When Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt was published in 2017 there were several acclaimed books by surgeons doing the rounds – Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. A diary about life as a junior doctor working on an obstetrics ward seemed an unlikely publishing bet. Wasn’t the market for medical memoirs already saturated? But This is Going to Hurt possessed what the others lacked: as well as being serious, it was indomitably entertaining and went on to sell more than two-and-a-half million copies, was translated into 37 languages and became a literary sensation. Most recently, it has been made into a major BBC series starring Ben Whishaw and Adam Kay has become the go-to medic of the day, the doctor in the house and on stage and screen.
We meet on a sunny morning in Oxfordshire, near to where he lives, to talk about his extraordinary new memoir, Undoctored: The Story of a Medic who Ran Out of Patients – super-readable, funny and disturbing. If you thought This is Going to Hurt was revealing, the new book makes the first seem discreet bordering on secretive. This is Going to Hurt was gender neutral, did not even make it clear he was gay (it was the television series that took that step). He wrote about the tragicomedy of his professional life, the insanity of 97-hour working weeks and the derisory wages while, in a deeper sense, he gave himself the slip. In Undoctored, the pendulum swings the other way: it is decisively personal. As well as writing about his marriage to a woman (not named) and his husband, James Kay (formerly Farrell), he gives a terrifying account of being raped while on a trip to a medical conference in New Zealand. He also reveals a serious eating disorder with which he struggled when younger.
