Shattered, a memoir by novelist, screenwriter and playwright Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. He is the author of nine novels, including The Buddha of Suburbia (winner of the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel), The Black Album, Intimacy, and The Nothing. His screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette was nominated for an Oscar, and he is the recipient of the PEN Pinter Prize and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He lives in London.
Author hoto by Kier Kureishi

In December 2022, novelist, screenwriter (My Beautiful Launderette) and playwright Hanif Kureishi was at his girlfriend Isabella’s apartment in Rome when he had a fall after fainting due to a change in blood pressure. Because of how he landed, he ended up hyperextending his neck resulting in immediate tetraplegia. His memoir Shattered (Ecco, 2025) is his account of the following year he spent in various hospitals and rehabilitation centers as he tried to understand how he would live moving forward, as the accident reshaped his view of himself and his body, especially what that means for him as a writer.

 Throughout the book, Kureishi has the reactions one would expect from a life-changing event such as his. He cycles through Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, though he never reaches acceptance (he has moments of hope, though), and he spends most of his time in anger and depression. Kureishi shares moments of disbelief—how waking up (when he’s able to get a few hours of sleep) can be the worst moment of the day, when he realizes all over again what has happened to him. It’s like “re-entering a horror movie that I had thought, for a moment, I could turn off.” He sometimes suffers from envy, especially when friends who visit him talk about going on vacation and he recalls what it’s like to travel with such ease.

He doesn’t say much about the care he receives, but that’s mainly because of the boring routines of a long hospital stay. Early in the book, he does provide details, even interjecting humor to his description of receiving an enema, but once he’s established that routine, he shifts his focus away from the medical descriptions. Similarly, given that he moves through five different hospitals/rehabilitation centers, he doesn’t truly get to know the people who care for him. Not only that, he notices the turnover in the staff, which prevents him from knowing them more fully. That’s a frustration for him, as he seeks to build relationships in a place where he’s spending several months of his life.

Empathy plays a part in how he sees his caregivers, as he reflects on all they do for him and how they see their job as a calling, despite the long hours and low pay. The experience is as humbling as it is existentially exasperating: He learns how to ask for help, as he has lost the ability to do anything for himself. Kureishi makes a clear contrast between the hospital in Italy, where he spends the first five months, and the various locations in England, which range from grim to adequate. There’s an implied criticism of the British National Health Service, but he never comes out and skewers it directly. As an American reader, I couldn’t help but wonder how much all of his care would have cost in the U.S. system and how somebody who makes their living as a writer would be able to afford it, even with insurance.

The main strength of Shattered consists of reflections on his identity after the accident. Early on, he writes: “I am a stranger to myself. I don’t know who I am any more. Someone new is emerging.” After ten months, he reflects, “I can feel my identity slipping, as if I am forgetting who I am and becoming someone else, or almost nothing. I never thought my identity would be scrubbed out or superseded by something else.”

Part of that change revolves around the idea of disability. He has gone from being a person who could function in a society built for those who are physically able to move around without assistance to somebody who requires help for every action they want to do. Daily activity becomes heightened for him: For example, Kureishi describes how those helping him eat either give him food too quickly or not quickly enough, a distinction most readers wouldn’t have thought about but one that makes perfect sense once one stops to consider it. For his return home to his house in London, a number of accommodations are needed, including adding a bathroom and bed to the main floor. The most mundane activities must be navigated with care. Kureishi chronicles, for example, the amount of attention he has to pay to the uneven quality of the sidewalks when he and one of his sons go to a pub.

He devotes a small amount of time to thinking about sex, as well as a discussion of psychoanalysis (which he has been in for decades), but not how he and Isabella will continue to have any type of intimacy. Instead, he talks about the sex he had in the past and his lack of interest in it now. He’s frank about it, even making Isabella uncomfortable in relating a story about a supposed orgy he was a part of (the story does not live up to that description), but he doesn’t seem concerned with it moving forward.

A Writer’s Life, Interrupted
Given how much of Kureishi’s life consists of writing, that part of his identity comes in for the most scrutiny. He wonders what life is like as a writer who is unable to pick up a pen and physically write. The only way he was able to compose Shattered, for example, was through dictation and the help of his family. It is telling that Kureishi begins writing this book within a couple of weeks after his accident, as his way of processing the world. In his first entry, dated 6 January 2023, he ends by saying, “I am speaking these words through Isabella, who is slowly typing them into her iPad. I am determined to keep writing, it has never mattered to me more.” One of the reasons his identity as a writer is so important is because it has provided him with an identity of his choosing, unlike the racial identity British society, especially his peers, put upon him when he was younger. After providing a list of words other people called him, he “found [his] own word, [he] stuck to it, and never let it go. It is still [his] word.” Some of the strongest sections of the book, certainly some of the best quotes, come from his thoughts about writing and being a writer.

