He is much loved for his daffy humour, but poet Michael Rosen’s new memoir, Getting Better, is an arrestingly honest account of devastating loss. He talks to Alex Moshakis about feeling sad, and why he’s no longer ‘carrying an elephant’Read an extract here
says, showing me into his north London office. The den brims. Books fill shelves. Boxes pile on other boxes. Knickknacks freckle a desk. “Where would you like to sit?” he goes on. I choose the only seat he isn’t about to occupy himself, something wooden and old and half-covered by a coat. Rosen describes it as a “captain’s armchair” and seems satisfied. “It was my dad’s,” he says. Then a mischievous grin appears, as though he knows what is about to happen.
Though Rosen has written about Eddie’s death previously , he has only done so sparingly and never in great detail. In, he lays out the detail. One night Eddie complained of a headache. The next morning Rosen discovered his body cold and unmoving.
When I ask Rosen if he would have written this book had he not almost lost his life to Covid, he says, “Probably not. No.” Becoming perilously unwell – “poorly,” as the doctors described it, as though he had a mild cold – has brought to the surface several other troubling periods in his life. “Freud’s got a word for it,” he says.
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