A memoir by the late journalist Sarah Hughes, who died from cancer earlier this year, will be published next March, tackling topics from planning your own funeral to the importance of trashy novels.
Hughes, who wrote about coping with her illness during the pandemic for the Observer, and was responsible for the Guardian’s episode-by-episode Game of Thrones and Line of Duty recaps, sold the memoir to Bonnier Books imprint Blink in early 2021. She died in April, aged 48, survived by her husband Kris and two children.
The publisher described her memoir, Holding Tight, Letting Go, as “a book about how to die as much as how to live” and “a celebration of everything that can make up a life, and how to hold it all close when everything feels completely precarious”.
“I’d be lying if I said that the last decade hasn’t been the best of my life,” Hughes wrote in the Observer in 2019 in a piece about her diagnosis. “I’ve been lucky in love, fulfilled in my work, surrounded by friends, laughed more than I ever thought possible at the most ridiculous of things. I can say with absolute honesty that I have had a lovely time and I don’t regret any of it.”
Later, during the pandemic, she advised that “even in these depressing times try to find some part of the day that is worth relishing, whether it is a moment of beauty half-glimpsed outside, the joy found in escaping into a different world on page or screen, or the pleasure of dressing up for yourself and no one else because it makes you feel fine”.
Hughes started out in journalism writing about basketball and college football for the New York Daily News. On her return to the UK, she covered horse racing and football, going on to write for papers including the Independent, Telegraph and Metro, as well as the Guardian and Observer. Her reports on abuses by UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with the photojournalist Kate Holt saw her shortlisted for an Amnesty International award in 2004.
Her memoir will also include contributions from her friends. When Hughes died, tributes poured in from names ranging from Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner to Jed Mercurio, the television writer and creator of Line of Duty, and the screenwriter and television producer Sarah Phelps. “She was endlessly curious, hilarious and kind, an incisively brilliant and fearless writer,” said Phelps at the time.
“Sarah was a guiding light for so many, in so many different ways,” said Blink editorial director Susannah Otter, who acquired the memoir. “She really knew what it was to live, fully and completely, with commitment, honesty and joy. It is a huge pleasure, and a colossal honour, to be publishing this luminously funny, honest collection from her with contributions from those who knew her best.”
