Shattered
A Memoir
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From acclaimed author and playwright Hanif Kureishi comes an urgent and stunning memoir about rebuilding a new life in the wake of devastating physical loss.
In late 2022, in Rome, Hanif Kureishi had a fall. When he came to, he realized he could no longer walk. He could do nothing without the help of others and required constant care in a hospital. So began a yearlong odyssey through the medical systems of Rome and Italy, with the hope of somehow being able to return home to his house in London.
While confined to a series of hospital wards, he felt compelled to write, but being unable to type or hold a pen, he began to dictate to family members the words that formed in his head—thoughts on his medical condition, but also parenthood, immigration, sex, psychoanalysis, and, of course, writing. The result was an extraordinary series of dispatches from his hospital bed: a diary of a life in pieces, recorded with rare honesty, humor, and verve.
Shattered takes these dispatches—edited, expanded, and meticulously interwoven with new writing—and charts both a shattering and a reassembling: a new life born of pain and loss but also animated by new feelings of gratitude, humility, and love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this raw but uneven account, Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia) presents diary entries that others transcribed for him while he was recovering from a debilitating fall. The author was at his girlfriend's Rome apartment in 2022 when a dizzy spell left him in a "grotesquely twisted position" on the floor, leading the 67-year-old to believe he was dying. "It wasn't the past but the future I thought I about," he writes. "Everything I was being robbed of, all the things I wanted to do." As Kureishi recouped in the hospital from the spinal injury he sustained in his fall, the existential reckonings continued. His diary entries ricochet between his fears that he'll never return home, reflections on his career, and memories of his childhood as the son of a Pakistani immigrant with his own thwarted literary ambitions. Angry, needy, and desperate for company, Kureishi finds occasional silver linings in more time with his busy sons and new opportunities to practice vulnerability. The author's rambling thoughts are by turns insightful and irritating; breakthroughs about the value of family brush up against tiresome name-dropping and crude "finger up my arse" descriptions of life in rehab. Inconsistency mars this otherwise pointed and moving narrative about the loss of bodily autonomy.
