Hanif Kureishi is shattered: I can’t use my phone, blow my nose or rub my eyes – writer Hanif Kureishi felt dizzy while watching football. The next thing he knew, he was nearly paralyzed, as he describes in this devastatingly honest memoir.

Shattered to smithereens by Hanif Kureishi (Hamish Hamilton £18.99, 336pp)

Ever since I read this searing book, I have been afraid to move; The slightest human action is obviously fraught with danger, risking hospitalization and paralysis.

During nearly a year of inpatient treatment, Hanif Kureishi was in a ward full of people who had near-fatal accidents such as tripping over garden rakes, falling out of bed, falling out of a chair while watering a potted plant, and rolling over. down the stairs.

When you add rock climbing, surfing, motorcycles, trampolines, horseback riding and car accidents to these, you will understand that ‘random bad things can happen to you at any time’. The young man who was struck by lightning on his way to his wedding had great misfortune.

Life can change in an instant. In Hanif’s case, on Boxing Day 2022, he was sitting at a table in his girlfriend’s living room in Rome, watching Aston Villa on the iPad and sipping a beer, when he suddenly felt dizzy and leaned forward.

The next thing he knew, he was lying in a pool of blood and his neck was in a “strangely bent position.” His collapse resulted in ‘neck hyperextension’ and tetraplegia. Hanif could move his shoulders a little, but everything else was numb.

What he found most worrying was the loss of feeling in his hands. When a physiotherapist placed Hanif’s hand on his cheek ‘it was terrible, lifeless, as if a dead man’s hand had fallen on my face’.

‘I can’t play with my phone; “I can’t blow my nose or rub my eyes,” he writes. He cannot feed himself or hold a pen – Fragmented was dictated – and often feels ‘buried’ in a useless, unwieldy body.

Life Changes: Kureishi can no longer hold a pen – Shattered dictated – and often feels ‘buried’ inside a body

When Hanif woke up at the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, he says, “I was divorced from myself, unable to recognize myself.”

His book is an intense medical horror story where the patient tries to make sense of this hideous metamorphosis, the flesh of which resembles a marshmallow. At the age of 68, Hanif suddenly became a ‘helpless baby’, motionless in his bed or chair, forced to endure fragility and disappointment.

We hear a lot about the patient’s toilet activities. While intimacy is respected, describing enemas, catheters ‘and a huge pain in the genitals’ is not for the faint of heart.

Six months later, Hanif was flown back to England and transferred to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where he was placed in the dementia ward. He was sent to Charing Cross Hospital, severely constipated and developing an infected fissure in his back passage that required liquid morphine.

Hanif and his sister Yasmin, 1970

Eventually Hanif is admitted to Stanmore Royal National Orthopedic Hospital, which is as fun as prison. The NHS is not coming out of this situation very well. ‘I have no dignity left since I became a plant,’ says Hanif.

British hospitals are decrepit places where nothing works; In my opinion, because all the money is paid to piles of managers and executives who have no clinical training and don’t even know how many beans make five.

Hollywood Star: Hanif (filmed in 2006) is an award-winning screenwriter.

Hanif realizes that nurses can be bullies, forgetting that patients are human. Physios often fail to show up for their shifts. NHS gym equipment is mostly broken; whereas in Italy, Hanif began to benefit from rehabilitation sessions, finding the gym ‘a place of beauty, collaboration and respect’.

Italians were also working in medical facilities in Italy. Our NHS is run by low-paid Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, Thais, Filipinos and Poles. Hanif was the only one who spoke with a middle-class British accent; which was ironic because he had to endure a lot of racist abuse growing up in Bromley and Beckenham.

To escape this unpleasantness in his youth, Hanif took a job as an usher at the Royal Court Theater and worked at Riverside Studios: ‘I was able to be around people who took art seriously and devoted their lives to it.’

They too devoted themselves to stupidity. Hanif was a party animal in the 1970s and 1980s, especially after his huge success with the movie My Beautiful Laundrette, for which he went to Hollywood for an Oscar.

He enjoyed what he cheerfully described as “a world of filth and depravity” with a lot of drug addiction, especially LSD. ‘It was cheap and we would buy most of it.’ He also says ‘sex and drugs go together’ and there is talk of a threesome in Amsterdam.

Controversially, Hanif admits: ‘I had great cocaine nights with my kids.’ They were probably grown by then; He did not appreciate early fatherhood, Hanif said, and had moved away from the “screaming midnights”. Nappies and more nappies.’ Now he is the one in diapers, ‘writhing in despair’.

It has never been fully explained why Hanif collapsed or convulsed in this way, although he was smoking marijuana at the time. He says the MRI scan showed he’d already had a series of mini-strokes – I think they’re called transient ischemic attacks – so something big was probably brewing.

Replaced: Hanif Kureishi before collapse resulting in ‘neck hyperextension’ and tetraplegia

There is no happy ending. Hanif’s libido has vanished. He doesn’t have much of an appetite for food that already tastes like cardboard and is difficult to swallow. Today he feels like Frankenstein’s monster, a patchwork of alien body parts. ‘There’s no going back but I always wish there was.’

He’s home now. A new bathroom was installed downstairs and his bed is in the living room. ‘All my caregivers are immigrants,’ says Hanif.

Although the friends who came are more famous: Daniel Day-Lewis, Nigella Lawson and Salman Rushdie are among them. I know exactly what this is like. When I had a heart attack I received a get well card from Richard Ingrams, a visit from Robert Bathurst and a phone call from Mark Rylance. Michael Gove said he would visit but didn’t.

This book is about the power of resilience. It’s surprising that Hanif keeps going when it’s so easy to give up on the ghost. Not many people have his determination. I know I didn’t.