Novelist Hanif Kureishi Wrote His Way Through Recovery

Summary

All Of It: Novelist Hanif Kureishi Wrote His Way Through Recovery – Episode Summary

Host: Alison Stewart
Guest: Hanif Kureishi
Release Date: February 5, 2025
Duration: Approximately 16 minutes

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of All Of It, hosted by Alison Stewart, renowned novelist Hanif Kureishi shares his profound journey of recovery following a life-altering accident. The discussion delves into how Kureishi transformed his traumatic hospital experience into a powerful narrative, resulting in his memoir Shattered. The conversation offers deep insights into resilience, the creative process under duress, and the rediscovery of self through adversity.

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The Accident and Initial Response

The episode opens with Alison Stewart recounting the harrowing incident that led to Hanif Kureishi's hospitalization in Rome. Kureishi describes the sudden dizziness, collapsing into a pool of his own blood, and the immediate aftermath that confined him to an Italian hospital.

Notable Quote:

Alison Stewart [00:35]: “Hanif Kureishi was in an apartment in Rome. He suddenly felt dizzy. Moments later he woke up on the floor in a pool of his own blood, unable to move his arms or legs.”

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Commencement of Writing During Recovery

During his nights in intensive care, Kureishi began dictating his thoughts and experiences. Without the ability to physically write, he collaborated with his partner, Isabella, who transcribed his musings. This spontaneous act of writing evolved into daily dispatches that laid the foundation for his memoir.

Notable Quote:

Hanif Kureishi [01:34]: “I found that I began to compose blogs, accounts of what was happening to me because I've been a writer my whole life, since I was a teenager...”

Kureishi emphasizes the importance of capturing his thoughts in real-time, stating that writing retrospectively would never convey the authentic immediacy of his experiences.

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Reflections on Childhood and Self-Identity

As Kureishi remained confined, he delved into memories of his childhood, exploring how early experiences shaped his identity as a writer. The isolation sparked introspection, allowing him to reconstruct his sense of self amidst physical vulnerability.

Notable Quote:

Hanif Kureishi [03:42]: “It was like being in a kind of immersive movie. So I began to think about who I was and how I came to be here in this situation and how I came to be a writer and so on.”

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Perception of the Body and Physical Vulnerability

One of the most profound topics discussed is Kureishi's altered perception of his body. The accident rendered his body foreign and unrecognizable, leading to a deep-seated aversion and philosophical contemplation on human fragility.

Notable Quote:

Hanif Kureishi [05:10]: “My body became and is still really a horrible object for me... I hate to look at it, I hate to be in it.”

Kureishi reflects on the randomness of accidents and the inherent vulnerability of human existence, themes that permeate his writing during this period.

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The Writing Process with Family Support

Adapting to his new limitations, Kureishi relied heavily on his family, particularly his wife Isabella and his son Carlo, to transcribe his dictated thoughts. This collaborative effort introduced a new dynamic to his creative process, blending familial interaction with artistic expression.

Notable Quote:

Hanif Kureishi [08:52]: “I have to dictate. I can't write it directly onto the computer... it's more direct. There's less of the artistic stuff in it.”

Carlo's role as both transcriber and informal editor added another layer to the narrative, ensuring that the dispatches maintained a certain standard and authenticity.

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Intimate and Unfiltered Narratives

Kureishi's memoir, Shattered, does not shy away from the raw and often uncomfortable realities of hospital life. He candidly describes personal moments and the invasive nature of medical care, providing an unfiltered glimpse into his daily struggles.

Notable Quote:

Hanif Kureishi [11:18]: “I thought what I'm gonna say is exactly how it is... what it's like to be in hospital for a year and the inconvenience.”

He defends his choice to include explicit details, arguing that it authentically represents the dehumanizing aspects of prolonged hospitalization.

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Observations on Human Behavior and Connection

During his confinement, Kureishi became acutely aware of human kindness and the capacity for generosity. Interactions with visitors and spontaneous acts of compassion from acquaintances and strangers alike reshaped his understanding of empathy and community.

