The Iceberg: A Memoir

The Iceberg is an account of the eighteen months leading up to the author's husband’s death and asks us how we witness and experience death along with celebrating love, family, language, art, and life.

In 2008 Marion Coutts’ partner, the art critic Tom Lubbock, was diagnosed with a brain tumor that was located in the area controlling speech and language. It would eventually rob him of the ability to speak and ultimately took his life in early 2011.

In short bursts of beautiful, textured prose, Coutts describes a man, a woman, and a young child under assault, and how the three of them fight to keep their family unit intact. Written with extraordinary narrative force and power, The Iceberg is almost shocking in its raw honesty and the beauty of its sentences. It charts the deterioration of Tom’s speech even as it records the developing language of his child. Fury, selfishness, grief, indignity, and impotence are all examined and brought to light. Yet out of this comes a rare story about belonging along with an adventure of being and dying.