Mortification: Eight Deaths and Life After Them

‘Mark Watson is a national treasure’ Richard Osman

Whatever I now know about life – or think I know – I found out through failure, disappointment, mortification. I’m writing it all down as much to remind myself as for anyone else – but now you’re here, I’d love you to stick around . . .

Mark Watson is generally accepted to be alive. And yet he’s died many times. Not just on stage – though he’ll tell you about that – but in other ways, too. There’s been the death of a childhood dream. The death of his panel-show career. And then there was the time he died inside and nearly lost it all . . .

Eye-opening, revealing and painfully funny, this is a book about mortification, failure and all the times life doesn’t work out as planned. But it also wisely questions whether the things we strive for – recognition, success, the approval of others – are really the things that matter. It’s a book about death that reminds us how to live.

‘Mark Watson makes the base metal of failure into comedy gold’ Adam Kay