Fresh Air - How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Hanif Kureishi began his new memoir just days after a fall left him paralyzed. He describes being completely dependent on others — and the sense of purpose he's gained from writing. The memoir is called Shattered.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. I first became aware of Henef Qureshi when the 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette was released. He was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay about a side of contemporary England that had rarely been explored on screen. Pakistani immigrants and their children. The film was a lively romantic comedy about gay love, family, racism and punk rock. It was directed by Stephen Friars and co-starred Daniel Day Lewis as a young man in a relationship with the son of a Pakistani immigrant. Qureshi has since written other screenplays and novels, including The Buddha of Suburbia. His new memoir called Shattered begins in 2020 after a fall that injured his spinal cord, leaving him unable to move his arms or legs. He describes being unrecognizable to himself,

disconnected from his body, totally dependent on others, feeling helpless and humiliated, dealing with rage, injuring other people who could do even basic things like scratch and itch. While spending too much time on his back staring at the ceiling, he reflected on earlier periods of his life. He shares those reflections in his book. He spent a year in hospitals before he was able to return home with round-the-clock caregivers. He started writing the memoir just days after the accident by dictating to one of his sons. The book's narrative is

occasionally interrupted by asides like, Excuse me for a moment, I must have an enema now. Qureshi is the son of a British mother and a father who emigrated from Pakistan in the late 1940s. Hanif Qureshi, welcome back to Fresh Air. We first spoke in 1990 on fresh air and you've gone on two times since then so welcome back how are you now like how much movement do you have now I'm thrashing my arm about a bit now as I speak to you but I can't use my fingers I can't grip I couldn't pick up a pen or anything like that I can move my shoulder I can move my legs a bit obviously I'm in a wheelchair I

can't stand up but I can't actually use my hands so I'm around the clock dependent as you put it earlier but I'm stronger than I was and I have physio every day and so I'm stretched out, I move a bit, but I think this is pretty much where I'm going to remain from now on. And physio is physical therapy? Yeah, I have the physio every day. Someone comes to the house and I stand up in a standing machine and they stretch me out and manipulate my fingers and my feet and so on. So I don't deteriorate.

That's the main thing. I don't want to get worse. I'm doing a lot of stuff at the moment. This morning I was writing here at my kitchen table with my son Carlo doing my blog. We were writing a movie based on my memoir Shattered. So you know it's a full working day for me. And your arm is strong enough to maneuver the controls of your motorized wheelchair? Yeah I buzz around my house. I can go out on the street, obviously with somebody else, and I can go up

and down the road into coffee shops, and I have lunch, and I can do stuff, so it's not as bad as it might have been. So I'm trying to figure out what happened. You were dizzy, and then you woke up in a pool of blood. Yeah, yeah, that's the story. I've been unwell with a stomach infection, and I've been taking a lot of painkillers and antibiotics and suppositories, all kinds of other stuff. So I was very weak. So I was at Isabella's apartment in Rome.

Isabella was your partner, now wife? Yeah, about to become wife, actually. No one else wants me now. And then I felt fate. I put my head between my legs, as you're supposed to do, and then I blacked out. And I think what happened was I stood up at that moment and I took some steps across the room and then I felt absolutely flat bang on my face and I broke my neck or damaged my spine very badly and when I woke up I was in a pool of blood and I was unable to move my hands or any other part of my body I could still speak. You write about how it initially felt to feel disconnected from your body to see your hand and not

feel connected to your hand. You write I had become divorced from myself. Would it be okay to ask you to describe what that felt like, that sense of disconnection from your own body? Well, at the beginning it's very odd because you're upside down on your head, you're bleeding from your forehead and then I saw these objects out of the corner of my eye and I didn't know what they were. And then I began to realise that they were my hands, but I had no agency over them. I thought that they were, you know, sort of live creatures, curled live creatures and Then I became convinced that I was gonna die and

Eventually, I was sort of suffocated You started writing your memoir just days after the accident by dictating it Was writing especially important to you. I know you're a writer I know know you're very dedicated to writing. Your life has centered around writing and family. But was it helpful to distance yourself from kind of removing yourself from what was happening so you could look at what was happening, examine it, and describe it? It was really because when I was in the ICU in Rome, I was just a body to the nurses, to the doctors. I was in the medical industrial complex and they were working on me and doing stuff to me and washing me and feeding me and then I had an operation and so on. But

