A Heart That Works: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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A drop-off point at the Royal Festival Hall (30 metres) has been created for visitors who are unable to walk from alternative car parks. Our Access Scheme A devastatingly candid account of a parent’s grief that will have readers laughing and crying in equal measure. A memoir that charts Henry’s life – from his birth in London – where Delaney, his wife, and their two young sons moved to from LA to his illness – after weeks of vomiting he is diagnosed with a brain tumour – to his family’s desperate attempts to cure his illness. In 2016, Rob Delaney’s one-year-old son Henry was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Amidst hospital life, surgeries, chemotherapy and a newfound community of carers, his family learnt the starkest truths about life.

Two years later Henry died, and his family watched their world fall away to reveal the things that matter most.Blue Badge holders and those with access requirements can be dropped off on the Queen Elizabeth Hall Slip Road off Belvedere Road (the road between the Royal Festival Hall and the Hayward Gallery). I spent my birthday reading an advance copy of Rob Delaney’s A Heart That Works. Rob’s son Henry died in early 2018. I remember reading Rob’s post about Henry’s death while lying in bed with my son Miles as he was falling asleep next to me. I sobbed as quietly as I could reading Rob’s words and thinking “I can’t imagine.” A few months later, Miles was killed at age 5. Since then, I have felt a connection with this family I have never met, and I always look for Rob’s words about his son and about grief. They help me. Another thing I know, is that a lost child slipping out of the memories, or thoughts, or the consciousnesses of the rest of the world, (that continues to chug on despite the enormous hole carved out of your soul) is another kind of agony. And yet it is, as one might imagine, vital and very, very funny. When his father-in-law hugs them, post Henry’s diagnosis, and wishes that he could be ill instead, Delaney doesn’t hesitate: “We do too, Richard.” The image of the Delaney family dressed as skeletons on Halloween in the Great Ormond Street paediatric oncology ward suggests a family united in an appreciation for the curative effects of the darkest kind of humour, just as Delaney now finds great peace, even delight, in art that horrifies or depresses others – the songs of Elliott Smith, the film Midsommar. And he is self-aware about just how unreasonable grief has made him. He’s furious when a man tries to comfort him with the fact that his grandfather had survived a brain tumour: “Grandfathers are supposed to get tumours and die! That’s their job!” Perhaps because Henry died on his father’s birthday, having only had two himself, Delaney now can’t believe adults are so needy as to still celebrate them. If he hears co-workers are surprising a colleague with cake at 4pm, he “will go take a shit at 3.57”.

Delaney writes beautifully about how caring for – and loving – his son became almost an addiction; and the way he writes about missing the calluses that develop on his fingers from operating his son’s suctioning machine was as touching a depiction as it was cruel. A few weeks ago, my grief therapist texted me a link to a video with the message along the lines of, "I won't send you every grieving parent interview, but this one you have to see." It was this author on The One Show talking about the passing of his two-year-old son to brain cancer and how he'd written a memoir about it. But here’s the thing: Rob Delaney does talk to me, and he’s not only incredibly gracious, thankful, and eloquent (all while still being heartbroken in so many ways), but he’s also funny and hopeful for the future and full of love for his family. It is this mindset that makes A Heart That Works so searingly beautiful and so utterly tragic at the same time. A memoir that feels like a diary written by a man who must watch as he’s helpless to save his young child, the book is raw and honest, which is precisely what makes it one that will likely help those who find themselves in a similar position. A Heart That Works is a testament to a father’s love and finding hope when it feels impossible. A Heart That Works is an intimate, unflinching and fiercely funny exploration of loss – from the harrowing illness to the vivid, bodily impact of grief and the blind, furious rage that follows, through to the forceful, unstoppable love that remains. Now Delaney and his wife, Leah, live in London with their three sons, the youngest of whom was born after Henry died. Henry spent months of his life living in a few different London hospitals, and the book is full of appreciation for the UK’s National Health Service and children’s hospice charities like the Rainbow Trust. In the wake of Henry’s death, Delaney has become an outspoken campaigner on behalf of the organizations that supported his family, speaking at political rallies and even weaving some lewd jokes about his love for the NHS into his stand-up routines.Most moving, though, are Delaney’s descriptions of the privilege of care. People don’t appreciate just how addictively wonderful it is to help someone you love, however exhausting, however devastating. Almost unbelievably, Delaney’s much-loved brother-in-law took his own life the year after Henry was diagnosed, following a period of depression. The bonding effect of his and his sister’s mutual agonies, the way their families responded with support, childcare, travel, listening, presence – these are the small actions, you feel, that make Delaney’s heart still “work”. His and Leah’s relationship also deepens, strengthens and blossoms in extremis. When events fracture us, it is the love of others that binds us together again, however imperfectly. Those practical and physical expressions of love – the relatives who learn to clean Henry’s tracheostomy or the calluses that develop on Delaney’s fingers from operating his son’s suctioning machine – are some of the most moving images of the book. My disabled sister, who died in 2020, also required regular suctioning; it is amazing how profoundly one misses the mind-numbingly tedious aspects of care. It’s difficult for love to find similar active expression once that person is gone.

