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Paralyzed by a Fall, a Writer Learns Resilience (and Kindness)
In a new memoir, Hanif Kureishi reflects on a life transformed since he lost the use of his arms and legs.
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’?”