Notable Quote:

Hanif Kureishi [14:54]: “I suddenly saw this incredible generosity from my friends and even people I didn't know so well... I do in fact try and be kinder than I was before.”

This newfound appreciation for kindness influenced his approach to life post-recovery, driving him to emulate the generosity he received.

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Conclusion and Reflections on the Journey

As the conversation wraps up, Kureishi reflects on the transformative power of his ordeal. Shattered serves not only as a memoir but as a testament to human resilience and the unyielding spirit of creativity even in the bleakest circumstances.

Notable Quote:

Hanif Kureishi [16:05]: “I wish it had all happened earlier.”

Though the journey was fraught with pain and uncertainty, Kureishi expresses gratitude for the personal growth and deeper understanding gained through his experiences.

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Final Thoughts

This episode of All Of It offers listeners an intimate look into Hanif Kureishi's battle with paralysis and his extraordinary method of coping through writing. Kureishi's story is a powerful exploration of vulnerability, the essence of creativity, and the enduring human spirit, making Shattered a poignant addition to his acclaimed body of work.

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Note: All quotes are attributed to the speakers with corresponding timestamps from the provided transcript.

Transcript

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[Alison Stewart]

This is all of it from wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart, the screenwriter of My Beautiful Launderette and novelist of the Buddha of Suburbia. Hanif Koresi was in an apartment in Rome. He suddenly felt dizzy. Moments later he woke up on the floor in a pool of his own blood, unable to move his arms or legs. Carisi was taken to an Italian hospital for treatment. There he began to dict what was happening to his partners and his sons. They'd write it down. They included reflections on his career, his childhood, his family, and the simple things most of us take for granted. For example, he wrote, I woke up this morning thinking about my old life and how dull it was. I wonder whether I enjoyed the repetition of it or whether I just become lazy. The first year of those dispatches now make up the book Shattered. Hanif Karisi joins me to discuss it. Hanif, thank you for being with us.

[Hanif Qureshi]

Hi. Yeah, it's a pleasure.

[Alison Stewart]

Do you remember when you decided to write about your experience from the hospital?

[Hanif Qureshi]

I was in intensive care in the hospital in Rome and I was lying there sleepless night after night and I found that I began to compose blogs, accounts of what was happening to me because I've been a writer my whole life, since I was a teenager, so it was instinctive of me to start thinking in paragraphs. And so then I called my partner, Isabella, and she began to sit at the end of my hospital bed and she began to type my thoughts and ideas into into her phone. And then we had a debate about whether we should tell the world what had happened to me because so many people were ringing up and were curious. So we published my first so called blog on Substack, which was an account of what had happened to me. And then the next day I had the desire to write again about what was happening to me because I thought it was terrible and interesting and unique. And you know, if you don't write these things down when they're happening and you write them down later, you never get it right. So I wrote that night again, another blog. And then we published it and it went on to Twitter and we got more and more likes and more and more hundreds and thousands of people Then started to respond to the blogs. So although I was lonely and in a terrible, traumatic situation in hospital, we began to get this huge audience of people who wanted to read about what was happening to me. So that's how it all started.

[Alison Stewart]

Your very second dispatch sees you reflecting on your childhood, learning to read and write. How did being confined, often alone in your hospital room, influence the memories that came back to you?

[Hanif Qureshi]

Well, one of the results of my accident is that I can't use my hands. And I think any of your listeners tied their hands up for a day. They would find it very inconvenient. So I couldn't use a computer, I couldn't use my phone. There was no way to distract myself. So I was in a kind of Zen meditative state, I guess. And in that state I would have very long, intricate memories of various things and various periods of my past. And it was like being in a kind of immersive movie. So I began to think about who I was and how I came to be here in this situation and how I came to be a writer and so on. So as I wrote the blogs, which were about my everyday life in the hospital and my suffering, I also began to write about my childhood, about my friends, about sexual relationships, about my education and so on. So that's how the book came into being really rather spontaneously, just because of what was happening to me.

