After You: Letter of Love, and Loss, to a Husband and Father

Natascha McElhone, star of The Truman Show and Californication, was filming in LA, seven months pregnant with her third child with her other two young children playing in the gym across the road when she got a call from a friend that would change her life forever. Her husband, Martin, the love of her life and father to her delightful children and an apparently healthy man in his early 40s had died suddenly of a heart attack. In the weeks and months that followed the devastating shock Natascha continued to write her diary and letters to Martin (something she had always done as, due to her work, she was used to being far from home). They were letters of love, letters about their gorgeous boys, letters about the birth of the new baby and diary entries detailing the mundane and heartbreaking details of her new life: house repairs and terrifying family finances; trying to keep the childrens lives as normal as possible in the face of such abnormal new circumstances. The result is a powerful, honest and moving story of a magical love affair and all-consuming grief, of being a mother alone and trying to live for the future. Her lyrical, fluid prose hits the spot with such precision it can leave you wincing with pain . . . After You is an extremely moving account of loss and loneliness. But in writing about the acuteness of her grief, McElhone also pays tribute to the power of survival. In the end she is saved by the unstoppable force of her love: both for the husband who died too early and for the sons who live on in his memory. Elizabeth Day Observer- Honesty is a much overrated quality when it comes to the revelation of private feelings. Separated from self-knowledge, confession simply feeds an appetite for sensation. But McElhones little book, though painfully honest, is far more than a simple diary of bereavement. Written with remarkable wisdom, grace and courage, it is a portrait of a woman fighting to reconcile death with life, and managing to do exactly that. How proud her husband would have been. Jane Shilling Mail