“That’s what’s great about being a writer,” Hanif Kureishi told an interviewer a decade ago. “Every 10 years you become somebody else.” He was 59 then, looking back on his younger days; in his 30s, he’d made his mark on a newly multicultural literary scene in London with the Oscar-nominated screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette, followed by the prizewinning debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia. The son of an English mother and a Pakistani father, he was a bad boy in the spotlight, intimate with working-class locals and worldly elites, unabashed about smoking weed and sleeping around, and funny. He invoked P. G. Wodehouse and Philip Roth, and struck a chord with upstart young readers and writers (among them Zadie Smith). His boldly nonconformist voice was his own.
Then, at the age of 68, in December 2022, he became somebody unimaginably different after he keeled over onto a hard floor in Rome and came to consciousness a paraplegic. Trapped in a paralyzed body in a hospital bed, he tweeted two weeks later, via his son: “An insect, a hero, a ghost or Frankenstein’s monster. Out of these mixings will come magnificent horrors and amazements. Every day when I dictate these thoughts, I open what is left of my broken body in order to try and reach you, to stop myself from dying inside.” And suddenly, Kureishi was back in the spotlight. People around the world were listening. He kept dictating.
When I went to visit him in London two years later, this past December, he was in his power chair, in the ground-floor living room of his colorful, cluttered house in Shepherd’s Bush. His hospital bed is in one corner, with stacks of books he cannot reach packing the shelves above it; his partner, Isabella d’Amico, and his 24-hour health aide, Kamila, sleep in bedrooms upstairs, next to his large, now-unused study. He had been sick with diverticulitis and had smoked half a joint and drunk half a beer, he told me, on the fateful day when he fainted and “fell literally flat on my face. Bang. Without putting my arms out or anything. I fell flat on my fucking face and broke my neck.” While we talked, his right hand, in splints to keep it from clawing up, fluttered in front of him, almost as if it were strumming a guitar—ironic, because Kureishi used to passably play the blues. His mobility is limited to controlling his chair, leaning forward, and wiggling his hips. Drugs, now a cocktail of pharmaceuticals, are very much back in his life: He’s taking 12 or so a day; he isn’t really sure. “It’s to make me shit. It’s to stop my bladder doing this. It’s for this, that, the other. God knows.”
He went cold turkey on virtually everything else, compelled by another need. Right away, he was “mad to fucking write,” he told me. “And I still am mad to write. It’s holding me together.” At first, the fragmented, dispatch-like nature of Twitter gave his individual utterances a suspenseful intensity: “Sitting here again in this dreary room for another week, like a Beckettian chattering mouth, all I can do is speak, but I can also listen,” he tweeted a few days into his new life. And then, “I wouldn’t advice [sic] having an accident like mine, but I would say that lying completely inert and silent in a drab room, without much distraction, is certainly good for creativity.”
Two weeks after the accident, Carlo, one of his three sons, revived the dormant Substack, The Kureishi Chronicles, that his father had once launched. The dictations began to coalesce into essays that combined tales of his former, able-bodied life with unvarnished assessments of his medical and mental conditions. “Experiencing the press coverage you might receive had you died,” in his words, spurred him on, and in July, just 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 book. Shattered, a bare, tumultuous memoir of the first year of Kureishi’s new life, published in the United Kingdom in October 2024, is now out in the United States. It’s simultaneously the story of his mind’s entrapment in his body and his attempt to outrun that restriction with radical transparency.
Back in the 2014 interview, he’d spoken of forging “a new kind of English realism” as his career took off. After reading Shattered, I wondered if the multigenre experimenter had, quite literally, stumbled into a new kind of illness realism.
Nobody is equipped for the kind of calamity that struck Kureishi. But the body, with all its spewing, writhing, lusting, hunger, and degradation, had long been his obsession. His fiction had traced his own arc from young renegade to disgruntled middle-aged father to ailing older man. Pain and pleasure were his recurring catharsis points. He wanted to explore whether, and how, the body could really satisfy the curiosities of the mind.
