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Summary
Summary
Winner of the Wellcome Prize
A finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Award
"A memoir quite unlike any other. It has the strength of an arrow: taut, spiked, quavering, working to its fatal conclusion...an extraordinary story told in an extraordinary way."-- The Sunday Times
"The most heartbreaking memoir of the year."-- Independent on Sunday
Winner of the Wellcome Book Prize, and finalist for every major nonfiction award in the UK, including the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Award, The Iceberg is artist and writer Marion Coutts' astonishing memoir; an "adventure of being and dying "and a compelling, poetic meditation on family, love, and language.
In 2008, Tom Lubbach, the chief art critic for The Independent was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The Iceberg is his wife, Marion Coutts', fierce, exquisite account of the two years leading up to his death. In spare, breathtaking prose, Coutts conveys the intolerable and, alongside their two year old son Ev--whose language is developing as Tom's is disappearing--Marion and Tom lovingly weather the storm together. In short bursts of exquisitely textured prose, The Iceberg becomes a singular work of art and an uplifting and universal story of endurance in the face of loss.
Author Notes
Marion Coutts is an author who wrote The Iceberg, which won the 2015 Welcome Book Prize for the best new work of fiction or nonfiction centered on medicine and health.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this profoundly moving memoir, author/artist Coutts recounts the two years leading up to her husband's death after he is diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor at the age of 53. During these years, from 2008 to 2010, Coutts and her husband, Tom Lubbock, who was the chief art critic for the U.K.'s Independent, are in the midst of their careers while raising Ev, their two-year-old son. The disease throws their lives into a tailspin, with daily activities taking on a new and poignant urgency. Ironically, the tumor affects the area of the brain associated with speech and language; as a writer, words are Lubbock's passion. With great care and craft, Coutts shares her husband's transition from successful wordsmith to a man who can no longer speak even his wife's name. As Lubbock begins to lose words, Ev is embarking on his own path toward the acquisition of language, and the intertwining journeys of father and son make this intricate tale of life and death all the more powerful; in the same day, for instance, Coutts shops for a nursing home or hospice in which her husband will die and a facility for her child to begin primary school. Coutts covers many intimate aspects of the dying process, one of the most stirring of which is the inevitable metamorphosis of a cohesive, loving family unit from three to two. Despite the somber topic, readers will be drawn to Coutts's exquisite portrayal of her husband's final years. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
For the two years leading up to her husband's death from a brain tumor, Coutts kept their many friends updated with a steady stream of positive, factual e-mails. But like an iceberg, most of her private feelings and struggles were submerged. In this painfully honest, beautifully written memoir, she exposes her fears and heartbreak as she watches her art-critic husband begin to loose first his physical stamina and, finally, his grasp of language. As he declines, their two-year-old son, Ev, blossoms. His discovery of words and meanings becomes even more poignant as Tom struggles to express his thoughts. Friends and family are supportive, but the ups and downs of the illness are sometimes overwhelming. Coutts fights to keep Tom in a positive setting when he can no longer live at home and works to keep him connected with nature, family, friends, and writing. Surprisingly, in the midst of the sorrow, Coutts bravely celebrates each day the three have together. Uplifting rather than depressing, this moving story will touch readers.--Smith, Candace Copyright 2015 Booklist
Guardian Review
Chair of judges Bill Bryson says Coutts' account of living with her husband's illness and death is wise, moving and beautifully constructed Marion Coutts' moving and unflinching account of her husband's illness and death has won the 2015 Wellcome book prize. Chair of judges Bill Bryson said The Iceberg was "painful to read, but beautifully expressed. She recalls things with such vivid detail that you almost feel you're reliving this experience with her in real time". Coutts, an artist and writer, was married to the Independent's art critic Tom Lubbock. In 2008 he was diagnosed with a brain tumour which in time took away his ability to speak. In 2011, he died. Bryson said: "Marion Coutts' account of living with her husband's illness and death is wise, moving and beautifully constructed. Reading it, you have the sense of something truly unique being brought into the world -- it stays with you for a long time after." The Wellcome book prize was created to celebrate fiction and non-fiction which engages in some way with medicine, health or illness. Coutts wins [pound]30,000, having triumphed from a shortlist that also included Do No Harm by Henry Marsh, Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss, The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being by Alice Roberts, My Age of Anxiety by Scott Stossel, and All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews. Simon Chaplin, the director of culture and society at the Wellcome Trust, called Coutts' book "immensely powerful" and "written with astonishing candour and pulsing with raw emotion." He added: "The Iceberg shines a burning light on the devastating impact of illness and loss on those who surround and support someone in decline, while simultaneously celebrating the powerful bonds of family and love. It is tremendously difficult to read, but impossible not to become absorbed." The award was presented in the new Reading Room of the Wellcome Collection in London. The medical charity is under pressure to sell off its investments in fossil fuels and join the Guardian Keep it in the ground campaign -- a proposal supported by Coutts when the Guardian approached her for comment. Coutts' book describing the 18 months leading up to her husband's death has been shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper prize, the Costa Biography award, and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. It lost out to H is for Hawk in the latter two competitions. Also on the judging panel were the writer Mark Haddon, the BBC journalist Razia Iqbal, the barrister Dame Helena Kennedy, and the academic Uta Frith. The Iceberg: A Memoir by Marion Coutts (Atlantic Books, [pound]8.99). To order a copy for [pound]7.19, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of [pound]1.99. - Mark Brown.
Kirkus Review
A debut memoir about losing a husband to cancer. In her riveting, harrowing chronicle, British artist and writer Coutts (Fine Art/Goldsmiths Coll.) recounts three years during which her husband, Independent chief art critic Tom Lubbock, succumbed to brain cancer. Lubbock's own reflections on his illness appeared in that publication just two months before he died in January 2011. Coutts' story, therefore, focuses less on her husband's experience than on her own: as caretaker, mother to their irrepressible toddler son, and intermediary with friends, family, nurses, and doctors. Her immediate reactions were shock and fear. "We discover, or rather I do," she writes, "that you cannot hold a state of fear for an extended time. Fear is a peak, not a plateau. Shock is a drug and at first it feels pure and elevated, yes. The unreal keeps all exalted." But that exaltation quickly dissipated, and Coutts was left feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and, as time went on, angry. As Tom underwent two surgeries and repeated chemotherapy and radiation, she strove to make "an intellectual accommodation with death." In emails to their many friends, which punctuate this poignant memoir, the couple admitted that the illness "affected us differently. It's been a lot of strain for Marion, less so in some ways for Tom." However, Tom's upbeat personality only masked his obsession; he told Marion that he thought about his cancer all the time, "though," she remarks, "you would never know it." Tom eventually became physically weak, his mobility was compromised, he contracted pneumonia repeatedly, and convulsions recurred. Because the tumor was in the area of speech and language, it soon affected his ability to write and to communicate, and Coutts added to her tasks the frustrating job of interpreter. In the last months, when he was in pain, she could only guess "at its extent and urgency and guess what we can do to alleviate it." A poetic and moving chronicle of loss. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
