Starred review from April 24, 2023
Actor Grant (With Nails) delivers an excellent memoir that’s part journal, part love letter to his late wife, Joan Washington. Mostly, he chronicles his and Joan’s ups and downs across 38 years, from their meeting in 1982, when he hired her as a dialect coach to “iron out” his Swazi accent, to her cancer diagnosis, decline, and eventual death. He also peppers in witty gossip, including the time he met “his lifelong idol” Barbara Streisand, descriptions of his friendship with Melissa McCarthy (“Melissa is, in fact, morose, always late for work, never knows her lines, is inconsiderate, selfish, and we did not get along, at all,” he tells an audience, to “big laughs and an even bigger hug from her”), and a particularly endearing account of the time he accepted a role as the Spice Girls’ manager in Spice World to please his eight-year-old daughter. Though he doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges of caring for Joan during her illness or his grief after she died (“I feel and look like an old turtle without my shell, trying to navigate the world on my own, having lost my loving compass”), Grant’s tender recollections effectively conjure on the page the couple’s enduring connection. The result is a moving and entertaining celebration of life and love.