I wasn't really a person, I had lost myself really. And the way that I could remind myself of who I was, a writer with a history, a person in the world, was to start writing again. So I started writing to my long-suffering partner Isabella, who would sit at the end of the bed tapping into her phone, and I started to issue statements or blogs about exactly what was happening to me and then Carlo my son he put the blogs

on Substack where I had an account and then he started putting them on Twitter and so on and they started to go around and people started paying attention and the figures went up and up and up So I did one one day then I did one the next day and one the next day we at that point Even though I was really ill and really you know bombed out of my head on painkillers and so on I was writing a blog every single day about my condition and it was very exciting that people were interested in what I had to say and what had happened to me. And then people started to write pieces about me in the New York Times and in Australia and India and so on. So it was a very strange period because I was completely done for alone lying in

hospital full of drugs and tubes and I my material was going very quickly around the world and increasing numbers of people were interested in what I was saying and that really cheered me up you know I had something to do I had a platform I was back as a writer which is what I am, which secures my identity. We've all experienced staying awake hours in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and worrying about so many different things. Sometimes you obsess on one thing, sometimes on many things. For you that was especially difficult.

It's not like you could get up and get a snack or you know watch TV for a little while, read a book. What I was doing was writing the blogs in my head. You described the nights very accurately but what I was doing I could write the paragraph and then another paragraph and another paragraph and I could hold it in my head and try and remember the blog until the next day when I would see someone who would then commit it to paper. So that was, kept me going, that was an interesting thing to do for me to start not only to write about my present life, but of course lying in bed for so long as you describe, you obsess

about things, but thinking about my childhood, about my parents, about growing up and my reading and anything that occurred to me, and I could put it in a blog and then publish it the next day. Your partner Isabella spent every day during visiting hours in the hospital with you, and you were hospitalized for about a year.

And one time when she was brushing your teeth and you felt like a helpless baby and a tyrant, two really conflicting, maybe not so conflicting, can you describe both of those feelings? Well, I think what you say is very interesting because a baby is a tyrant. Yeah, I was thinking that as I said it. I remember a phrase from some writer or another who describes, who says, the fascist face

of the baby. I've had three babies and I can tell you that there are times when they are like fascists, when they overwhelm you. And then suddenly I was in that situation again. I was helpless in bed. I couldn't feed myself, brush my teeth or do anything. I was entirely dependent on other people. And I hated being so dependent.

And the only way I could ever get anything done was to ask someone to do something for me, you know. And that's my situation now. Today I'm in that situation. And I hate it and I resent it. I wanna get up and make my own tea and breakfast, you know? So I suddenly became aware of, in order to get anything done, I had to demand things.

I have to ask people to do things for me. And it's embarrassing to have to do that all the time. If I'm in my kitchen and Isabella is cooking and then she does the shopping and then she has to feed me, then she has to wash up, there's nothing I can do to help her and it's shameful and embarrassing. And so the nature of our relationship was completely transformed by this accident where I am entirely dependent on other people and also profoundly ashamed that I'm not able to do what I could do before. The only way to get around this is to enjoy it, you know, and enjoy the conversations you have with other people to enjoy their generosity to enjoy the the love that they have for you and

How they like to to help you just to serve you So it's a big kind of Emotional and intellectual turnaround. I'm just describing here from being an independent, you know person with agency in the world You can do stuff to becoming this tyrannical baby that I am here now talking to you You have paid caregivers to write Yeah, I have one person 24 7 who lives in the house who looks after me and then

Carers who come in one in the morning to wash me and get me dressed And ready for the street and then in the evening someone who helps Put me to to bed and cleans me and gets me ready for the night. So they're paid to do this. That's their job That's what they're trained to do. Do you feel guilty or embarrassed or humiliated when they're helping you? I felt all those things as you have to adjust to a new life. One day I was an ordinary normal person walking about the world doing stuff, the next day, and this may happen to many of us, to all of us. You are entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers for your life. And it is a big adjustment. In the beginning it is very humiliating, you feel really embarrassed.

