The Iceberg

Book excerpt: “The work of an exceptional woman artist, writing from the inside about the things women have always done: nursing, nurturing, loving.” —The Guardian Winner of the Wellcome Book Prize, and finalist for every major nonfiction award in the UK, including the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Biography 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 Lubbock, 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. “Dazzling, devastating . . . In her plain-spoken retelling of the commonplace human experience of illness and loss, Coutts achieves something truly extraordinary—she’s created one of the most haunting and achingly honest explorations of grief in recent memory.” —Los Angeles Times