Memoirs are very hard to review. How can you criticize the characters and plot of someone else’s life. It’s not like they invented the whole thing, everything actually happened. So I’ll try to keep it close to reality and remember that this is not a novel.

Jane Hawking was married to the genius scientific Stephen Hawking for about thirty years. They met in the sixties and married shortly after he was diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, for those of you who were living in another planet in 2014, during the ice bucket challenge craze). She chronicles their married years, his disease, his academic life and physical deterioration, and she manages to show him as a normal human being, not as the awesome and brave scientific that has faced a lot of adversity and still goes on.

Don’t get me wrong: I deeply admire Hawking for all he has done. He is, indeed, a brave human being. But he’s not a poor saint. And Jane shows it very clearly here. And a lot of the things he has overcome are invisible: what we see is just the tip of the iceberg. Jane does show them: how hard it is to move a wheelchair, how much does it cost to travel in these conditions and so on. I’ve never even thought about it, it’s just one of those things you take for granted.

I respect Jane a lot, especially after reading this. She could’ve sounded bitter and she could’ve shown Hawking in a worse light, like a despot or a selfish person (there are some points in which he does come out as self-involved, but it’s kind of understandable, given his life). Jane shows the good and bad honestly, both of Steven and herself. She doesn’t hide her infidelity or any of that side. That’s something worth repeating. It shows her humanity (she has lots of reasons to be bitter about her relationship). So, points for her for that.

This is a book that I totally recommend to anyone. Hawking is one of the greatest minds in science, and it’s very interesting to read about him in such a light. I think that sometimes, in the cases of people who have gone over such problems, we tend to see them as heroes rather than people. In this book, Hawking is incredibly human, which is great to read. Maybe because I can’t stand “heroes”, they bore me way too much. I prefer reading about real people (o realistic, at least). I enjoyed this book a lot. It’s well written and it kept me going, so I finished it in a few days (mind you, I usually read very fast). It never gets really hard to read or anything, so there are some points there.

P.S.: Watch the film. There are a few problems with it (it shows their lives to be a lot more idyllic than how they really were), but Eddie Redmayne’s acting is wonderful. And Felicity Jones is also amazing, so it’s totally worth watching it.