You know, people touch you all the time. Strangers come into my house every single day and they touch me, they turn me over, they talk above me as if I'm not there. And my circumstances have entirely changed. But I have to say you get over it. You once accused Isabella of going all Betty Davis on you, making it seem like she was the one being the tyrant. That's harsh.

What brought that on? Well, I think at the beginning, there was a lot of anger, you know, from me mostly. When you have your life, as it were, your normal life, your ordinary life snatched away from you by an illness, as I say, as will happen to so many of us, you are absolutely furious and you become furious with the people around you. You become furious with your life. You can't believe this horror has happened to you. It's a contingent random thing that's happened to you just out of the blue, you know.

I'll give you some examples. When I was in hospital in North London in the rehab, I was on a ward of accidents. Everybody on the ward had had an accident. One guy had dived into an empty swimming pool by mistake. Another guy had fallen down the stairs while drinking a glass of wine. Another guy had fallen over his rake in his garden, just tripped over it and fell down and broke his neck and was paralysed. So we all had these random rather contingent accidents, which suddenly in a moment completely changed your life forever and there's no going back. That is absolutely enraging. You think, you know, why couldn't

I have been doing something else at that moment? You know, why did that moment occur to me? Why have I been chosen? What have I done wrong? You go through all these terrible, awful thoughts about who has done this to you and why it's happened and it makes you an angry person. So I think there are moments, quite rightly, where you deserve to feel angry, but it's tough on the people around you. Isabel asked you that if the tables were turned and she was lying in bed unable to move,

would you do for her as much as she'd been doing for you? And you write that you weren't sure. You weren't sure if you would. What made you doubt that? I guess because I've never done anything like that before. I look after Isabella and she looks after me, we're equals. But the idea that I would then devote my life to her being disabled and being in a need, I can't answer that. But I think I would now. I'd do it for anybody now because I know so much about suffering and disablement,

which I didn't know before. So the answer would be, yes, I would do that. But I don't know whether I would have done it when I was healthy. But as I say, it's not a question one can answer. So in recalibrating your relationship, what are some of the changes that you made so that even though you were

no longer physically equals and you were dependent and she was a caregiver, what were you able to change to restore things that or to keep on track things that were special between you? Unlike most of the people that I was in hospital with, they can't go back to work. None of them have gone back to work. You know, if you're a truck driver or you're a street cleaner or you're a postman or whatever, none of those men or women can go back to work. And so they go back home and they lie in bed and they watch TV. My is a is a talking and writing job And I and I work

Every day as I just described to you earlier Um, and that's part of important part of our relationship. She works and I work and I have the dignity of my work I've written shattered. I'm writing other stuff other stuff as I've said and I feel that, you know, it's my part of the relationship, that I earn money, that I support us. I'm a father to my son, so I'm still doing stuff in the world and I have some dignity. I haven't been robbed of my ability to function, to be creative. In fact, I'm writing more now even though I'm disabled than I did before and I'm very happy to work. And I go to work in the morning with great energy and belief and that's important in our

relationship for both of us. We both feel, you know, that we are dignified, creative people doing stuff that matters in the world So you're no longer sexual because of your paralysis You like sex was a very central part of your life until the accident and It was part of your writing as well so you seem to have Changed in terms of your attitude towards sex at At first, I think you really, really missed it.

And then you got so used to not having it that you became kind of uninterested in it. You wrote, just because you're severely injured doesn't mean you don't think about sex. But you also write that you lost interest in sex once you couldn't have it. Can you describe that transition? Yeah, it's an interesting thing and something I've discussed with male friends of mine mostly because, you know, when you get to our age a lot of my male friends have problems with their prostates as you can imagine, and some of those guys were, prostates as you can imagine and some of those guys were you know very horny in their younger years and then suddenly when it's gone it's an absence but it's also a mercy you do feel released from some terrible agency and you look with amusement at other people's bizarre activities actually so i don't actually. So I don't particularly

