“That’s what’s nice about being a author,” Hanif Kureishi informed an interviewer a decade in the past. “Each 10 years you grow to be someone else.” He was 59 then, wanting again on his youthful days; in his 30s, he’d made his mark on a newly multicultural literary scene in London with the Oscar-nominated screenplay for My Stunning Laundrette, adopted by the prizewinning debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia. The son of an English mom and a Pakistani father, he was a foul boy within the highlight, intimate with working-class locals and worldly elites, unabashed about smoking weed and sleeping round, and humorous. He invoked P. G. Wodehouse and Philip Roth, and struck a chord with upstart younger readers and writers (amongst them Zadie Smith). His boldly nonconformist voice was his personal.
Then, on the age of 68, in December 2022, he grew to become someone unimaginably totally different after he keeled over onto a tough ground in Rome and got here to consciousness a paraplegic. Trapped in a paralyzed physique in a hospital mattress, he tweeted two weeks later, through his son: “An insect, a hero, a ghost or Frankenstein’s monster. Out of those mixings will come magnificent horrors and amazements. Each day once I dictate these ideas, I open what’s left of my damaged physique with a purpose to attempt to attain you, to cease myself from dying inside.” And abruptly, Kureishi was again within the highlight. Folks world wide have been listening. He stored dictating.
Once I went to go to him in London two years later, this previous December, he was in his energy chair, within the ground-floor front room of his colourful, cluttered home in Shepherd’s Bush. His hospital mattress is in a single nook, with stacks of books he can’t attain packing the cabinets above it; his companion, Isabella d’Amico, and his 24-hour well being aide, Kamila, sleep in bedrooms upstairs, subsequent to his giant, now-unused research. He had been sick with diverticulitis and had smoked half a joint and drunk half a beer, he informed me, on the fateful day when he fainted and “fell actually flat on my face. Bang. With out placing my arms out or something. I fell flat on my fucking face and broke my neck.” Whereas we talked, his proper hand, in splints to maintain it from clawing up, fluttered in entrance of him, virtually as if it have been strumming a guitar—ironic, as a result of Kureishi used to passably play the blues. His mobility is proscribed to controlling his chair, leaning ahead, and wiggling his hips. Medicine, now a cocktail of prescribed drugs, are very a lot again in his life: He’s taking 12 or so a day; he isn’t actually certain. “It’s to make me shit. It’s to cease my bladder doing this. It’s for this, that, the opposite. God is aware of.”
He went chilly turkey on just about all the pieces else, compelled by one other want. Immediately, he was “mad to fucking write,” he informed me. “And I nonetheless am mad to write down. It’s holding me collectively.” At first, the fragmented, dispatch-like nature of Twitter gave his particular person utterances a suspenseful depth: “Sitting right here once more on this dreary room for an additional week, like a Beckettian chattering mouth, all I can do is converse, however I can even hear,” he tweeted a number of days into his new life. After which, “I wouldn’t recommendation [sic] having an accident like mine, however I’d say that mendacity fully inert and silent in a colorless room, with out a lot distraction, is definitely good for creativity.”
Two weeks after the accident, Carlo, one among his three sons, revived the dormant Substack, The Kureishi Chronicles, that his father had as soon as launched. The dictations started to coalesce into essays that mixed tales of his former, able-bodied life with unvarnished assessments of his medical and psychological situations. “Experiencing the press protection you would possibly obtain had you died,” in his phrases, spurred him on, and in July, simply after he moved from an Italian rehab facility to London’s Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, his agent agreed that the entries would work as a e book. Shattered, a naked, tumultuous memoir of the primary yr of Kureishi’s new life, revealed in the UK in October 2024, is now out in america. It’s concurrently the story of his thoughts’s entrapment in his physique and his try to outrun that restriction with radical transparency.
Again within the 2014 interview, he’d spoken of forging “a brand new form of English realism” as his profession took off. After studying Shattered, I puzzled if the multigenre experimenter had, fairly actually, stumbled into a brand new form of sickness realism.
No person is outfitted for the form of calamity that struck Kureishi. However the physique, with all its spewing, writhing, lusting, starvation, and degradation, had lengthy been his obsession. His fiction had traced his personal arc from younger renegade to disgruntled middle-aged father to ailing older man. Ache and pleasure have been his recurring catharsis factors. He wished to discover whether or not, and the way, the physique may actually fulfill the curiosities of the thoughts.