My Beautiful Laundrette is bookended by two beatings similar to ones inflicted on an adolescent Kureishi by punks who regularly chased him home from school. Pain conveys its bearer, whether it’s the Pakistani British Omar or his former skinhead lover, Johnny, to a new level of self-realization. The Buddha of Suburbia—with more plotlines pulled from Kureishi’s young life—follows teenage Karim on lust- and creativity-fueled escapades that end with the kind of sex that includes a leather hood, ropes, and a candle inside an orifice. “What do you do?” he asks the woman involved in this act. “Pain as play,” she responds. “A deep human love of pain. There is desire for pain, yes?” In the wincingly autobiographical novel Intimacy (1998), a married man who leaves his wife for another woman has aging very much on the brain.
But The Body (2002) most uncannily foreshadowed Kureishi’s current situation. The novel is narrated by a writer in his mid-60s whose medical ailments have left him broken—“I don’t go to parties,” he moans, “because I don’t like to stand up.” But a secretive new surgery transplants his brain into a young, fit body for six months, which he uses to screw women across Europe, take ecstasy, and contemplate how experiencing a body’s failure elevates your appreciation of just how good you can feel. “After the purifications and substitutions of culture,” he thinks, “I believed I was returning to something neglected: fundamental physical pleasure, the ecstasy of the body, of my skin, of movement, and of accelerated, spontaneous affection for others in the same state.”
Anointed with unexpected establishment credentials (Queen Elizabeth II named him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2008), Kureishi was mellowing in the 2010s. As he put it to me, “I was bored with my own imagination and … I was happy having a good life. I was living part of the time in Italy, part of the time here; the kids were grown up. So I thought, Fuck it. Why should I spend all day working? So I was taking it easy and I had—I didn’t have much of a desire to write anymore. Not with the enthusiasm I had when I was younger. Then I had the accident.”
Writing fiction no longer merely strikes him as boring. To “make up shit” has become impossible. “It just seems frivolous to do that,” he told me. Some other writers, I pushed him, might retreat to the relief of fantasy in his situation. Not Kureishi. “I’m not writing fiction,” he said. “I’m not writing some stupid story, made-up story. I’m writing it directly about what happened to me.” Forget easing into his late phase as a writer. Kureishi has been ambushed by the physical infirmities of age in a rare way. He has always drawn on his own experience, but by choice. A vulnerable, relief-seeking self-exposure is now a necessity, a compulsion—a mode of connection, even as his world has shrunk. It has also offered a way to again rebel against the dominant modes of storytelling. He has one story, and it’s his own, and the only way he wants to tell it is to spit it out raw.
In 1926, after a bout with a devastating flu and a series of earlier nervous breakdowns, Virginia Woolf published an essay on why we don’t—but perhaps ought to—treat illness as a subject as valuable and enlightening as “love, battle, and jealousy.” “On Being Ill” considers illness as a foreign land, a place where “the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea.” Properly rendering the miasma of sickness and the “daily drama of the body,” argues Woolf—who endured her share of forced confinements in bed—is so difficult that the challenge is rarely undertaken. The ill usually write after they’ve recovered, when the palpable sensations of debilitation are gone, and “our intelligence domineers over our senses.”
Nearly a century later, fiction about illness is still relatively uncommon. Even the best of the genre, such as Helen Garner’s The Spare Room and Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, are told from a caretaker’s perspective or maintain a veil of silence over the specifics of the chemical and mechanical horrors that a body can endure. Excessive depictions of pain, as in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, can curdle understanding into a kind of grimy sympathy or, worse, distaste. The illness memoir, however, is a well-trodden contemporary genre. First-person tales about cancer, freak accidents, chronic disease, and mental breakdowns regularly make their way onto best-seller lists (or into remainder bins). They typically take one of two approaches: Either the writer finds redemptive lessons in the path toward death or disability, as Paul Kalanithi did in his posthumous megahit, When Breath Becomes Air, or, as in Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, a previously unexamined world of disease is made manifest while the writer explores what we know, and don’t know, about its properties. The hope in both types of books is to impose sense—for the writer and the reader—on the mysterious.
