SHATTERED: A Memoir, by Hanif Kureishi
In December 2022, in Rome, fate took Hanif Kureishi by the wrong hand. He was sitting in the living room of his girlfriend’s apartment, watching a soccer game on his iPad. Suddenly he felt dizzy. He leaned forward and blacked out. He woke up several minutes later in a pool of his own blood, his neck awkwardly twisted.
Kureishi was 68. He was rendered, instantly, paralyzed below the neck, able to wiggle his toes but unable to scratch an itch, grip a pen or feed himself, let alone walk. Kureishi, who is British Pakistani, is a well-known screenwriter and novelist. His paralysis made international news, and many began to follow his updates on his progress, which he posted via dictation on social media.
Now comes a memoir, “Shattered,” with further updates. The news this book delivers, as regards his physical condition, is not optimistic. He has progressed little. He wrestles mightily with who he is, now that he must rely on others for nearly everything except talking and breathing. His memoir is good but modestly so. It contains a great deal of black comedy but its most impressive emotion is regret — for things undone and unsaid earlier in his life.
It’s hard to get across how counterculturally famous Kureishi was in the 1980s and ’90s. He wrote the screenplay for Stephen Frears’s raffish art-house film “My Beautiful Laundrette” (1985), about a young Pakistani man who is given a derelict laundromat in London by his uncle and hopes to turn it into a success.
That movie arrived in the wake of Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” (1981), the most influential novel of the late 20th century. Both were fresh and sharply drawn works about postcolonialism and its discontents, a topic that Rushdie and Kureishi dragged, alive and squirming, to the forefront of the culture. The men became friends.
Kureishi photographed a bit better than Rushdie did. With his lion’s mane of dark curls, he resembled a pop star or a hipster prince more than a writerly mole person. Thus, it is one of the jokes in “Shattered” when Kureishi recalls the time a nurse asked, while plunging a gloved finger into his backside: “How long did it take you to write ‘Midnight’s Children’?”
He replied that if he’d written “Midnight’s Children,” he would not be in the care of England’s public health system.
In a darker parallelism, Rushdie too has written a recent memoir of horror and recovery.
Kureishi wrote the screenplay for Frears’s next movie, the romantic comedy “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid” (1987), and then published his first and best-known novel, “The Buddha of Suburbia,” in 1990. He has since written many more screenplays and novels but none have so captured the conversation.
When the press began to write about his accident, Kureishi says in “Shattered,” he began to feel like Huck Finn at his own funeral. Most of the accounts of his life and career were flattering. There is a bit of that life and career in this memoir, but more often we are in the present tense, as in: “Excuse me for a moment, I must have an enema now.”
Bodily eliminations are a central topic. He learns to get over the humiliation of not being able to cope with these on his own. Caregivers always seem to be feeling around back there. At one point Kureishi cries out to his readers, “I now designate my arse Route 66.”
The importance of touch, of small physical kindnesses, is felt in nearly every paragraph. It has ever been true: Kindness is the coin of the realm, accepted everywhere. Looking back at his life, Kureishi writes: “I wish I had been kinder; and if I get another chance, I will be.”
Remorse runs through this memoir’s veins like tracer dye. Kureishi stares hard at himself; he studies the blueprint of his own heart; he does not always like what he sees. He recalls being spoiled and self-centered and not, for example, welcoming the arrivals of his three sons. He hated taking them to sports events; he was used to doing what he wanted.
While his girlfriend and later wife, Isabella, cares for him in his new state, he wonders if he would have done the same for her. He was often distant, to her and others. His injury has brought him so much good will from so many people; he wonders if he would have reacted similarly.
Kureishi comes to feel “like a Beckettian chattering mouth, all I can do is speak, but I can also listen.” His favorite visitors are big talkers. Speaking takes a lot out of him. He remarks that “becoming paralyzed is a great way to meet new people.”
While he is in rehab, trying to regain motor skills, Kureishi confronts the contingencies of all our lives. Those around him have suffered motorcycle crashes, falls from ladders and trampolines, dives into empty swimming pools, sports injuries, a litany of freak and not-so-freak accidents.
Many incapacitated people, including famous ones like Christopher Reeve, have written books. The paralysis memoir with the most sophistication and sensitivity, that constantly taps into life’s mother lode, is “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (1997), by Jean-Dominique Bauby. He was 43, the editor of Elle France, when he suffered a brainstem stroke. He wrote his sumptuous book by blinking to select letters while the alphabet was recited to him.
“Shattered” does not reach such heights. We confront the bare wood beneath the bark of Kureishi’s best earlier writing. But he is good and bracing company on the page. His book is never boring. He offers frank lessons in resilience, about blowing the sparks that are still visible, about ringing the bells that still can ring.
SHATTERED: A Memoir | By Hanif Kureishi | Ecco | 328 pp. | $28
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