• Tell Me Good Things

  • On Love, Death and Marriage
  • By: James Runcie
  • Narrated by: Pip Torrens
  • Length: 4 hrs and 35 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (4 ratings)

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Tell Me Good Things  By  cover art

Tell Me Good Things

By: James Runcie
Narrated by: Pip Torrens
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Publisher's summary

James Runcie’s wife Marilyn Imrie died in August 2020. Their thirty-five year marriage had been miraculously happy – until, in the last two years of Marilyn’s life, she descended into the pain and humiliation of motor neurone disease.

In the wake of her death, Runcie stumbled in the dark. How do you make sense of the decline and death of the most alive person you have ever met? And how do you go about building a life worth living in their absence?

In Tell Me Good Things, Runcie tells the story of Marilyn’s illness and death – in all its moments of tragedy, rage, farce and surrealness – while painting a vivid portrait of her life and their marriage: a partnership defined by a shared love of beauty, conviviality and storytelling. And during that first year of loss, he awakens to the strange paradox of grief: that the way to survive Marilyn's death is to understand how very good she was at living.

Tender, funny, profound and deeply true, Tell Me Good Things is an unforgettable story of life before death – and love beyond the grave.

©2022 James Runcie (P)2022 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

"Runcie has an expert imagination." (Hilary Mantel)

"Tremendous: shrewd, compelling and full of insight." (William Boyd)

"A triumph of inspired imagination." (Financial Times)

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Outstanding

James Runcie’s love story of his life with his wife and her subsequent death from motor neuron disease is more engrossing than the best written novel. This story is real, and it touches on themes that are (or will be) real in the life of every single person. Nobody is beyond the reach of grief. Munchie’s account of navigating the minefield of grief is beautifully told, without devolving into maudlin sentimentality or hollow prescriptions for “recovery.” This book is a must for anyone who will some day, sooner or later, say goodbye forever to a loved one.

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