The title of Richard E. Grant’s memoir, “A Pocketful of Happiness,” is both misleading and utterly truthful. On the one hand, the book is full of charming anecdotes that are indicative of the Swaziland- born, British actor’s sunny disposition, but on the other, it charts the grim journey of losing his wife of 35 years to lung cancer in the span of 10 months.

As director Eileen Fisher asks Grant — in one of the book’s anecdotes — Why would anyone write their memoir in the day and age of the internet? — he finds a cogent answer in his own. The book is not so much a memoir as it is the anatomy of a love story and partnership. The 10 chapters are each based on a month starting with December 2020 when the couple got the grim news until Joan Washington, dialect coach to the stars, died in September 2021.

The most career-related information is given to his awards campaign experience on “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” a film that earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor in 2019 (he lost to Mahershala Ali), while the most personal is reserved to his unabashed obsession with Barbra Streisand.

The actor’s lifelong habit of keeping a journal comes in handy to his retelling, especially for the minutiae of Joan’s decline and the emotional turmoil engulfing the couple and their stalwart daughter, Oilly. The kind friends who look after them he names (Nigella Lawson, Gabriel Byrne, Rupert Everett and King Charles III, who visited Joan’s bedside). The ones who seem too uncomfortable to interact with them, he silently curses but keeps anonymous.

He doesn’t dwell much on his childhood in Africa, but touches lightly on his familial traumas; so lightly, one would be forgiven for not registering it. He also misses on expanding on his lifelong love of scents and the creation of his perfume line. He keeps it lean, meandering between years, his first and breakout role in “Withnail and I,” “Spice World,” “Girls,” “Star Wars” and “Loki.”

An endearing read, “A Pocketful of Happiness,” gets progressively harder to digest emotionally as the illness marches to its inevitable conclusion. But it’s worthwhile all the same. — Cristina Jaleru, Associated Press

Group biographies are ambitious undertakings. To weave together divergent narratives is a challenging feat; to make it coalesce, the writer has to find the right balance of substance and texture.

“The Slip” charts the overlapping trajectories of six visual artists as they establish themselves in the late 1950s at Coenties Slip, a disused shipyard on the southern tip of Manhattan in New York City. Toiling in illegal studios, the scrappy and enterprising subjects managed to carve out functional live-work spaces from “raw warehouses.” This use anticipated the repurposing of commercial loft buildings in Soho and Tribeca as artist spaces in the 1970s.

There is a well-worn conceit that New York is more than just a place but a character in and of itself. When deployed, it runs the risk of over- romanticizing the city and flattening it to the point of abstraction. Under Prudence Peiffer’s deft hand, though, this motif is anchored to a clear purpose: to make vivid how the post- industrial landscape of lower Manhattan became the material, sometimes literally, of the artists’ work.

“Place is a tricky protagonist: fickle and, for too many uprooted or dispossessed, not guaranteed,” Peiffer writes.

To readers with a casual interest in art, the origin stories of marquee figures like Robert Indiana, known for the “LOVE” series; Ellsworth Kelly, a seminal abstract expressionist painter; and Agnes Martin, a monastic and exacting artist, may appeal. There’s more still for those with background in art history, who are already familiar with the practices of pop collagist James Rosenquist, fiber artist Lenore Tawney and hard-edged constructivist Jack Youngerman — renowned artists whose New York stories are still getting uncovered. — Anna Furman, Associated Press