miss it. I don't particularly care about it because there really are other forms of human intercourse, other forms of human love, other forms of touching and kissing and being with somebody else in a sensual way. I think probably it's a real narrowing of the sexual spectrum to think that there are only a few ways in which you can be sexual. I think sexuality and sensuality is a much broader thing than we grow up thinking to be honest. So you can find other ways of loving other people that are not necessarily sexual in the most overt sense actually. Let TARI COLLINS Let's take another break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Hanif Qureshi and his new memoir is called Shattered and it's about the year he spent in hospitals

after the fall that injured his spinal cord, leaving him unable to move his arms and legs. We'll be right back after a break. I'm Terri Gross, and this is Fresh Air. Hey, it's Scott Detter, the host of Trump's Terms, a podcast where we bring you short, focused episodes about the 47th president and the biggest changes he is trying to make. A lot of those changes will be front and center during his address to a joint session of Congress on March 4th.

In the days after, we will bring you stories, not just about what he said, but about what is actually happening and what isn't happening. Listen to Trump's terms from NPR. At this year's Oscars, Anorah took home the award for Best Picture, Zoe Saldana and Kieran Culkin also picked up wins, and Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo delivered a show-stopping opening number.

For a recap of all the highlights, listen to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. If you're a super fan of Fresh Air with Terry Gross, we have exciting news. WHYY has launched a Fresh Air Society, a leadership group dedicated to ensuring Fresh Air's legacy. For over 50 years, this program has brought you fascinating interviews with favorite authors, artists, actors, and more. As a member of the Fresh Air Society, you'll receive special benefits and recognition. Learn more at whyy.org slash Fresh Air Society. Your father was an immigrant, and I want to get into that a little bit later, but I just want to talk about the contrast between the racial ethnic aspects of the hospital in Italy where you had your accident and in London the hospitals you eventually moved to because you're from London, your partner is from Italy.

So in Italy, just about everybody who worked in the hospital was white. When you went to hospitals in London all the therapists and nurses they were all people of color often immigrants and you were the only person here who speaks standard Middle English was you. When I was in Rome in the hospital, everyone was white. You never saw a person of color. It's the only Monocultural country, Italy really in in in Europe and Isabella says that I'm wrong about that That's beginning to change but I didn't see any people of color in the hospitals in in in Italy really

And then of course you come to London around the corner from here where I am in West London now and obviously the whole of our huge NHS is run by people from all over the world. And it's just incredible to lie in bed, to be changed and washed by someone. And you have these incredible conversations with somebody from Africa, from the Philippines, from South Africa, India, Pakistan, and so on. It's incredible stew and great multiracial, multicultural society. But one of the things you become aware of, certainly in these British hospitals, is our dependence in Britain on immigration and other races. The place, the hospitals, none of it, it wouldn't function at all without immigration, even

recent immigration, to be honest. There were a lot of people who had recently come from the Philippines, people who had come from Africa Philippines, people who'd come from Africa and so on, and I began to realize that since we had Brexit, which was the breakup with Europe, that we were now importing people from other parts of the world in order to run the NHS. That's the National Health Service. Yeah, that's indeed, yeah. And in America as well, you know, in the U.S., so many healthcare workers, including caregivers and aides, are recent immigrants or, you know,

immigrants who've been here for, you know, a longer time. Oh, and so many people who take care of children are also immigrants. And yet, there's this strong anti-immigrant feeling in America, as I'm sure you know, and I think in England as well, right? It's a terrible dilemma really for Britain because originally our country was almost entirely dependent on the empire. As you know, before 1945, Britain had this huge worldwide empire from which most of its wealth was derived. And now, as a smaller society, we are entirely dependent on immigrants

in order to look after a slowly aging population. And if you saw the hospitals and the care homes and the transport system and so on here, you'd see it's entirely run by immigrants. But of course, it's hated that dependency by people and they wish to end it, to go back to being an entirely Caucasian society, but that can't happen. And so there's a kind of deadlock in British society between those who want to hate immigrants

and the rest of us who realize that without immigrants the NHS, for instance, would break down. It just wouldn't work at all. And the NHS and our social system is understaffed as it is. The nurses and doctors in the hospitals in which I spent a year were complaining all the time about they didn't have enough people to work there. So this is a real deadlock and a real problem because it's really fun to hate on immigrants. People really enjoy it. They're the one group of people in society that you can hate.

