‘At night, it’s anguish’ – Hanif Kureishi talks trauma, recovery and assisted dying

It’s almost two years since the British author Hanif Kureishi was left paralysed, after fainting and falling on his head, while in Rome.

The writer – who rose to prominence confronting complex social issues in novels like ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’ – has had to confront the trauma of his accident and a new way of living.

His book ‘Shattered’ is a brutally honest account of his recovery so far.

We asked him if the memory of what happened is still painfully sharp.

Hanif Kureishi: There are two sides really to what you said, which is during the day I’m writing, I’m working, I’m doing interviews like this. I’m a coherent, articulate person who couldn’t think about the tragedy that’s befallen him. But at night, it’s anguish. I’m screaming, I’m crying, I’m shouting out.

Cathy Newman: And is that physical pain or emotional pain? What’s causing that?

Hanif Kureishi: It’s a mixture of self-pity and the horror, really. You have a trauma and you react to that trauma after it happens and reorganise your life and so on. But later on down the line, as the months pass, the fact that you can’t go back to your previous life, a life that you loved, that you enjoyed, becomes more and more harrowing to contemplate, I think.

Cathy Newman: Just explain, as you do in the book, the ways in which you are utterly sort of broken by what’s happened.

Hanif Kureishi: I’m broken by what’s happened. But on the other hand, you reorganise yourself around trauma. And when I was in Rome, in the ICU in the first hospital, and I asked Isabella, my partner, to start transcribing my ideas and thoughts about what happened to me. And I did that almost immediately. And she was stood at the end of the bed with her phone tapping wildly into it as I shouted from my bed trying to write an account of what had happened to me. So despite the fact that I was utterly done for, I still wanted to speak and I still wanted to be a writer. And I began to write these blogs with my son Carlo as well. And they went around the world really quickly.

Cathy Newman: One of the things that really comes across strongly in the book is just how difficult it is living with a disability. What have you learned about how society treats people with disabilities?

Hanif Kureishi: Just going around the streets every day as I do in the afternoon around this area where we’re talking now, you realise how difficult it is. Most of the shops around here, I can’t get into. They’ve got impossible steps. So the world isn’t really built very much for disabled people. People park all over the streets, there are bicycles all over the street. I can’t just get up the street.

Cathy Newman: One of the darkest bits of the book is about a month after your accident where you write, ‘I feel depressed. I’m in despair. I don’t want to be here. I want to go home. I’d rather die now’. And now that the bill on assisted dying is going through parliament. Do you support the bill as it is or not?

Hanif Kureishi: Yes, absolutely. I absolutely believe that people have the right to end their lives.

Cathy Newman: Clearly, the bill wouldn’t apply to someone like you with the kind of condition you have, only to those with terminal illnesses. Is that the right balance, do you think? The right sort of safeguards are in place?

Hanif Kureishi: I think we have to return agency to people. And I think that for many people, that life can become so meaningless and so intolerable. We have to respect their freedom and the right to make decisions. Some people are in such despair. You might call it terminal despair, that I would fully support their right to end their lives.

Cathy Newman: What do you hope to be doing in a year’s time, in two years’ time? You talk in the book about your hopes, are you wondering about whether you will ever walk again?

Hanif Kureishi: I don’t think about that physically. The doctors never talk about that. They never make a prognosis. I can stand up. Maybe in the next few months I might start taking one step or two steps. I can’t use my hands. I can’t type. But there is stuff that I can do through other people, through using their love for me and their support for me in order to get things done. So I can write books, I can write plays. I want to write a movie with two of my sons about my experiences in hospital. So I’m still here, I’m motivated. There are things I want to do, the people that I love and the reasons to carry on living.