The illness narrative usually benefits from months or years of deliberation: It’s a reckoning with how injury or sickness edges into a life and then cracks it wide open. As Kureishi tilted his chair forward and backward, he blithely told me that he hadn’t had a chance to read Woolf or any other books in the illness canon (he can’t hold a novel and doesn’t want to be read to), and that in Shattered, “there isn’t much reflection.” His writing method during the post-accident year he chronicles hardly changed, even when, halfway through, he knew that a book would emerge. Once he was home and stabilized, the suspense petered out, but his from-the-trenches method continued. For a few hours each day, he sat with his son, recording a routine newly cluttered by physiotherapy bills and National Health Service red tape. What winnowing they did was minimal. Shattered is akin to a war diary, prizing immediacy above all else.
Kureishi never planned to produce a stylized memoir. He simply documented the uncertainty and emotional convulsions of the moment. At night, when visitors left his hospital room, he was alone, awake, and imprisoned in his body. “I would write the whole scheme of the piece in my head,” he told me. “One sentence, one paragraph, one paragraph, one paragraph, and kind of hold it there. I could see it visually like a picture.” He’d keep it in his mind until morning, and then dictate in a rush. In an early entry, he notes that he hopes to one day “be able to go back to using my own precious and beloved instruments,” meaning pen and paper, then swerves. “Excuse me, I’m being injected in my belly with something called Heparina, a blood thinner,” he says, then gets right back to praising longhand.
The book’s tone leaps and crashes with Kureishi’s post-accident moods. A model of bountiful gratitude, he praises the Italian doctors and nurses who feed him and move him, who “wash your genitals and your arse, often while singing jolly Italian songs.” When someone comes to measure him for a wheelchair, he writes, “I’ve had enough of this shit.” He turns on himself frequently, worrying that he is “both a helpless baby and terrible tyrant.” Memoirs are designed for revelation, but Kureishi, a connoisseur of shock, invades his own privacy more than most. Nothing is off-limits, including the butt plug he wears in hydrotherapy: His rectum cannot be trusted to control itself. He can’t resist stories, such as one about a threesome he had years ago in Amsterdam, that remind him and us of his wild old days and magnify the contrast with his current straits. How many (sometimes tedious) details we might really want to hear doesn’t concern him. Shattered practices what Woolf calls “a childish outspokenness in illness”; she goes on to note how “things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.” Kureishi’s mode is impromptu exposé: He has no distance from himself or his condition, and refuses to add any.
For readers, this lack of filter makes Shattered bluntly intimate, demanding in its sharing. For Kureishi, it reflects the urgent purpose of his confessional writing, which is partly financial. “It costs me a thousand pounds a week just to have physio and to go swimming and all that shit,” he told me. Friends donate to a fund, but he’d like to contribute to it himself, with a book that really sells. The urgency is also partly—probably mostly—existential. If Kureishi can’t be out in the world, he needs his voice to be.
Kureishi’s emotions, as you’d expect, surface readily. He cried a few times while we talked, once when I asked him about the knife attack that maimed his friend Salman Rushdie. The two men suffered nearly fatal injuries within months of each other: Rushdie was stabbed onstage at a literary festival in August 2022 and has lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand. They emailed each other daily during Kureishi’s months in the hospital. Rushdie has written his own memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, in which he carefully and solemnly recounts the way the attack punctured and then reinflated his sense of self. Knife favors a narrative of growth; it aims for closure. Shattered rejects both, never leaving the insistent and unceremonious present tense.
Just as Kureishi hasn’t read the illness canon, he hasn’t read his own memoir. “People tell me it holds together,” he said. He doesn’t seem to need or want proof of that; he knows it’s fragmented. He’s interested in his daily creations as evidence of what feels like newly unfettered access to his mind—of his power to delve into its recesses and skim its surfaces, mobile as he can be nowhere else. That drive shows no signs of ebbing as he now works on a sequel and a movie, his son at his side. “I’ve never felt such a strong desire to be a writer,” he said. “It’s a relief that to be a writer for me is to be a human being, to be sentient.”
*Lead image sources: Stuart C. Wilson / Getty; Universal History Archive / Getty;
Neville Elder / Corbis / Getty; Print Collector / Getty
This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “‘I Am Still Mad to Write.’”
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