And it's an absurdity because they're the one group in society in which you're entirely dependent and without whom your society would go down into darkness. Your father emigrated to Britain in the late 1940s from Pakistan. Was he from a Muslim family? My understanding is he was relatively secular. family. My understanding is he was relatively secular. My dad came from Bombay in India. He came from a Muslim family, but they were a secular family then. They were an upper middle class, wealthy, intellectual family. My dad came to England to study law. So many members of the wealthy middle class from India,

like Gandhi and Jinnah and so on, great figures from India, they all came to the West to be educated. And then normally they would return to India to run the country. But my dad met my mom, he got married and he stayed in the UK and wanted to be British. He wanted to be an Englishman, in fact, and he liked England. He loved England and he always wanted to stay

here. Now, I thought he came from Pakistan. My family moved to Pakistan after partition. All my many uncles and aunts and cousins and so on they moved from India to Pakistan to be safe in Pakistan Which is a Muslim state? Yeah, and partition happened and was it 1947 when India basically divided into two with Pakistan becoming a new Muslim state Pakistan becoming a new Muslim state? Yep, that's the story. My dad came to the UK around that time So he didn't go to Pakistan and he stayed in in Britain, but he worked in the Pakistan Embassy and

So became Pakistani even though he hadn't actually been to Pakistan. It's a it sounds like an odd thing, but it's the case And and when you were growing up, one of the insulting words that you were called was Paki, short for like, yeah, go ahead. That was a very common designation for anyone actually who was oriental looking or brown or whatever. We were all called Pakis, whether we were from Sri Lanka or India or Pakistan or

wherever, Paki was the sort of ubiquitous insult thrown at us. Danielle Pletka So was your father part of the first generation of a wave of immigrants to England from South Asia? Yeah, yeah. I mean, my father worked in the Pakistan embassy and so was very aware of what was going on of how many people from Pakistan and India were coming to the UK. I mean, in those days, my father was automatically a British citizen. If you were born in India, which was then part of the empire, you were automatically British. So my dad always had a British passport.

I see. So what was it like for him and then for you as being his son to be part of a new wave of immigrants. When people, I think, is it fair to say England was largely white at the time? England was largely white, but I think the immigrant ethic is probably like the immigrant ethic in the United States, you know, that you were coming to a new country and it would be a new start for you. It was a clean slate. You would get educated, you could bring up your kids.

You know, Britain was a really civilized, well-organized, law-abiding country. And he just left the chaos of India, you remember, after partition. And my dad thought it was fantastic. You get free education. You go to the doctor the dentist We had the welfare state was a rising standard of living in the 1960s. There was the Beatles. It was pop There was the 60s what we call the 60s and so on So my dad saw it as a great opportunity for us, his kids, to do really well. Of course,

at that time in Britain, particularly where I was in South London, there was a lot of violence, there was a lot of racism, there were a lot of attacks on people, people like us of colour. And we were terrified of that. And we used to run and have to hide and my father was frightened and so on. It was quite tough and rough, but on the whole, my father was really pleased that he had come to Britain and given us the chance as his kids to grow up in Britain and to do well. He thought it was a great opportunity for us. And he believed that I, his son,

could become a significant writer. You know, that the world was our oyster, there were opportunities in Britain. And to be honest, he was right about that. I mean, when I was a young man, there were not many Asian artists in pop or photography or in the arts, people from South Asia at all. And there were certainly no writers really, apart from V.S.Nipol, writers of color who are successful in England. But we changed it all, you know. Other writers like Salman Rushdie and of course Sadie Smith and so on and the whole scene has changed and opened out now and there's been a huge unfurling of these really really talented people from South Asia.

When you were growing up you were bullied by skinheads and other kids who were racist. How did you respond to that? I think I responded to that in the way that I responded to my accident, really, which is in the only way that I knew how, which was to become a writer, which was to live through this stuff, to survive it, to suffer from it and find it painful and so on, which it is.