Occasionally, he forgets the privilege he does still have as a male writer. He tells the story of one of his students who is working on a novel. Before giving a draft to an editor or agent, she asks a sensitivity reader to evaluate it to see if it contains anything that is offensive. Kureishi is appalled by such an idea and spends several pages talking about how writers of the 20th century would not have taken such an approach, that the point of literature is to transgress, especially writers such as Dostoevsky, Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Céline, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, James Baldwin, Franz Kafka, and D.H. Lawrence, all of whom pushed boundaries and forced readers to see a wider world. He fails to notice that most of them are male—Rhys and Plath are the exceptions— and while there have been female writers who were literary disrupters, it has been (and continues to be) much more difficult for them to do so.

 One other aspect of his identity that he explores is the nature of his body. He admits he hasn’t thought about his body much during his life, as he’s not an athlete and hasn’t suffered from any other significant ailments or injuries, but this accident has brought him more in touch with that body, even as it has become more of an object. At times, he talks about parts of his body as if they don’t belong to him, given his lack of control over them, but he’s also fascinated with what his body can and can’t do. His hands are of particular interest, given they are the conduit for his writing. He regularly mentions how he has given up any kind of embarrassment about his body, given how often people undress and wash and handle him, which causes him to see his body as more of an object, but also to appreciate the lack of judgment from those who do such work.

 His list of acknowledgements is longer than for most books, given how many people have taken care of him. He spends some of the time in the book talking about the effects such care has taken on his family. His now-fiancée Isabella (they get engaged during the course of the book) has effectively given up her work as a PR agent for writers and festivals to be there for him, and his three sons work out a rotation of visits to help her. He describes the change that happened:

“Two weeks ago a bomb went off in my life which has also shattered the lives of those around me. My partner, my children, my friends. All my relationships are being renegotiated. It makes everybody a little crazy, it changes everything. There is guilt and rage, and people resent their dependence on one another and the fact they can’t do everything for themselves. My accident was a physical tragedy, but the emotional outcomes for all of us are going to be significant.”

He also talks about the wide variety of friends and even acquaintances who come to see him, with Isabella even joking about how busy his room often is. There are days where several people end up there at the same time, having lengthy intellectual conversations, much like they would have had in the past. On most of those days, he’s suffering too much to truly enjoy them, but it’s clear he noticed them, given that they show up in his account. He realizes that such an accident has taught him who his true friends are, and he reflects on when he might not have been as good of a friend as he should have. Like most of us, he resolves to be different moving forward.

I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the humor he works throughout the book, given the lack of jollity in his situation. He tells the story of a time before his accident when a nurse mistook him for Salman Rushdie—the author of Midnight’s Children and one of Kureishi’s friends—while a nurse was flipping him over, preparing to put a finger in his “backside.” Kureishi jokes that if he had written Midnight’s Children, he would have “gone private,” implying that he would be able to afford private care and wouldn’t be in such a public setting, given the threat on Rushdie’s life. When he relates a story about having a long conversation with a doctor in Italy about raising children, translations of Russian novels, the doctor’s performing surgery on a Mafia don, among other subjects, Kureishi ends by saying, “I have to say that becoming paralyzed is a great way to meet new people.”

The book ends with his going home to a different life, but one where he can still find some joy in the world. His book is not treacly or saccharine, as he doesn’t try to deliver any life lessons he’s learned along the way, nor does he end with any implication that moving forward will be easy. However, he has begun to try to see the small parts of life that will continue to provide happiness. In fact, he reflects on the collaboration of editing this book with his son Carlo and how much he has enjoyed that. Even if he doesn’t pick up a pen again, it’s clear Kureishi will find a way to communicate with the world around him.—Kevin Brown

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Kevin Brown (he/him) teaches high school English in Nashville. He has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Find out more about him and his work on social media sites at @kevinbrownwrites or at http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Show Me Where it Hurts: Living With Invisible Illness by Kylie Maslen

Kylie Maslen’s critically acclaimed non-fiction essay “I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Not Okay “ took a new form on shelves worldwide in 2020: The essay became the first chapter of Maslen’s experimental book Show Me Where it Hurts: Living With Invisible Illness. Like her essay, the book has met with success: it was shortlisted for Non-Fiction in the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and named among Guardian Australia’s 20 best Australian Books in 2020.

Author Kylie Maslen . Learn more about her work at kyliemaslen.com
Photo by Lauren Connolly

As Maslen herself says, her book is a part of a growing trend of Australian “sick lit” – literature that deals with life with chronic illness. “Living with invisible illness poses a unique challenge,” Maslen explained we spoke via Zoom, “in that you’re constantly having to fight for attention because things are not self-evident.” Her collection of essays primarily focuses on endometriosis and bipolar disorder and brings to light conditions that are not well known or understood but are quite common. Endometriosis alone affects 1 in 10 women and its issues create complications we often choose to dismiss or ignore.

