'Nova Weetman’s unforgettable memoir reflects on experiences of love and loss from throughout her life, including: losing her beloved partner, playwright Aidan Fennessy, during the 2020 Covid lockdown; the death of her mother ten years earlier; her daughter turning eighteen and finishing school; and her own physical ageing. Using these events as a lens, Nova considers how various kinds of losses – and the complicated love they represent – change us and can become the catalysts for letting go.
'This is a moving, honest account of farewelling a partner of twenty-five years, parenting teenagers through grief, buying property for the first time at the age of fifty, watching Aidan live on through his plays, and learning to appreciate spending hours alone with only the household cat for company. Warm and wise – and often joyful – Love, Death & Other Scenes ultimately focuses on the living we do after losses and what we learn from them.' (Publication summary)
(Introduction)
'A memoir that tracks the love and loss of a long-term partner.'
'It’s difficult to critique a memoir. How do you critique the work – its language, structure, craft – without feeling you are exposing the author’s life and experiences to critique?' (Introduction)
'Nova Weetman’s Love, Death & Other Scenes is an elegiac memoir, a subgenre of memoir that gives ballast to stories of everyday lives by focusing on life’s ultimate drama: death. Of course, the everyday and mortality are intimate companions. When the poet Philip Larkin asks, “Where can we live but days?”, the question brings “the priest and the doctor / In their long coats / Running over the fields.”' (Introduction)
'It’s difficult to critique a memoir. How do you critique the work – its language, structure, craft – without feeling you are exposing the author’s life and experiences to critique?' (Introduction)
'A memoir that tracks the love and loss of a long-term partner.'