And then one day you find yourself writing a novel about it and you find yourself writing a novel that hasn't been written before in Britain called The Buddha of Suburbia with material in it that is fresh and new and from a part of Britain that is undiscovered and so on. So I think becoming a writer is a very good way, as it were, to organize and to think about your experience and not only that, to pass it on to other people for them to enjoy and to learn about their own country at the same time. Let's take another break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is screenwriter, novelist, and playwright, Hanif Qureshi. His new memoir is called Shattered, and

it's about the year he spent in hospitals after the fall that injured his spinal cord, leaving him unable to move his arms and legs. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. You're a father. You have three sons. Two of them are twins. And, you know, you try to write as honestly as possible. And one of the things you write in your new memoir, Shattered, is there has barely been a minute of the last ten years when I haven't enjoyed being with my three sons. But I admit that the early days were difficult, if not nasty, even hair-raising on occasions.

I often felt that I was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong people. What was it about fatherhood early on, when your kids were young, that made you feel like you weren't living the life you were supposed to be living? I guess, I don't know whether other people feel like this or other men feel like this or whatever, but I really started to enjoy the kids when I could have grown up conversations with them. You know, as they started to get older and we could talk about sport or politics or literature

and we started going to the movies together and so on. They were more like equals to me. When they were little kids, you know, screaming their heads off and they wouldn't go to school and they hated you and they kicked you and etc, etc. I found all that a bit sordid. It wasn't much fun. But as I got older, I really started to enjoy them and I enjoy them now as adults. The twins are 31 now and the other boy is 26. But I'm not a big fan of babies, to be honest.

They're okay, you know, for about half an hour. But what you really want is to go down the pub, sit down with a kid and have a beer and really talk about interesting things together, which is what I do with my kids now. We're all equals. And my son, Carlos, said to me the other day, he said, you're much better as a friend than you are as a father. I was rather hurt by that because I like to think I was quite a good father. But I enjoy them as adults much more than I did as kids. The passage that I just read, did you

dictate that to one of your sons? Because your sons helped you in writing the memoir because they transcribed what you were saying. Yeah, I write all kinds of weirdo, as you can see from the book shattered I write all kinds of weirdo stuff about sex about politics about literature about being a father Or going to an orgy in one case or whatever and so on They don't mind writing it down it doesn't bother bother them at all. I don't see why it should

Well because you said you didn't enjoy being a father and you were dictating this to a son so I could see how he might interpret that as Disappointing yeah. Well, I'm sure the same thing will happen to him, you know when he When he has children has to stay up all night when they're vomiting in his shoes. Good luck to him. That's my cat's job. Yeah, exactly.

And you also wrote you hated taking your children to karate and football and swimming and... Oh, God, I hated all that. Yeah, you had to take them to karate and tennis and God almighty driving them around London in the pouring rain when you just wanted a you know be at home smoking a joint It just seemed ghastly to me, but you know, I did it and I did my duty So I can't say I didn't do it. I actually did do it. So You know, you must give me some credit for that your good friends was Salman Rushdie and he wrote a really wonderful, like so well written memoir about the incident where he was stabbed, well on stage at the

Chautauqua Festival where he was making an appearance. And you write in your book that you've had many conversations with him, subsequent to your injury and his attack, the attack on him. Did you read his memoir? I'm wondering if maybe you'd wanted to stay away from it, knowing that you'd be writing your own thoughts I Didn't read it actually Isabella read it for me and she told me what was in it The reason I didn't read it wasn't because I wanted to keep to my own thoughts Is that I couldn't I didn't want to hear about his suffering. It's so upset me what happened to him

I've known Salman since the early 80s and I I love him and admire him as a man and as a writer he's like an older brother to me. And there was no way I was going to read about that awful thing that happened. I just couldn't face it. And he understands that. He's aware of that. And I, you know, I didn't want to read about someone being in hospital and having to recover and so on. I can write about it, but I don't want to hear about it, because my life is miserable enough as it is. I don't want to make it worse.

What happened first, your fall or his attack? I'm losing the chronology. No, no, he was attacked in August, and I fell over at Christmas. And he would text me every day. He was really sweet about supporting me and loving me, and I love and admire him for doing that. What did he mean to you as another writer from South Asia,

living in England? And he started writing, Midnight's Children was published before your screenplays and novels. I met Solman probably around 1982 and Midnight's Children had just come out and won the Booker Prize. He was such an amazing figure, so super, super smart, a great writer, a great raconteur, a great party giver. He was at the centre of the scene in London in the 1980s and I was quite close

to him at that time. And I never stopped admiring him. Also, after the fatwaal, the strength he showed, the fortitude, how he survived that terrible period with those awful attacks from the Iranian government and so on. I mean, he's an amazing man, very brave and admirable and a man who's continued to be an important and amazing writer, but also someone who's stood up for these profoundly important values, like the freedom of speech, for instance.