The topic of the book might sound a bit heavy – and at times it is – but Maslen managed to create a Millennial masterpiece. It is many things: confessional literature, a review of pop culture and a fight for disability awareness and representation all at once. A source of both tears and laughter, the book comes with an important message. As a part of pop culture itself, it manages to entertain nevertheless.

The nature of the book is already illustrated in the opening essay, where Maslen movingly writes about endometriosis, suicidal ideation and memes all in one text, as the following illustrates:

The very nature of chronic illness lends itself to isolation. Time spent at home resting, time spent in waiting rooms, time spent in hospital, time spent recovering.
Things I want to say:
I don’t know how long I can keep doing this.
I can’t do anything nice for myself because I spend so much money on staying alive.
Instead I post a meme of SpongeBob walking into a room with an exaggerated swagger. The caption reads ‘walking into your doctor’s office’.
The receptionist at my GP’s rooms says, ‘Take a seat, Kylie’ when I walk in the door. The frequency of my visits spares me the time it takes for him to look me up on the system and confirm my appointment; he no longer asks, ‘Is this still your current address?’ before letting me sit down. I’m grateful that he can see my exhaustion and helps me in this small but not insignificant way, but I’m saddened that my life looks like this at such a young age.

A key theme in chronic-illness memes is conversations with ‘normies’ (those who are not chronically ill or disabled). Specifically, she chronicles their refusal to listen, an inability to empathize with others’ pain or the quickness to dispense unsolicited advice about symptoms and illnesses of which they have no lived experience.

Things people say:
‘You don’t look sick.’
‘You look much better than last time I saw you.’
‘It’s good to see you with some colour back in your face at least.’
Many of us with chronic illness are often housebound. Unable to socialize with family, friends or colleagues we go online to interact with others. We are also searching for people who understand.
Peer support through social media offers a source of experiential knowledge about illness. It gives us a way to normalize pain and a life lived with chronic illness. That can take the form of sharing stories and asking questions, but often we communicate through chronic-illness memes, which are a simple visual means of conveying complicated emotions and frustrations, as well as a way to add humour to our heavy conversation. Using memes—images or videos that are already widely shared – with context tailored to illness communities allows those of us who feel socially isolated by circumstances beyond our control to connect with the broader zeitgeist.

Maslen connects with readers, especially those of her own generation, with her daring honesty. The author discusses sex, loneliness, mental health struggles and the burden of chronic pain as well as pop icons, her favorite TV shows, books and movies. In one essay, the writing is raw and dark, disclosing extremely intimate episodes of alcohol and prescription drug abuse as well as Tinder dates gone wrong due to endometriosis; another essay is a playlist, where each song serves as a tool to dig deeper into her own headspace. We are presented with an analysis of SpongeBob SquarePants and an ode to Beyoncé on the one hand, and on the other we witness Maslen thoughtfully posing for Instagram, choosing what to share and how, and comparing her life to the curated online lives of those who are well. It is this combination of different approaches to the same topic that enable the book to be a refreshingly accurate description of an entire life, warts and all, of a person just like any other Millennial—having to deal with the burden of chronic illnesses on top of it all.

This aspect of her narrative is what made it stand out from the rest of “sick lit” for me personally. Not much younger than Maslen, I, too, suffer from endometriosis. I’m often bedbound, scrolling through memes about menstruation and ‘endo life,’ laughing out loud and sharing the best ones with my online support groups and trying to communicate my condition with others through Instagram stories. I am yet to find a book on the subject that so fully resembles my own life. I can say with no hesitation that Maslen managed to do what all illness narratives aim to do – she wrote a book that connects with those who experience similar things on a very deep level. This makes the reader feel validated and less alone. It is, however, written in a welcoming way should it fall in the hands of ‘normies’ who are willing to learn more about what it is people like us experience.

There is a running joke in the endometriosis online community: We are the worst club with the best members. Nobody wants to be a part of this club, but everybody is offered a level of understanding that can hardly be found elsewhere as our situations are so particular, very individual yet somehow the same. In Maslen, I immediately recognized an #endosister as we say. Having heard that I would be doing this review, Maslen felt the same when she “Instagram stalked me.” It is for this reason, as well as being a genuine fan of the book, that I was thrilled when Intima decided to reach out to Maslen and ask her for an interview.

Maslen agreed to have a virtual sit down with the journal’s editor Donna Bulseco and myself, and across time zones, each cozy on our own continent, the three of us had a wonderful online chat about chronic illness, social media, narrative medicine and the possible impact of books such as this one on society at large. It was my pleasure to chat with Kylie, and I hope it will be yours to listen to what we each had to say. —Alekszandra Rokvity

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Alekszandra Rokvity is a Serbian-born writer and PhD candidate working on her doctorate between the Karl Franzens University of Graz in Austria and the University of Alberta in Canada. She specializes in cultural studies and medical humanities. Her academic interest lies in the experiences of women with endometriosis within the healthcare system. Her doctoral dissertation is a case study of endometriosis that explores the connection between gender bias in the medical community and the social discourse surrounding menstruation.

