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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leif, the literary editor

of The Spectator. This week, my guests are the arts publicist Anne Mayer Bird

and writer, campaigner and co-founder of the Women's Equality Party, Catherine Mayer.

They're mother and daughter, but they're also, in the phrase they use,

twin widows. About a year ago, both of their husbands died within about five weeks of each other. And they've written

together a new book called Good Grief, Embracing Life at a Time of Death. This is a book that sort

of starts in a room. And I just want us to talk about how it comes out of that room.

Well, if you look behind me, you can see the room.

The listeners can't, but I can.

It's a bit spacious room with the sofa on it.

So I actually originally suggested calling the book the living room.

Because of the deaths in rapid succession of our husbands and then lockdown,

so we were freshly widowed and then thrust into lockdown. The only person that

either of us saw during that first lockdown was the other, albeit wearing masks and protective

clothing, because I would come once a week to make sure that my mother was all right, that she had food.

As you will gather from this conversation, my mother is not somebody who fits a lot of preconceptions about caregiving.

She's deeply independent, but she had never lived alone ever before my stepfather died.

And we would mostly do practical things while I was there, but at the end of every visit, we would sit in this very big room that they have,

which is a kind of light industrial unit that was added onto their house later on and where we can sit at enormous

distance and we'd sit there at enormous distance to each other and sort of try and talk through

what was happening to us in terms of widowhood, a lot of it not talking about emotions, but talking

...