In a gripping new memoir titled Shattered, acclaimed British author Hanif Kureishi offers a brutally honest account of his life in the aftermath of a devastating fall that left him nearly completely paralyzed. The book, expanded from dispatches Kureishi dictated to his wife and sons from his hospital bed, is an unflinching examination of what it means to have one’s world upended in an instant.
A Life-Altering Accident
On December 26, 2022, while on holiday in Rome, the 68-year-old Kureishi suffered a fall that would irrevocably change his life. The tumble left him with a severe spinal cord injury, rendering him paralyzed from the neck down. In the blink of an eye, the vibrant, hedonistic writer, renowned for his boundary-pushing works like The Buddha of Suburbia and Intimacy, found himself grappling with a new, unimaginable reality.
“Who am I now?” Kureishi asks in Shattered. “Paki, writer, cripple.” The memoir chronicles the author’s experiences over the next year as he navigated the healthcare systems in Italy and his native England, coming to terms with the extent of his paralysis and what it would mean for his future as a writer and a man.
Candor and Dark Humor
True to form, Kureishi pulls no punches in his unflinching portrayal of life as a newly disabled person. With a mix of searing honesty and his signature dark wit, he details the indignities of his new existence—the endless medical procedures, the loss of bodily autonomy, the frustrations of navigating a world not built for those with disabilities.
“Since I became a vegetable I have never been so busy,” Kureishi quips. “It would be easier for everyone in Italy to learn English than for me to understand Italian.”
Yet beneath the gallows humor lies a palpable sense of grief and rage. Kureishi mourns the loss of his former life—the “great cocaine nights” spent with his children, the easy pleasure of “sex and drugs [and] wine and a good meal.” He envies “able-bodied sexual beings” and rages against the cruelty of a fate that would transform a writer renowned for his fierce intellect into “a Beckettian chattering mouth.”
Confronting Hard Truths
Shattered is more than just a memoir of illness and disability. It’s also a searingly honest examination of Kureishi’s own failings and blindspots. With the same unsparing eye he turns on the world around him, Kureishi looks inward, confronting uncomfortable truths about himself and his relationships.
He acknowledges his past selfishness and wonders if he would have shown his wife the same devotion she now shows him were their positions reversed. “I couldn’t answer. I don’t know,” he admits.
Yet for all its brutality, Shattered is not a hopeless book. Kureishi writes with the urgency of a man clinging to a lifeline, determined to wrest some meaning and purpose from an impossible situation. “My body is broken, but I’m not going to give up,” he avows.
A Testament to Resilience
Ultimately, Shattered stands as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the saving grace of art. In the act of writing—even if it means dictating his words to others—Kureishi finds a reason to go on, a way to make sense of the senseless.
It’s impossible to read Shattered without being moved by its author’s plight, and impossible not to admire the tenacity and honesty with which he lays bare his pain. As a memoir of illness and disability, it’s a bracing, vital addition to the canon, one that challenges us to confront our own mortality and the fragility of all we take for granted.
But Shattered is more than that. It’s a reminder of the power of storytelling to give shape and meaning to even the most senseless of tragedies, and a testament to one writer’s indomitable will to survive and create in the face of unimaginable adversity.