[Alison Stewart]

Yeah. You noticed in your first month in the hospital that you had a new sense of smell, that you looked at other people's bodies with a new meaning. How has the body taken on a new meaning or a new sense of injury, of new sense of interest? Excuse me, Sense your injury?

[Hanif Qureshi]

Well, my body became and is still really a horrible object for me. I mean, I was a reasonably healthy, mobile person before, and now, you know, I'm living in this horrible, broken, semi paralyzed blob and I hate it, as if I become some kind of turtle or some kind of animal. My body is alien to me and I hate to look at it, I hate to be in it, But I began to think that what happened to me, of course, could happen to anyone at any time. What happened to me was contingent. It really was an accident. I fainted, and I hadn't never really fainted before. And I stood up and I fell flat on my face and broke my neck. And later on, when I was in hospital in London, I was in a. On a neurological ward where everybody on the ward had had an accident. You know, one guy had fallen down the stairs, another guy had been hit by a Truck, somebody else had jumped into an empty swimming pool. Somebody. One guy tripped over a rake in his garden when he was gardening and fell over and broke his. So I began to realize that an accident can happen to any of us at any time, that we are fragile, that we are vulnerable, and that we don't necessarily have any agency over what will happen to us. And I began to think about this philosophically, about the fragility and vulnerability of the human person.

[Alison Stewart]

Reading the dispatches, you become really aware of the small things that non disabled people take for granted. Holding a pen, just scratching an itch. What are the small things that are foremost in your own mind?

[Hanif Qureshi]

Well, I began to think about every day as I, as I, as I got stronger in the hospital. I began to think very unhappily about everything that I lost. You know, as you described, that I can't pick up a pen and write my name. And it was terrible when friends would visit and obviously I would see them, you know, walking out of the room and going down the corridor and going home. I thought, you don't appreciate how lucky you are to have your legs to be able to walk such a simple thing. I would do anything, give anything, to be able to, you know, walk out of here and go to the shops. And so you realize everything you can't do. But then at the same time you begin to think about the things that you can actually do, which I'm doing now. I'm communicating with you. I can speak, I can, I can write, I can read. I didn't have a. I fell on my head, but I don't have a brain injury. So basically I'm exactly the same person as I was before, except I'm in a smashed and broken body and I am entirely dependent on people around me.

[Alison Stewart]

I'm speaking with Haniv Karishi, author of many films and the books, including the Buddha of Suburbia. He's also written a memoir. It's called Shattered. It details his recovery after a fall in late 2022 left him paralyzed. Your wife Isabella and your sons were often note takers in these dispatches. As a writer, what was it like to rely on them to put your words down?

[Hanif Qureshi]

Well, I've never written in this way before. You know, I normally just sit at a computer and tap away and there you go. But now every day, every morning, my son Carlo comes to my house and I have to dictate the story, the blog to him. And that's a completely different method of writing, which I've never, I never used it before. It never occurred to me to dictate my writing to someone else. But I have to say it's a very beautiful way to work because it means that you have somebody else with you who you can. You know, we gossip about the family, about sport, about politics, and it's really fun to see him coming into my house every day. But I have to dictate. I can't write it directly onto the computer. So I have to think in a different way about the blog. And the blog, I guess people say, sounds like me, but it's more direct. You know, there's less of the artistic stuff in it. And I like this new method of writing. And I'm writing a movie now based on the book Shattered, and I'm writing it in the same way with other people around me.

[Alison Stewart]

It's interesting. In one of your early dispatches, which you dictated to your son, Carlo, you start to talk about him. You say, what I like about him is that he can type quickly. How are you able to turn these dispatches into. Into shared and somewhat maybe positive experiences?

