Don't Put Yourself on Toast

'Don't Put Yourself on Toast is about losing a father to brain cancer - the slow agonising deterioration, the false hopes, the despair, the euphoria - in minute, vivid detail. But this utterly fresh, unconventional memoir is also about the joy of realising what is important in life, and seizing it while it is still there. It is about the power of finding humour in our darkest hours.' - Iona McLaren, The Telegraph When Freddy was 21 years old, his dad, a larger-than-life, successful TV producer, was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a particularly aggressive type of brain cancer.

Collected and expanded from Freddy's journal at the time and interspersed with entries from his stepmother's medical notes, Don't Put Yourself on Toast is a record of the last two years of his father's life and Freddy's attempt to hold his family together using all the fun he can muster. Written in sparse prose, Freddy bares all in startlingly vivid snapshots: from the entertaining antics of 'the most inappropriate wine gum toss competition ever attempted in a hospital ward'; to the comic-tragic deciphering of his father's muddled riddles as his speech disintegrates; to painful moments of regret and self-loathing, squandering precious time watching films when he could have been asking his father those questions he knows he would want the answer to someday. This bittersweet memoir demonstrates how humour, in the face of death, is as pure a strength as any.