Let's take another break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is screenwriter, novelist, and playwright, Hanif Qureshi. His new memoir is called Shattered, and it's about the year he spent in hospitals after the fall that injured his spinal cord, leaving him unable to move his arms and legs. We'll be right back.

This is Fresh Air. I don't know if you're a planner or not and if you look ahead into the future a lot or not, but has the accident changed your approach to planning, to looking at the future, to thinking what's next? Or are you living more like day to day and not thinking ahead very much? I want to have a lot going on, you know. I'm doing a dance thing. I'm writing another book. I'm doing this movie with Luca Gardinino. I'm very excited about what I'm doing and I need to get up in the morning and look forward to the day and think what am I going to do today? Is it going to be exciting? Am I going to see a really good friend? Am I going to have a conversation that I never had before?

And I'm going to work on something that's fresh and new and I'm really excited about my book Shattered coming out in the US for instance. I haven't published a book in the US for a long time so I want to read the reviews, I wanna read the interviews, I wanna find out how the book's doing. I just wanna be excited about the world after having gone through a year of hell, you know? You mentioned you're doing a dance thing, what is that? Yeah, I'm gonna do a dance thing. They asked me to supply some pages for them for a choreographer who we haven't chosen yet and the the

pages that I will write which will be about accidents I'm gonna call it the hospital of accidents I'm gonna give that to the choreographer and they're gonna be inspired by the pages in order to create some kind of choreography probably with disabled dancers in order to create some kind of choreography, probably with disabled dancers, in order to create some kind of classical dance piece which we're going to perform in Bradford in the middle of this year. That's really interesting. That's really fun, isn't it? Yeah, I never thought I would end up creating a dance piece, but somebody just asked me randomly and I thought that's a great idea. creating a dance piece but somebody just asked me randomly and I thought that's a great idea. Oh it's nice that they asked. I mean what an interesting and unusual

opportunity. Yeah and it's really fun for me to collaborate. You know I've collaborated all my life with dancers before, with directors, with musicians and composers and other obviously actors and other artists. I love collaborating with other people because you can do stuff with them that you can't do alone. Well, even your memoirs a collaboration because you dictated it to members of your family. And I'm sure they commented on it at some point, as you were... Unfortunately, yeah. They comment, commentated on it all the time.

They never shut up. You know, it's really fun to hear from other people when you're writing. I'll be doing that tomorrow morning. Okay. Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with us and for sharing so much of your life. Thank you, Terry. Beautiful questions. I really enjoyed it.

Thanks. Thank you. And I wish you, among wish you among other things, comfort and freedom from pain. And that reminds me, are you, are you in pain? People think that, well, if you're paralyzed, therefore you don't feel anything and you're spared from pain, but that's actually not true. Oh, I was back in the hospital last week.

I had a very serious and incredibly painful infection in my bladder. So they rushed me to hospital and pumped me full of antibiotics and painkillers, which worked. So today as you're speaking to me, I can tell you that I'm all right, but it's not necessarily going to last. Well, you spoke about the fragility of life and you've been narrating what that's like. Yeah, I have. Thank you for having me on your program, Terry. Let's do it again. It sounds like there'll be plenty of things to talk about in the future. Yeah, yeah. I've always got plenty to say.

Hanif Kureishi's new memoir is called Shattered. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Aired. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, for Mardi Gras Day, we'll be joined by a Mardi Gras attraction, clarinetist and vocalist Doreen Ketchens. Known as Lady Louie, she's a fixture of the French Quarter in New Orleans. We'll talk with her about her decades-long career as a street performer, and she'll play some music. I hope you'll join us. So

so Fresh Air's executive producer is Yanny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Arju Bentham. Thanks to Fatima Al-Khassab for her help in recording today's interview. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Rae Boudinado, Lauren Krenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challener, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show.

Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.