Wrong Rooms
Mark Sanderson
Scribner £15.99, pp320

Mark Sanderson's memoir relates how, in 1992, he met and fell in love with Drew, a young Australian. They had barely moved in together when Drew found a lump in his groin which proved to be malignant melanoma. Because of over-exposure to sunlight in his youth, Drew had fallen prey to this most aggressive of cancers. Despite - perhaps because of - treatment, his decline was rapid. Mark, awkwardly accompanied by Drew's parents, conducts a bedside vigil as Drew succumbs to the cancer's banal cruelties.

When the inevitable happens, Mark is poleaxed by grief. After a brief period of normality in which he tries to return to work, he breaks down, is told by a psychiatrist that his sorrow is morbid and his mourning 'pathological'. He contemplates suicide and clumsily attempts it, before dragging himself out of despair and gradually putting his life back together. Writing the book provides resolution - Sanderson narrowly avoids the term 'closure'.

The element I have left out of this resumé is what gives the book topicality, its talking point. Before he became gravely ill, Drew asked Mark to promise him that he, Mark, would help end his (Drew's) life if that life became merely futile pain. Keeping his promise, Mark smothered his lover with a pillow in what were clearly Drew's final hours. Technically, Sanderson could be subjected to police investigation for his 'confession'. In practice, it seems unlikely.

Sanderson evokes sympathy for carrying out his lover's wishes. It was certainly a courageous act. And few who have seen a loved one die slowly and painfully, even with the best aids of palliative care, which chiefly means medical diamorphine, would condemn him. Yet one wonders whether the cost to Sanderson himself - in guilt super-added to the burden of the guilt that goes automatically with bereavement - was worth the saving of Drew's suffering in those few final hours when he was already barely conscious.

'I won't be able to come to terms with it until I've made a complete confession,' Sanderson tells his father. This is true in a larger sense. It is fine for the writing of a memoir to be a cathartic, even therapeutic experience for its author; if it works, it can carry its reader on that journey. But by telling us more than we need to know, Sanderson's story moved me less than it should.