Grief can be hilarious. Who knew? Well, Adam Golightly, for one. Or at least – and let’s be clear about this – it is his reaction to his grief that is hilarious. Grief, as we all know, is a devil; sent to sit on our conscious mind, stabbing it every few seconds with powerful, heaving, tearful reminders of our loved ones, beating us almost senseless with the knowledge that we will never again see them as they were. Whether there is an afterlife or not, they will never be in your life doing the things they used to do, and you could be facing decades without them. 

Such an awful dilemma faced Adam Golightly after his wife, Helen, died of cancer, leaving him to face bringing up two children alone. Adam, as you may well imagine, is not a fan of cancer, and he tells us in no uncertain terms in this book’s first chapter. But even before that, in the prologue, he tells us that Adam Golightly is not his real name; it is a pseudonym he dreamed up (his real name is not revealed) to create a persona with which he could write a weekly column in The Guardian called “Widower of the Parish.” 

This book is a collection of those columns. Bearing in mind that they were published every week, it is easy to discover from the very beginning that Guardian readers would have immediately been drawn into Adam’s world and, upon finishing the first column, hardly able to wait for the next instalment. His writing style is natural, very little in the way of sophisticated language, quite a lot in the way of swearing, but it is witty and his attention to detail brought every situation to life in my mind.  In the first chapter, a complete stranger knocks on his door, answered by his son who says, “It’s another lady for you, Dad!” (he has no idea who she is, either), and hands him a lasagna. The description of the awkwardness of the hug (because of the lasagna), and the kiss she gives him on the cheek are a delight. We never find out who the lady is.

Chapter Two, entitled “Binge Thinking,” shows us more of Adam’s propensity to treat his darkest hour with great humour. It concentrates on the period leading up to his wife’s funeral – which he, of course, must plan. We readers do not need reminding that this jocularity is nothing more than a mask; the desperate pain of her loss is never too far away. He calls the funeral “Helen’s ‘F’.  “That the word ‘funeral’ should ever be prefixed by ‘Helen’s’ seems so wrong; I hate it,” he says towards the end of the chapter.  He then challenges us to try prefixing the word “funeral” with that of our own loved one. “Feels horrible even knowing it’s not true, huh?”  Heartbreaking.

Naturally enough, Adam’s biggest fear is leading his two children into the unknown; a void neither he or his offspring know how to navigate. He tries desperately to cling on to normality; doing all the jobs around the house that he used to do provides him with that safe comfort. He then realises that he must do all of his wife’s jobs too; which, he accepts, were far tougher than his weekly swanning to put the bins out, changing the odd light bulb, and putting a new washer on the tap on the bathroom sink. In reading through 'Being Adam Golightly', we learn a great deal about the tiny workings of human nature through his own actions, thoughts and feelings, but also via the description of others’ behaviour – the trying to help, the constant apologising, the feeling that the bereaved person needs to have everything done for them. This may be brought on, Adam theorises, by a form of guilt, or perhaps simply a human need to sympathise and show kindness. 

Then, there is the other side of the coin; the coldness, hardness and dismissive nature of those for whom death forms a large part of their job. Thirty minutes after his wife’s death, the night sister at the hospital asks when he plans to remove “the body”. This leads to a huge explosion of anger from Adam; a result, perhaps not only of Helen’s passing but of the two years of hell they went through prior to that trying to save her life. Later, he receives a cheery phone call from a young lady from the funeral director’s office, who asks when he would like to collect “the ashes”.

'Being Adam Golightly' is another taboo broken down; laughing at and standing up to death as it affects those who are left behind. For the most part, it does this well. It can sometimes feel a bit forced – hardly surprising, perhaps, his wife has just died – and the almost identical construct of each chapter makes it read less like a book and more like a reprint of a series of articles for The Guardian, which is exactly what it is.

But the appeal of books such as this one is that there is – or, at least, there should be – an Adam Golightly in all of us. A part of us that tries to reject the fear of death, the fear of being without one’s partner in life, the fear of the unknown.