The Welsh writer behind the BBC's The Split and The Iron Lady has revealed the horror she and her family lived through from June 2018 to June 2021: the collapse of her husband, the actor Jacob Krichefski, which resulted in him spending six months in a coma.
But that's not all - when Jacob woke up, he no longer recognised Abi Morgan and thought she was "an imposter who worked for the state". It's a moment she's described as "surreal" and one which left her in a state of "shock and hysteria".
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Talking to Woman's Hour host Emma Barnett this week following the publication of her first book, Abi explained how the story of her life was like a "plot twist". She said: "It's a great plot twist. I mean, it felt like a cliché. But basically when Jake woke up, I became quickly aware that the one person who he didn't recognise any more was me."
She's detailed it all in This is not a Pity Memoir, which the 54-year-old writer published just three days ago on May 12. Abi was born in Cardiff and has had an impressive screenwriting career, most recently creating the hit BBC One legal drama The Split. She's probably best known for the films The Iron Lady, Shame and Suffragette.
But not even Abi could come up with the plot for what happened to her. Her book begins on a day like any other - Jacob, who has MS, doesn't feel great. She's in a rush, asks him if he's taken paracetamol and then leaves the house. When she arrives home that afternoon, Jacob is lying on the bathroom floor, his lips blue, dried blood caked around his mouth. An ambulance is called and it’s blue lights all the way.
It turned out Jacob had suffered a reaction to drugs he was taking as part of a trial. His condition was so serious his doctor warned Abi her partner could die that day. After being transferred to London’s National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Jacob developed brain inflammation and his body began to slowly shut down leaving doctors forced to put him in an induced coma - from which he wouldn't awake until January the following year.
When he did wake up, he'd developed Capgras' syndrome, a rare type of delusion where a person feels someone, sometimes themselves, has been replaced with an imposter.
Although the delusion can extend to pets and even personal items such as property, often it focuses on someone close to the patient. It felt like her life had been "burgled", she told Woman's Hour. "I'm a dramatist, so I'm aware of the drama but I can also feel the catch in my [throat]...you know it's still quite live for me," she said. "It was so shocking."
She said the joy of Jacob waking up had turned to a surreal nightmare, heightened after a romantic build-up: "I bought him a really cheesy bright red balloon heart for Valentine's Day and gave it to him and the nurse had bought a really awful red rose wrapped in cellophane for me and very sweetly gave it to me and said 'Jacob, you know, it's your wife'."
She continued: "And he said: 'That's not my wife'. And from then on, it became apparent that Jacob had developed a very specific and quite rare delusion called Capgras' delusion, which is the belief that someone close to you has been replaced by an imposter." In the book she documents how he told her: "I know you are not who you say you are," and asked: "Why do you have such an interest in my children?"
In an interview with The Observer earlier this month, she said not being recognised by Jacob was "like a bad party game". She explained: "There was something genuinely peculiar and creepy and terrifying about it. It really shook me; I was literally shaking. And having been rubbed out myself, I have a slight delusion now. ‘Is this real?’ I sometimes think [when I’m with Jacob]. ‘Are you really back? Do you know me?’."
It took a year to convince Jacob she wasn't in fact working for the state and that she was his long-term partner with whom she shared their two teenage children. They were 14 and 16 when Jacob collapsed and Abi said they "seem to have coped well".
But there was more heartache to come: while he was still recovering in hospital, Abi was diagnosed in April 2019, with breast cancer and a mastectomy and chemotherapy followed. She's now in recovery.
She told the Observer that writing her memoir felt like a safe place where she could "make sense" of what had happened to the family for the couple's children. She said: "Primarily, I did it because I was losing my mind and I was trying to hold on to my sanity. I was very, very frightened and I didn’t want my children to be frightened.
"I thought that if I could hold it all and write it down for them to read… that they might feel that [a book] was a safe place, as if it was over there, rather than here."
Abi and Jacob married in June last year at Wood Green register office. She described it as a "perfect, funny, lopsided, comical day" with just 24 close family and friends. She said: "Then we went to our favourite restaurant, Luca [in Clerkenwell], and there were speeches. Jacob was very quiet all day. At that time, he didn’t communicate very much. But he was smiley and from then onwards, he has steadily improved.
"The past six months, that improvement has been radical. He’s zinging. He’s 80% of himself. He banks up his life with activity: his ukulele, football, musicals. We’re lucky. I have the wherewithal. A lot of therapies have been thrown at him, and we have a fantastic carer who comes in on half days, and a housekeeper in the afternoons, so there’s always someone around. I’ve got huge hope and ambition for him."