Ms Rokvity has previously taught in Austria, Canada, Vietnam and is currently teaching in Belgrade, Serbia. An avid activist for women's rights, she cooperates with various NGOs such as the London Drawing Group (UK) and Vulvani (Germany).

Read more of her work on Medium.

The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper

In the powerful memoir The Beauty in Breaking (Riverhead Books 2020), Michele Harper challenges us to examine the transformation of trauma and how painful experiences figure prominently in one’s past and present. In honest and contemplative language, Harper, a doctor and graduate of Harvard University and the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, courageously describes a challenging childhood that exposed her and other family members to ongoing outbursts of physical abuse. Dr. Harper gives insight into how this adversity informed her decision to pursue a career as an emergency room (ER) physician, one that now spans more than a decade working at various locations in Philadelphia and the South Bronx:

“Unlike in the war zone that was childhood, I would be in control of that space, providing relief or at least a reprieve to those who called out for help. I would see to it that there was shelter in the spaces of which I was the guardian.” (19)

Michele Harper has worked as an emergency room physician for more than a decade at various institutions, including as chief resident at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and in the emergency department at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Philadelphia. She is a graduate of Harvard University and the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. The Beauty in Breaking is her first book.

In navigating this career of service, she regularly draws upon her resiliency to confront violence when caring for gunshot victims, responding to code blues, or de-escalating threatening patient behavior. Simultaneously, Dr. Harper impresses upon readers the extraordinary privileges of being a healer, as well as the difficulties of stewarding the distressing stories accompanying that role.

As Dr. Harper continues to meditate on her life’s milestones, including divorce, residency graduation and new leadership roles in the clinical world, she paints a sobering reality of her patients’ lives. In often invisible ways, society inflicts lasting and generational trauma that tends to be outside of individual control, especially for historically underserved populations. From the perspective of an African-American female physician, the author shares her reflections on heartbreaking interactions with young patients, like Gabriel and Jeremiah, both of whom she treats for head trauma:

“I suppose it’s a matter of faith whether or not we choose our starting ground before we’re born into this life. Some begin the journey on flat, grassy meadows and others at the base of a very steep mountain. One path, seemingly smooth, can make it nearly impossible for us to see the ditches and gullies along the way. The other, while painfully tough, can deliver what it promises: If you can navigate that path, you’ve developed the skills to scale Everest. It isn’t fair on many accounts; it simply is…All deserve the chance to speak and be heard and be touched. If we’re lucky, we’re touched at every station along the journey, and if nothing else, then at the end.” (137-138)

These carefully curated thoughts about her patient encounters challenge readers to critically think about the culture of blame and stigma towards those facing complex circumstances, an idea expressed succinctly by an ER social worker in the book: “When [people are] at war, the rules are different.” Dr. Harper highlights the continued ripple effects of systematic racial bias and other forms of discrimination in healthcare and beyond.

Still, the path to healing is complex. Dr. Harper herself claims no simple solution, knowing she has to navigate her own fraught path forward too. While contemplating reconciliation with her estranged father, she draws us in as readers interested in clinical encounters and how they may have an impact in our lives; she helps us understand the many complex ways patients offer invaluable wisdom too, if only providers choose to listen. In one interaction with a patient who is a veteran, Dr. Harper skillfully demonstrates how both she and the patient find liberation in acknowledging shared loss.

As an epidemiologist by training, I am reminded that there is always a human story behind the numbers. Narratives like Dr. Harper’s often transcend the limitations of quantitative metrics, such as incidence or rates, by offering a compassionate and instructive glimpse into the lives of those who are suffering. These stories raise important ethical questions about how we, as a medical and research community, should respond. In my professional and personal life, I hope to amplify these stories of oppression so they may be perceived at the same level of legitimacy as other forms of communication in order to spur organizational change.

The Beauty in Breaking is aptly titled, as the author/physician beautifully shows there is indeed beauty in the examination of the trauma one has experienced and struggled to overcome. Her storytelling brims with hope while contributing to a broader conversation about diversity and meaningful inclusion in medical training and beyond.—Brianna Cheng

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Brianna Cheng has a MSc Epidemiology from McGill University, and completed a Narrative Medicine Fellowship at Concordia University. She now works as a consultant epidemiologist for the WHO. Her writing has appeared in Intima, Journal of General Internal Medicine, CMAJ Blogs and Families, Systems & Health. She currently serves as an Editor for the McGill Journal of Medicine. @withbrianna