My Stunning Laundrette is bookended by two beatings much like ones inflicted on an adolescent Kureishi by punks who usually chased him house from college. Ache conveys its bearer, whether or not it’s the Pakistani British Omar or his former skinhead lover, Johnny, to a brand new degree of self-realization. The Buddha of Suburbia—with extra plotlines pulled from Kureishi’s younger life—follows teenage Karim on lust- and creativity-fueled escapades that finish with the form of intercourse that features a leather-based hood, ropes, and a candle inside an orifice. “What do you do?” he asks the lady concerned on this act. “Ache as play,” she responds. “A deep human love of ache. There may be want for ache, sure?” Within the wincingly autobiographical novel Intimacy (1998), a married man who leaves his spouse for an additional lady has ageing very a lot on the mind.
However The Physique (2002) most uncannily foreshadowed Kureishi’s present state of affairs. The novel is narrated by a author in his mid-60s whose medical illnesses have left him damaged—“I don’t go to events,” he moans, “as a result of I don’t like to face up.” However a secretive new surgical procedure transplants his mind right into a younger, match physique for six months, which he makes use of to screw ladies throughout Europe, take ecstasy, and ponder how experiencing a physique’s failure elevates your appreciation of simply how good you possibly can really feel. “After the purifications and substitutions of tradition,” he thinks, “I believed I used to be returning to one thing uncared for: elementary bodily pleasure, the ecstasy of the physique, of my pores and skin, of motion, and of accelerated, spontaneous affection for others in the identical state.”
Anointed with sudden institution credentials (Queen Elizabeth II named him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2008), Kureishi was mellowing within the 2010s. As he put it to me, “I used to be tired of my very own creativeness and … I used to be blissful having an excellent life. I used to be dwelling a part of the time in Italy, a part of the time right here; the youngsters have been grown up. So I assumed, Fuck it. Why ought to I spend all day working? So I used to be taking it simple and I had—I didn’t have a lot of a want to write down anymore. Not with the keenness I had once I was youthful. Then I had the accident.”
Writing fiction not merely strikes him as boring. To “make up shit” has grow to be inconceivable. “It simply appears frivolous to do this,” he informed me. Another writers, I pushed him, would possibly retreat to the reduction of fantasy in his state of affairs. Not Kureishi. “I’m not writing fiction,” he mentioned. “I’m not writing some silly story, made-up story. I’m writing it straight about what occurred to me.” Overlook easing into his late section as a author. Kureishi has been ambushed by the bodily infirmities of age in a uncommon manner. He has at all times drawn on his personal expertise, however by alternative. A weak, relief-seeking self-exposure is now a necessity, a compulsion—a mode of connection, at the same time as his world has shrunk. It has additionally provided a technique to once more insurgent towards the dominant modes of storytelling. He has one story, and it’s his personal, and the one manner he needs to inform it’s to spit it out uncooked.
In 1926, after a bout with a devastating flu and a sequence of earlier nervous breakdowns, Virginia Woolf revealed an essay on why we don’t—however maybe must—deal with sickness as a topic as precious and enlightening as “love, battle, and jealousy.” “On Being Unwell” considers sickness as a overseas land, a spot the place “the entire panorama of life lies distant and honest, just like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea.” Correctly rendering the miasma of illness and the “every day drama of the physique,” argues Woolf—who endured her share of compelled confinements in mattress—is so tough that the problem isn’t undertaken. The unwell normally write after they’ve recovered, when the palpable sensations of debilitation are gone, and “our intelligence domineers over our senses.”
Practically a century later, fiction about sickness remains to be comparatively unusual. Even the most effective of the style, resembling Helen Garner’s The Spare Room and Elizabeth Strout’s My Identify Is Lucy Barton, are informed from a caretaker’s perspective or preserve a veil of silence over the specifics of the chemical and mechanical horrors {that a} physique can endure. Extreme depictions of ache, as in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, can curdle understanding right into a form of dirty sympathy or, worse, distaste. The sickness memoir, nonetheless, is a well-trodden up to date style. First-person tales about most cancers, freak accidents, persistent illness, and psychological breakdowns usually make their manner onto best-seller lists (or into the rest bins). They sometimes take one among two approaches: Both the author finds redemptive classes within the path towards loss of life or incapacity, as Paul Kalanithi did in his posthumous megahit, When Breath Turns into Air, or, as in Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Persistent Sickness, a beforehand unexamined world of illness is made manifest whereas the author explores what we all know, and don’t know, about its properties. The hope in each forms of books is to impose sense—for the author and the reader—on the mysterious.
