“Giving someone the truth when they don’t want it is a sort of emotional violence,” says Roopa Farooki. “It’s as much an act of aggression as shaking their hands in the Covid era.” She should know. When the pandemic first struck the NHS, the novelist – three times nominated for the Women’s prize for fiction – was also one of its most junior doctors, with barely six months of medicine under her belt.
The act of aggression to which she refers is not, however, pandemic-related. Everything Is True, her blistering new Covid memoir, begins in the wake of her sister’s death from breast cancer. When Farooki breaks down in tears at work on her sister’s birthday, she makes the fatal mistake, on being asked by a colleague if she is all right, of giving “an honest answer, like a psychopath”. Her disarming frankness about her dead sister sees the colleague practically sprinting off down the hospital corridor, leaving Farooki to observe wryly that she might as well have coughed in their face with her “snotty, messy tears”.
