The acclaimed creator of The Split and The Iron Lady has endured three gruelling years of loss and illness. Now she’s written it all up, and it reads like a thriller
The screenwriter Abi Morgan, best known for the films The Iron Lady, Shame and Suffragette and more recently for the much-loved BBC series The Split, works in a small flat above a perfumery in Islington, north London. Its rooms, pale and sleekly minimalist, not only smell lovely, the rose geranium and vetiver floating obligingly upwards; they’re also, for a writer, extraordinarily tidy. The casual visitor would not think for a single moment of fraught commissioning meetings and hurtling deadlines were it not for the little squares of paper that line one wall, on which the episodes of her latest project are neatly summarised. But like everything about Morgan, this tranquility is, perhaps, deceptive. While she, too, exudes a warm, outward calm, her interest extending to everyone she meets, inwardly it’s a different story. Sometimes, it’s as if a bomb has gone off deep inside her. “I am both absolutely the same and profoundly changed,” she says, sitting at her white table, turning her white coffee cup in her hand.
Morgan is about to publish her first book, This Is Not a Pity Memoir, which tells the story of all that happened to her family between June 2018 and June 2021. It begins, as most stories of catastrophe and loss do, on a day like any other. On this morning, her now husband, the actor Jacob Krichefski, who has MS, doesn’t feel fantastic, but Abi, who’s tired and only wants to be able to drop their children at school and head to work, is unsympathetic: has he, she wants to know, taken a paracetamol? It’s a crotchety-ness – “you’re a bad nurse,” he says, just before she leaves – that she will soon come to regret. When she arrives home that afternoon, Jacob is lying on the bathroom floor, his lips blue, dried blood caked around his mouth. An ambulance is called and it’s blue lights all the way.