[Hanif Qureshi]

Well, the problem with Carlo is that he's got a lot of opinions. You know, he's got a lot of opinions, and he's a person. So when I start dictating to him, he always says stuff like, oh, God, dad, you said that last week. You said that before. Oh, God, dad, we can't go back there. We can't do that. So he makes it very difficult for me to write my blog, but I have to write to a higher standard because it's like having a living editor in the room with me, you know? And he's very disapproving of the stuff I write. So I have to. I have to get the stuff past him before I can get it onto the page. Which is very amusing and interesting for me because he's read all the blogs. He knows what's in them, and he knows when I'm being naughty and repeating myself and saying the same old stuff as I said before.

[Alison Stewart]

Well, as long as we're talking about naughty, we can talk about. Several things are described to us very frankly. One of the first lines is, excuse me for a moment. I must have an enema now.

[Hanif Qureshi]

Yeah.

[Alison Stewart]

Why did you decide to include these direct glimpses into your life?

[Hanif Qureshi]

I thought what I'm gonna say is exactly how it is. You know, what it's like to be in hospital for a year and the inconvenience. I mean, in my life, before I had my accident, nobody ever touched me apart from Isabella. And I need her from time to time, as you can imagine. But when you're in hospital, you are touched all day, every day by doctors and nurses. They roll you over, they wash you, they stick things in you, you know, the whole procedure, and you become just a piece of meat. You become a body to them very. It's a kind of outrage, really. You have no privacy. And when they're washing you or turning you over, other people come into the room, and there are other patients around you. So this is the experience of being in hospital. It's not a big deal. And it is a big deal to those who it's happening to. And so I thought, I'm going to write exactly what happens to me. Isabella and I argued about it. She said that there was too much of the horrible stuff, but I just wanted to carry on and write as directly as I could.

[Alison Stewart]

There was something that was very interesting in the book that you write about because everyone had to wear masks in this Italian hospital that you write about becoming well acquainted with the Italian eyebrow because everyone was coming up from their nose down. What other things became really apparent to you during this time about people? About people's faces?

[Hanif Qureshi]

Yeah, because I would. I could only tell who the nurses were by trying to memorize the particular curl of their. Of their eyebrows and sometimes by their tattoos. And obviously they were Italian, and my Italian isn't so good, so I was quite alienated. And the Italian nurses would. When they were watching me, they would. They would. They would sing Italian songs and they would listen to Abba and they would do all kinds of stuff between themselves that made me feel very pleased to be in their hands, but also very alienated, you know? And so the way in which I could recapture myself and remember who I was was by writing. That was my lifeline with the world. You know, I knew that if I wrote this blog and it would go appear on social media, I knew that thousands of people would read about my condition. And as you say, it was pretty horrible, some of the stuff I wrote. But people loved it. We got a huge audience on Twitter. We had like 85,000 people. And before that, I never had that number of people. So I think what was interesting to people about it was that I was writing immediately about it as it happened. I didn't write it in retrospect. You know, six months later, in July.

[Alison Stewart]

Of 2023, you wrote, I wish I had been kinder, and if I get another chance, I will be. Have you made good on that wish?

[Hanif Qureshi]

One of the things I realized as I was in bed. And then when I left Rome and I came back to London, I realized how kind and generous people wanted to be. They would visit me very often. They would tell me stories, they would watch me, they would read the newspaper to me. They would bring me food. Some people came far across London every day bringing me meals and so on. So I suddenly saw this incredible generosity from my friends and even people I didn't know so well. People wanted to do things or people, let's say actors I worked with in the 80s suddenly write to me and then come and visit me and sing to me and read the papers and so on. It was incredible. So I suddenly was aware of this feast of incredible generosity. I thought, this is so beautiful. I thought I should try doing this to other people. And it's a wonderful sharing thing. I guess I hadn't thought about so much before. So I do in fact try and be kinder than I was before. But I wish it had all happened earlier.

[Alison Stewart]

The name of the memoir is Shattered is by Hanif Qureshi. Thank you for making time for us today.

[Hanif Qureshi]

That was a great pleasure. Thank you so much. Having me on your on your show.

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