The best writing in the world right now
The extraordinary despatches sent these past few weeks by author Hanif Kureishi from his hospital bed in Rome are like some kind of new literature, reading like a series of calls to 111, or a man in a hurry to record his famous last words - he had a fall on January 6, woke up in a pool of blood, has had spinal surgery and cannot move his arms or legs, and is dictating his thoughts and memories to his son Carlo, who publishes them on the Twitter machine: "How Easy it is to Nearly Die," ran a tweet on January 15, with 1.2 million impressions.
It's like nothing else being published. It's like a perfect freedom to say whatever the hell he wants about anyone or anything, because what's the worst that can happen to someone who has already experienced the worst that can happen? In our age of memoir, of personal stories, of Knausgård and Grimshaw, Kureishi's amazing confessions form the best writing in the English-speaking world right now and are avidly looked forward to as a saga in progress.
Horror as literary entertainment. Yeah, kind of, but there is a bit more at stake than just a good read. This is someone's life. This is someone's agony. But even a health crisis as sudden and severe as Kureishi's reveals him as the writer he always was. Kureishi has form in mining his life for literature. His novella Intimacy, about a man who leaves his wife and two sons to be with a beautiful woman, was an imagined portrait of Kureishi leaving his wife and their twin boys to be with a beautiful woman. His novel The Buddha of Suburbia was, in part, based on his parents and grandparents: "My father felt that Hanif robbed him of his dignity," his sister has said. Even so, his Twitter diaries bring a new dimension of honesty. This is a man who cannot move, writing of his mum, "My mother was the most boring person I have ever met." His latest thread muses, "I might eventually be a capable of a little light cunnilingus."
The threads are compiled each day and put together as a single piece on a substack. Subscriptions are free. Strangely, though, they lose a lot of their power in that format. It's the Twitter thread that exhilarates: you never know what he's going to say next, it's a crisis in instalments, and it's like reading him in real time, a fly on the wall in a ward in Rome.
In one sense his writing belongs to ye olde genre of deathbed or sickbed literature. "Writing is what I do and now cancer is what I do, too," wrote Jenny Diski in 2014, in the first of a series of cancer diaries published as death foretellings in the London Review of Books. "A fucking cancer diary? Another fucking cancer diary. I think back to cancer diaries I have read, just because they’re there. You don’t seek cancer diaries out, they come at you as you turn the pages of magazines and newspapers or thumb through Twitter and blogs. How many have I read? I can’t remember, but they’ve spanned decades…."
She died in April 2016. Her cancer memoir In Gratitude was published the previous week. The same thing happened to New Zealand writer Peter Wells.
I have been thinking about Peter since reading Kureishi's tweets. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2017. Like Kureishi, he was taken to hospital; like Kureishi, he took to social media, writing about his experience on Facebook, composing his thoughts and memories in the dark, on his iPhone. They were incredible pieces of writing and he later published them in his cancer memoir Hello Darkness. I went to the 2019 launch at Unity Books on a Monday, February 11. He was the best dressed man in the room and made a beautiful speech. He died on February 18.
"Naked autobiography," he called Hello Darkness, in the book's foreword. "I was overcome with an almost awful sense of urgency…I was in a fundamentally changed landscape and one I needed to describe. Perhaps the morphine disinhibited me. But I began to do posts on FB which were, for better or worse, broadcasts from this strange new landscape…If one part of my brain told me FB was an inherently corrupt and even corrupting medium, another part of my brain told me it provided a format that allowed me to speak my truth."
Kureishi has chosen the fully corrupted medium of Elon Musk's weird acquisition. Wells writes in his foreword that a great part of the pleasure of writing on Facebook was the engagement with readers. Kureshi, January 21: "I am finding a way to cope with the horror of my recent accident…. I would be very keen to hear from other readers who have thoughts on this matter. Please get in touch. I will try to read everything that is sent to me."
Do please head to @Hanifkureishi at once. Hello Darkness by the late Peter Wells (Mighty Ajax, $40) may still be available in selected bookstores, and in public libraries.
