Amy Bloom is an American writer and psychotherapist. She has written four novels and five collections of short stories, including Love Invents Us, Lucky Us and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You. Her memoir, In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss , is a searing account of her journey with her husband, Brian Ameche, to Dignitas in Switzerland to end his life after he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
Alongside the heartbreak, your book is mordantly funny. How did you locate the humour in what you were going through?
I didn’t so much locate it as just swim in it, which I think is in my nature. When you’re going through something really hard, you have to have time to cry but there are also things that are just too funny and I don’t feel it takes away from the sadness or the grief to find them funny. I think it’s an important quality to be woven into the story. One of my favourite exchanges with Brian, which I have in the book, is when he told me that he would prefer it if we could just find a way for me to end his life when the time came. And I’m like, I don’t know, I’m not sure I can do that emotionally. Also, it’s illegal and I would go to jail. He was very disappointed and then he said to me: “You’d be great in jail. You’re such a leader.” That did make us both laugh.
