - about hope. Abi joined me 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. She also told me about being a lone woman in a world of white men in…

People in this episode

Host: Sam Baker

Guest: Abi Morgan

Topics covered

• memoir
• health
• trauma
• family
• female empowerment
• cancer
• writing

Keywords

• Abi Morgan
• memoir
• cancer
• trauma
• female empowerment
• writing
• family

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: This is Not a Pity Memoir, Shame, Sex Traffic, The Queen, Iron Lady, The Hour, Suffragette, The Split

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