The sickness narrative normally advantages from months or years of deliberation: It’s a reckoning with how damage or illness edges right into a life after which cracks it extensive open. As Kureishi tilted his chair ahead and backward, he blithely informed me that he hadn’t had an opportunity to learn Woolf or some other books within the sickness canon (he can’t maintain a novel and doesn’t need to be learn to), and that in Shattered, “there isn’t a lot reflection.” His writing methodology in the course of the post-accident yr he chronicles hardly modified, even when, midway via, he knew {that a} e book would emerge. As soon as he was house and stabilized, the suspense petered out, however his from-the-trenches methodology continued. For a number of hours every day, he sat along with his son, recording a routine newly cluttered by physiotherapy payments and Nationwide Well being Service crimson tape. What winnowing they did was minimal. Shattered is akin to a struggle diary, prizing immediacy above all else.
Kureishi by no means deliberate to supply a stylized memoir. He merely documented the uncertainty and emotional convulsions of the second. At night time, when guests left his hospital room, he was alone, awake, and imprisoned in his physique. “I’d write the entire scheme of the piece in my head,” he informed me. “One sentence, one paragraph, one paragraph, one paragraph, and form of maintain it there. I may see it visually like an image.” He’d preserve it in his thoughts till morning, after which dictate in a rush. In an early entry, he notes that he hopes to at some point “be capable to return to utilizing my very own valuable and beloved devices,” which means pen and paper, then swerves. “Excuse me, I’m being injected in my stomach with one thing known as Heparina, a blood thinner,” he says, then will get proper again to praising longhand.
The e book’s tone leaps and crashes with Kureishi’s post-accident moods. A mannequin of bountiful gratitude, he praises the Italian docs and nurses who feed him and transfer him, who “wash your genitals and your arse, typically whereas singing jolly Italian songs.” When somebody involves measure him for a wheelchair, he writes, “I’ve had sufficient of this shit.” He activates himself often, worrying that he’s “each a helpless child and horrible tyrant.” Memoirs are designed for revelation, however Kureishi, a connoisseur of shock, invades his personal privateness greater than most. Nothing is off-limits, together with the butt plug he wears in hydrotherapy: His rectum can’t be trusted to regulate itself. He can’t resist tales, resembling one a few threesome he had years in the past in Amsterdam, that remind him and us of his wild outdated days and amplify the distinction along with his present straits. What number of (generally tedious) particulars we would actually need to hear doesn’t concern him. Shattered practices what Woolf calls “a infantile outspokenness in sickness”; she goes on to notice how “issues are mentioned, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of well being conceals.” Kureishi’s mode is impromptu exposé: He has no distance from himself or his situation, and refuses so as to add any.
For readers, this lack of filter makes Shattered bluntly intimate, demanding in its sharing. For Kureishi, it displays the pressing function of his confessional writing, which is partly monetary. “It prices me a thousand kilos per week simply to have physio and to go swimming and all that shit,” he informed me. Buddies donate to a fund, however he’d prefer to contribute to it himself, with a e book that actually sells. The urgency can be partly—most likely largely—existential. If Kureishi can’t be out on the planet, he wants his voice to be.
Kureishi’s feelings, as you’d anticipate, floor readily. He cried a number of instances whereas we talked, as soon as once I requested him concerning the knife assault that maimed his buddy Salman Rushdie. The 2 males suffered practically deadly accidents inside months of one another: Rushdie was stabbed onstage at a literary competition in August 2022 and has misplaced sight in a single eye and using one hand. They emailed one another every day throughout Kureishi’s months within the hospital. Rushdie has written his personal memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Tried Homicide, by which he fastidiously and solemnly recounts the manner the assault punctured after which reinflated his sense of self. Knife favors a story of progress; it goals for closure. Shattered rejects each, by no means leaving the insistent and unceremonious current tense.
Simply as Kureishi hasn’t learn the sickness canon, he hasn’t learn his personal memoir. “Folks inform me it holds collectively,” he mentioned. He doesn’t appear to wish or need proof of that; he is aware of it’s fragmented. He’s serious about his every day creations as proof of what looks like newly unfettered entry to his thoughts—of his energy to delve into its recesses and skim its surfaces, cell as he might be nowhere else. That drive exhibits no indicators of ebbing as he now works on a sequel and a film, his son at his facet. “I’ve by no means felt such a robust want to be a author,” he mentioned. “It’s a reduction that to be a author for me is to be a human being, to be sentient.”
*Lead picture sources: Stuart C. Wilson / Getty; Common Historical past Archive / Getty;
Neville Elder / Corbis / Getty; Print Collector / Getty
This text seems within the March 2025 print version with the headline “‘I Am Nonetheless Mad to Write.’”
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