The US writer and psychotherapist on helping her husband to die and finding the humour in writing about it – and why she’s now spending more time with waves and sunsets
Amy Bloom is an American writer and psychotherapist. She has written four novels and five collections of short stories, including Love Invents Us, Lucky Us and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You. Her memoir, In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss , is a searing account of her journey with her husband, Brian Ameche, to Dignitas in Switzerland to end his life after he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
Alongside the heartbreak, your book is mordantly funny. How did you locate the humour in what you were going through?
I didn’t so much locate it as just swim in it, which I think is in my nature. When you’re going through something really hard, you have to have time to cry but there are also things that are just too funny and I don’t feel it takes away from the sadness or the grief to find them funny. I think it’s an important quality to be woven into the story. One of my favourite exchanges with Brian, which I have in the book, is when he told me that he would prefer it if we could just find a way for me to end his life when the time came. And I’m like, I don’t know, I’m not sure I can do that emotionally. Also, it’s illegal and I would go to jail. He was very disappointed and then he said to me: “You’d be great in jail. You’re such a leader.” That did make us both laugh.
