(courtesy Amazon)
Life’s “Great and Terrible Sadnesses” have a way of wiping absolutely everything before them and even reducing a season full of love and good cheer like Christmas to a dull, depressive footnote in a long line of unremarkably barren calendar moments.
That’s certainly been the experience of Grace White and Henry Adler, two quite different Baltimore residents who lost both their spouses, to completely different causes, roughly a year earlier and who are heading into the most wonderful time of the year wondering if anything will ever feel that good again.
These two deeply sad people are the beating heart of Matthew Norman’s remarkably moving, sweetly romantic and often charmingly funny novel, Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon which is, even with some 10 to 12 other festive books to go on my Christmas TBR, is already the standout read of the season.
Framed around a series of holiday films including Love, Actually, It’s a Wonderful Life, Elf, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and yes, even Die Hard – yes, it is a Christmas movie and no, do not @ me thank you; my decision here is happily final, Yippee-Ki-Yay, Motherf*cker! – Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon explores what it is like to approach one of the most upbeat times of the year when you feel, and understandably so, like someone has ripped the heart out of your life, stomped mercilessly on it and left you more sad and alone that you can ever remember being.
It’s not exactly a spit take, but Henry laugh laughs this time, which makes me smile even though I was going for deadpan. Maybe it’s my imagination, but the poor guy looks better already.
The beauty of Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon is that it understands at every step, in the rawest and most honest of ways, what it is like to be in the midst of grief.
Profound, life shattering, heart ripping grief, the kind that doesn’t bounce back from the abyss in a few weeks, no matter how uncomfortable it makes those around you who want the old you back even if they would never say it out loud, and which draws everything into its yawning maw, much like a black hole sucking in surrounding star systems.
If this doesn’t sound like the core of one of the best Christmas romcoms you will ever read, then here is where you need to be open to expectations being subsumed by masterfully executed actuality.
Because while you might think overwhelming sadness does not the best of all Christmases make, and honestly on that score, you’d be bang on, what it does do is give you two individuals who are so in touch with the very depth of their emotions – admittedly some pretty dark ones but no one is arguing that they are the very deepest of things you can feel – that they are unwittingly ready to also feel the good stuff again.
At the start, middle and almost the end of Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon, you’d likely finally straight-talking mum and bar owner Grace and creative, goofy, ad content wunderkind Henry, the former in particular vehemently disagreeing with you on that point, and from where they are at the time, mired in unending, seemingly undefeatable sadness, that makes perfect sense.
(courtesy official author site)
But the truth of that statement that raw loss and raw wound grief make you open to more than just the worst of all the feels is borne out in the wondrously well written Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon which understands that when people feel like all is lost that they might be open to finding something again, even if they don’t know what that is, or if they’re not even sure they want it in the first place.
Feeling like a sprightly and fun romcom thanks to the kind of funny, heartfelt, gorgeously worded dialogue that most writers would kill for – the MVP here is Grace who gets all the best lines but good lord does Henry makes a brilliant straight man to Grace’s witty retorts and artfully enunciated black comedic brilliance – Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon is the kind of book that knows that out of great sadness comes the rawest and truest of humanity.
While some might dismiss Christmas, and holiday films generally, as lighter than air and the stuff of confected, whimsically and easily despatched nonsense, the truth is they are often built around dark and terrible moments in peoples’ lives, drawing their impact and warmhearted outcomes from how deeply they dive into the human condition before serving up some version of a happy ending.
Using these films to tell the story of Grace and Henry slowly and unwittingly falling in love, in totally believable fashion, after being set up none too subtly by their book club mothers, is a very clever move because not only do you have a reason to get the characters regularly together, as friends mind you, but iy gives them a chance to touch on some very raw subject matter they might otherwise avoid.
‘I know it’s kinda late, but maybe we could watch Home Alone,’ he says. ‘I missed most of it earlier. Or, actually, what am I talking about? The Holiday.’
I close Tim’s laptop. ‘Not tonight, Henry.’
And boy do they go deep into the emotional words, their friendship, and then more, based on the fact that each knows precisely what the other has gone through.
The ability of Norman to bounce between the lighthearted and the deeply serious, between scenes of hope and life and nascent happiness and times of real darkness and despair, and stumble or fall once, is a thing of affecting wonder, making Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon one of those festive books that doesn’t just make you feel good, it lets you feel bad too because let’s be honest, so many of us don’t reach Christmas, whatever the year, feeling like it’s as wonderful as promised or that life overall is living up to the hype.
My mother died barely two months out from Christmas 2019, and so I arrived at Christmas that year feeling like the least celebratory person ever; it makes sense, no one rebounds from great loss that quickly and not even the most wonderful time of the year can fix things in an instant.
But can it fix things in a way that the brokenhearted can bear and can it make things better again when you don’t think they can be?
Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon, which is a funny, heartwarming, sweet and raw gem of a novel that will move your heart and make you smile even as tears sometimes roll down your cheek, argues Christmas can do all that more in ways that will surprise, delight and remake a broken world into something worth living in again.