Photograph: David Emery/BBC/Turbine Studios
‘I was drinking a beer, smoking a joint, watching the football,” recalls Hanif Kureishi in the powerful opening frames of In My Own Words. “Everything went fuzzy and I landed on my head.” These are the last moments the writer recalls from Boxing Day 2022 in Rome, before the fall that crushed his spinal cord, leaving him paralysed. Unable to move his arms or legs, he required constant care but was determined, nonetheless, to write. As those who have followed Kureishi’s extraordinary posts, dictated to his son since the accident, will know, he is not one to shy away from the truth of an experience, however devastating. “I was done for,” he says, his eyes a little glossy, his hangdog expression entirely serious. “My life was ruined.”
This is an intensely personal, unflinching, expletive-peppered documentary (it is Kureishi, after all), directed by his longtime friend and past collaborator Nigel Williams, which only increases the tenderness. Their camaraderie is lovely to witness. “I’m riding your bike in that picture, Nigel,” he says, commenting on footage of himself in Southall, west London, in the early 1980s, when he was researching his first play, which he wrote furiously in six weeks. Now and then Williams interjects – “You look good!” – to buoy up Kureishi, sitting in his wheelchair, watching younger, longer-haired and bell-bottomed versions of himself on screen. When Kureishi recalls the shame of walking out on his wife and twin babies not long after they were born, Williams reminds him, “You came back. You’re very hard on yourself.”
