Book review: Spectacles
Confession: I’ve never actually seen that show. You know the one I mean. With the baking. The cakes. That one. I know people have a lot of feelings about it, but I’d rather, well, eat food than watch it. Nevertheless, I do adore Sue Perkins – my heart skips around a bit when she turns up on one of the British panel shows to be funny and snarky and clever. Funny women aren’t exactly rare, despite what the media would have you believe, but you do notice them. You admire them. You do things like suggest questions such as “how are you so awesome?” when they are being interviewed for Diva magazine.
But I digress. Spectacles – as in glasses but also making a show of oneself – is a memoir which offers up humour, as you might expect, but also much poignancy. Yes, we hear about the mishaps in the school play, or about going to Edinburgh to perform a drastically under-rehearsed sketch show, but this is much more about growing up and the sad things that happen to us. When Perkins introduces us to her father, he is funny, absolutely:
“Dad: Ronnie Corbett’s children were at that school with you.
Me: Is that pertinent?
Dad: No, it’s name-dropping.”
But then she tells us about when he gets sick, about the hospital, and things get real:
“It was a men-only ward. Strong men. Fathers. They had been the axis on which their children plotted their burgeoning lives. And here they all were – brought down, levelled, lying there in hastily bought pyjamas and kept awake by each other’s coughs, moans and excretions. Welcome to the grim camaraderie of cancer.”
It’s pretty far removed from laugh-a-minute stuff, and there’s something sharp and painful in how she tackles our view of cancer and of being ‘a survivor’. It’s hard, she says.
“It returns you to your home a different person. It changes you, changes your world view. Sometimes it changes you for the better – you’re more resolved to squeeze the juice out of your remaining years. That at least is the trope we most often see in books and films. But sometimes it returns you scooped out and hollow – resentful that you’ve worked yourself to the bone for nearly fifty years and that what was supposed to be the glorious era of retirement has been scarred by disease and incapacitation.”
It’s not just what her father’s going through. It’s everything, it’s life: when her comedy partner Mel gives birth to her first child, Perkins reflects: “… that night was perhaps the first time I had to contend with the painful reality of being a grown-up – that messy, unarticulated feelings stay with you for ever without finding resolution.” There is a letter to her dead dog, which brings a tear even to the eye of this firmly cat-person reader. She describes what it’s like to discover she’s infertile, the result of a benign brain tumour. It’s all beautifully conversational but also sadder than you might think from the light-hearted cover. That being said, it’s by no means a misery-fest – how can it be when we hear that her term for repeatedly coming out to her dementia-suffering grandmother is “GROUNDHOG GAY”? Or that, when on the dangerous roads of Alaska, she has an epiphany:
“It’s amazing what you learn about yourself when you come face to face with death. What I learned is that when I confront my own mortality I like to do it in the voice of Fenella Fielding.”
Oh, Sue Perkins. How are you so awesome?
