All About My Mother, by Rachael Stirling

I highly recommend the audiobook version of this brilliant memoir, as Rachael Stirling not only reads her own words but performs her mother's responses. It's a dazzling account of Dame Diana Rigg's life and death. There are anecdotes about The Avengers, James Bond, Doctor Who and Game of Thrones as well as all the hifalutin theatre. There are some outrageous moments and outrageous language, and some details that will long linger in my head - Rigg and daughter in the mosh pit at a Tina Turner gig, or Stirling's account of her own audition for Casino Royale, trying to do a bed scene with both Daniel Craig and a dodgy tum.

There was a lot of laughter in her mother's life, and I laughed a lot at the stories here. But there's also lots of other emotions in the mix - the prolonged loss of Rigg's father, the abrupt loss of her mother, a different kind of loss altogether when her husband falls for something else. I shared her raging sense of injustice in the disparity between the fees that she and Patrick Macnee earned on The Avengers, such as that he could effectively retire on the proceeds and she could not, and the ways that fame as Emma Peel did her did lasting harm. Some of it is very intimate, such as the rows between mother and daughter, and the terrible things said in the heat of a moment. Then there's the time Rigg had a cyst in her back and her daughter squeezed out the thin noodle of ick...

It's all extremely gossipy, rich and entertaining, and then we get into the closing chapters and Dame Diane's last exit. "Get Busy Dying" is a long chapter by comparison with much of the breezy stuff before it, and seems to have been drawn from diaries and recordings made at the time. It is an unflinching account of a process that is at once harrowing and profound, and a privilege to share.

Rigg died a month before my beloved dad, who likewise died of cancer in the midst of the Covid pandemic, tended in the family home - which means that many of the details here, and feelings, really cut through. Realising, late on, what I embarked on, I steeled myself for something grueling. And it is tough, and upsetting, but also uplifting, too. I'm glad she felt such love at the end.

The book is deeply moving and beautiful, and still engagingly funny and odd to the end. (My father was buried not cremated, but I doubt I'd have felt any compunction to eat his ashes...)