On Hanif Kureishi – Sarah Lyall in NYT:

‘Just after Christmas, the writer Hanif Kureishi was taking a long walk in Rome, where he and his wife, Isabella D’Amico, were spending the holiday, when he suddenly collapsed onto the sidewalk. It is unclear why — perhaps he fainted, said his son Carlo Kureishi, or perhaps he suffered an epileptic fit — but he fell awkwardly, twisting his neck and grievously injuring the top of his spine.
When Kureishi regained his senses, he was lying in a pool of blood, unable to move his arms or his legs. “It occurred to me that there was no coordination between what was left of my mind and what remained of my body,” he wrote, via dictation, a few days later on Twitter. “I had become divorced from myself. I believed I was dying. I believed I had three breaths left.” Taken to the Gemelli Hospital, Kureishi spent the next several days “profoundly traumatized, altered and unrecognizable to myself,” he said on Twitter. “At the moment, it is unclear whether I will ever be able to walk again, or whether I’ll ever be able to hold a pen.”’

(…)

‘The posts are presented as series of tweets and also compiled as a Substack newsletter — postcards from an unfolding crisis. They have touched a nerve in readers, who have responded with practical advice, as well as messages of love, support and gratitude for what they say has been an extraordinary model of grace and imagination in the midst of calamity.
“We are all with you in this room, lying next to you on your trolley and staring at the ceiling tiles,” a Twitter user named Affi Parvizi-Wayne wrote. “Your beautiful writing transports us every day to your world.” Kureishi first said he wanted to post something on social media a few days after the accident, his son Carlo said in an interview. “He’s not a private person in that respect,” Carlo said. “He’s always been autobiographical in his writing.” He started dictating, almost in the way of an old-time, pre-internet reporter phoning in a story to the office (As he speaks, he notes the paragraph breaks, for example, by saying “new paragraph.”) “It came out very naturally, very fluidly,” Carlo said. “I thought that was that.” But the first posts attracted a great deal of interest, in part because Kureishi was channeling the fears of so many readers.
“What happened to my dad is pretty much the event that’s uppermost in people’s minds of what they don’t want to happen to them,” Carlo said.
The tweets are brave, profound, playful, lyrical, despairing and occasionally very funny. Mentioning an impending rectal exam, Kureishi recalled the last one he had, courtesy of the public National Health Service back in England. The nurse mistook him for Salman Rushdie.
“As the nurse flipped me over she asked me, “How long did it take you to write ‘Midnight’s Children?’” Kureishi wrote. “I replied, ‘If I had indeed written ‘Midnight’s Children,’ don’t you think I would have gone private?”’

(…)

‘In 1997, readers marveled at the courage and humanity of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French magazine editor who wrote the memoir “The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly” after a stroke left him profoundly paralyzed, suffering from locked-in syndrome and able to communicate only by blinking one eyelid. Kureishi’s situation is different, of course: He is not as physically incapacitated as Bauby, for one thing. But what is perhaps most striking about what he is doing is that it is unfolding in real time, as if he is writing from inside a storm, rather than waiting for it to abate.
As such, his dispatches have the impact almost of a serial novel that is being written in installments as the action takes place and before the author knows the ending.
In one of his posts, Kureishi talked about his love of the physical act of putting pen to paper, how he likes to “write a word, a sentence, then another sentence, until I feel something wake up inside me.”’

Read the article here.

Kureishi ‘novelist, screenwriter, playwright and director’ wrote yesterday on Twitter: ‘Later on, a man comes into the room with a measuring tape. He says he’s checking my size for the wheelchair. Until tomorrow, dear friends, in these shitty times, your writer Hanif, and a kiss.’

When I first stumbled upon his messages on Twitter I thought that I had entered a very strange novel in installments. But apparently it’s all true.

It’s indeed one of the more interesting things happening on Twitter right now as far as I can see.

Kureishi on January 10: ‘An insect, a hero, a ghost or Frankenstein’s monster. Out of these mixings will come magnificent horrors and amazements. Every day when I dictate these thoughts, I open what is left of my broken body in order to try and reach you, to stop myself from dying inside.’

By the way, his novel ‘Intimacy’ made a huge impression on me when I read many years ago. Pick it up and read it, and follow him on Twitter I would say.