Shattered: A Memoir

Summary

From acclaimed author and playwright Hanif Kureishi comes an urgent and stunning medical 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 life-altering spinal cord injury, 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.

In these dispatches, Kureishi confronts his new reality with the tools he knows best—observation, wit, and relentless inquiry:

• Unflinching Honesty: A raw, diary-like account of navigating foreign hospitals, the indignities of physical dependency, and the moments of dark humor that make it bearable.
• Disability and Identity: Kureishi grapples with what it means to be a writer, a father, and a man when the physical self he knew is shattered and must be reassembled.
• Literary Nonfiction: Experience a master storyteller's voice—urgent, witty, and profound—as he turns the wreckage of a fall into an extraordinary meditation on loss, gratitude, and love.
• National Book Critic's Circle Award Finalist