In Spring 2017, Jess gave birth to her first daughter, Ottie. Ten weeks later her mother, the much-loved Labour politician Dame Tessa Jowell MP, was diagnosed with advanced brain cancer. This is the story of the year that Jess spent with her baby daughter in one arm, and her dying mother in the other - of becoming a mother whilst losing her own.
Though Tessa Jowell lived a life of public service, this is not the story of a public person. We Are Each Other tells, with a powerful lyricism and raw intensity, of a mother and a daughter walking both sides of life and death together, documenting the extraordinary human ability to love, grieve and renew, alongside the changing seasons of the natural world.
Despite the universality of bereavement and grief, our cultural expression of it remains awkward and inarticulate. How can it still be that death - the only certain thing about living - is so difficult for us to commune with? In We Are Each Other Jess seeks to write the book she desperately needed to read, and contributes to a roster of works advancing a shared language of love, griefand healing such as Clover Stroud's The Red of my Blood, Cathy Rentzenbrink'sThe Last Act of Love and Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart. It is not a book about grief, but one which writes grief itself: the internal journey from obliteration to renewal, which has no end, through which Jess discovers unknown capacities for resilience, love and courage.