RD: More for others. I thought, basically, for better or for worse, I’m on TV and in movies, so some people know who I am out there in the wider world, which makes it a little easier for me to get a message out there. And only now do I have a message worth sharing. I haven’t done anything original with the book. I’ve just done what people do in AA, and what people do in our bereaved parents’ group, which is honestly tell about what it’s like to have your child die. And then what people do with that is up to them. But if I do it honestly, and I really tell the truth to the best of my abilities of what it feels like, then I know that might help other people who’ve lost kids, who’ve lost siblings. And that’s not because I’m anything special. It’s because I’m no better and no worse than any other bereaved parents out there. But I have seen, felt, and lived through something that is rare. It’s happened millions of times, but percentage wise, most people don’t have a child die. And so, I guess I did feel a responsibility. People know who I am, so I better use that in a way that can help people. SN: The book is beautiful, and it’s such a celebration of Henry’s life. It also feels very much like a private journal in ways, almost like a diary. Is this something that you were writing as everything was going on with Henry and his treatment, or was this something that it took you a while to sit down and decide you needed to write?

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SN: You talk about this a bit in the book — almost wondering why it was so important for you to write, why you felt compelled to talk about it. But then you kind of answer your own question a chapter or two later when you say, “[Joan] Didion made me feel less alone.” Which I think is precisely what this book will do for so many people. My question is, ultimately, do you feel like this book was written for you , for others who are hurting with a similar type of pain, or something else altogether? My first introduction to Rob Delaney was on Elizabeth Day’s brilliant podcast, How to Fail. During the episode, he spoke with great candour about his son Henry, who – aged one – was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and later, devastatingly, died.

Delaney’s heartache is visceral and violent – a “decaying disused train station while freight train after freight train overloaded with pain roars through”. He doesn’t hope for death but one day, when he is learning to scuba dive at the bottom of a pool in Soho, he thinks that if something went wrong, he’d at least get to be with Henry. RD: Well, that’s very kind of you to say. If there’s anything people can glean from merely reading the book, rather than experiencing it, is that the people we love and care for and take care of and value are all going to die. They’re just these temporarily coalesced little constellations of stardust that we have to be grateful for and love. We need to recognize the miracle of their existence and the ephemeral nature of everything that we love and hold dear. You can also use the external lift near the Artists' Entrance on Southbank Centre Square to reach Mandela Walk, Level 2.All of which is to ask the question: is it possible to write a critical review of someone who is bearing witness, in writing, to the incalculable pain and emotional chaos suffered on the death of their young child? Does the weight of its emotional punch do away with the need for an anaemic assessment of a writer’s craft? Or is the very act of writing something so transgressively raw and open, a cry for these experiences to be normalised – and therefore a request for it to be treated like any other book? I don’t know. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be mean if it were awful, at least publicly. Which makes me worry that I’ll sound disingenuous when I say that it gives me great pleasure, and no pleasure at all, to write that Rob Delaney’s new book is both overwhelmingly moving and, in any other way you might assess a book, excellent. Much as I wish he hadn’t had to write it, I am glad he did, because such deaths do happen, but largely in private There is a haunting rant when he recalls people asking more openly about his father’s cancer than his son’s. “Have you forgotten that I held my two-year old’s body after rigor mortis had set in?… Why don’t you ask me about that, you stupid fking ahole?”