Hanif Kureishi was visiting Rome on Boxing Day in 2022 when he fainted and fell over. “I woke up a few minutes later in a pool of blood, my neck in a grotesquely twisted position,” he recalls. The fall damaged his spinal cord; he instantly lost most of the use of his limbs.
In his first bulletin from hospital, Kureishi writes: “I cannot move my arms and legs. I cannot scratch my nose, make a phone call or feed myself.” His adult independence had vanished in a split second.
Shattered began as a series of dispatches from hospitals in Italy and London, dictated to family members. Kureishi, a successful playwright and screenwriter, then widened out its scope to become a full memoir, taking in his life before and after it was shattered by his accident. As a teenager growing up in south London, he decided that he was going to become a writer and much of this book recounts his pursuit of his vocation.
When he started writing back in the 80s the literary scene was very different. “No one in Britain was writing about Asian immigrants,” he recalls. Kureishi’s breakthrough came with the screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette (1985); his award-winning novel The Buddha of Suburbia followed five years later.
Kureishi has always been notable for his scabrous humour and its use here shoves Shattered away from tragedy. He is engagingly frank throughout, as he sounds off on diverse subjects. They range from the difficulties of writing porn for top shelf magazines , which was a mon.
