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Ungovernable, Capricious Life

In Hanif Kureishi’s astonishing memoir of his life after the fall that left him tetraplegic, the sense of vulnerability is crushing, but it’s also part of what makes the writing so intimate.

There were memories of childhood, anecdotes of early fame and the famous, reflections on Jung and Freud and psychoanalysis, on food, on sex, on London, on his father, his children, his girlfriends, and his friends, on rock and roll and cricket and literature and film. Earlier, Kureishi had gotten the chance to observe London’s theater world, starting at the age of twenty-one, when he walked into the Royal Court Theatre and saw Samuel Beckett in the midst of directing Billie Whitelaw in a production of Footfalls —a lesson in collaboration. Having gathered up Mary Shelley, Giorgia Meloni, beautiful Italian men and women, and a partner we have begun to realize is always at his side, the accident, too, has its say: “Every day when I dictate these thoughts, I open what is left of my broken body to give form to this chaos I have fallen into, to stop myself from dying inside.”

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