All at Sea by Decca Aitkenhead review – an inspiring memoir, never sentimental

This agonising account of the death by drowning of Aitkenhead’s beloved partner Tony, and its aftermath, is clear-eyed, stringent and self-aware

^“The death of a beloved is an amputation,” CS Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed, his memoir about the death of his wife; but more than that, “The same leg is cut off time after time.” Narratives of bereavement, once rare, have grown more numerous in recent years: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story are two devastating examples of the genre, each distinctive in its raw compulsion. We seem to fall on these accounts of grief with a troubling hunger, in the hope that the shared revelation of pain may assuage – or perhaps stave off? – our private sufferings.

But each death is unique, each loss particular. Whereas Didion and Oates both lost their husbands in relatively advanced age, to sudden illness, after many years of marriage, the Guardian journalist Decca Aitkenhead, a woman in her early 40s, was widowed in May 2014, while on holiday in Jamaica with her partner and their two small children. Her agonising memoir All at Sea tells the story of that unthinkable death and its aftermath, with the author’s particular clear-eyed self-awareness. This is a book entirely without sentimentality or rhapsodising, a jaggedly complex meditation that refuses to idealise her beloved, Tony, or herself. All at Sea compels the reader’s trust and sympathy, but also provokes us to consider our hypocrisies.

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