How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Hanif Kureishi - ‘I Write To Stay Alive’

Episode Date: October 28, 2026

Hanif Kureishi is one of Britain’s most celebrated writers. His debut screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette, was nominated for an Academy Award, and he went on to write novels including The Buddha of Suburbia and Intimacy, as well as screenplays for Venus and The Mother. But in 2022, Kureishi’s life changed irrevocably. A fall in his partner’s apartment left him paralysed and unable to use his hands. His extraordinary journey through the aftermath and rehabilitation became the subject of his 2024 memoir, Shattered. Now, in Are You With Me Now?, a collection of essays written with his son Carlo, he explores what it means to survive when the life you knew has fallen apart. In this episode, Hanif talks about the accident itself, subsequent years, his changing relationship with writing and his body… and why Elton John came to his wedding! IN THIS EPISODE 00:00 Introduction 03:53 Accident to Viral Blogs 06:49 Work, Disability, Identity 07:31 Conflict as Intimacy 12:27 Failures at School 19:32 Loss, Suicide, Wedding Twist 24:27 Quitting Directing 24:46 Writing The Buddha Of Suburbia 26:17 Comedy From Pain 27:02 Oscar Nominee Whirlwind 29:19 Why Directing Failed 31:56 Success And Jealousy 34:34 Body Failing Bomb 42:28 Love Dependence 💬 QUOTES TO REMEMBER: I was writing to keep myself alive as a person. I think boredom is really important. If someone becomes glamorous and successful, it f***s with your head. 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: Hanif’s book Are You With Me Now? is out on 5th November: www.penguin.co.uk/books/481825/are-you-with-me-now-by-kureishi-hanif-kureishi-with-carlo/9780241831595 Join the How To Fail community: www.howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Elizabeth’s Substack: www.theelizabethday.substack.com 📚 WANT MORE? Salman Rushdie - swap.fm/l/3qh3lMa8mCxLSv8AL7ys 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod Podcast Instagram: @howtofailpod Website: www.elizabethday.org Elizabeth and Hanif answer listener questions in our subscriber series, Failing with Friends. Join our community of subscribers here: https://lnk.to/7i0moR Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: askhowtofail.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Engineer: Matias Torres Assistant Producer: Shania Manderson Senior Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Alex Lawless How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

But also I was writing to keep myself alive as a person because in hospital you're just an object. All the things I can't even go, you know, into my study upstairs. I have no idea what this goes on up. There could be having orgies up there. As far as I know, who knows? My wife said to me, she said, you spent more time with Elton John than you did with me on our wedding day.

Everyone thought you were marrying him rather than me. This month on How to Fail, we're all about celebrating wellness from the inside. If you'd like to hear more on this, go and listen to my episode with Bella Mackey. I don't mind talking about it. I mind people's reactions imagining that they like know what's going on in my womb. Like what's going on my womb is like everything is pecking it up and leaving town, baby. How to Fail is brought to you by A Lacto Free. Delicious Dairy with with all the taste, easier to digest. Link in the episode description. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. This is the podcast where we

believe that most failure can be an act of creativity, if only we interpret it correctly. Before we get into this conversation, please do you remember to like, follow and subscribe so that you never miss a single episode. And just a heads up that this episode might not be for everyone because it does contain discussion of suicidal feelings. Confession time, I have a tendency to postpone certain decisions for far longer than is sensible. Not the big life decisions, oddly enough, those I can usually handle. It's the smaller ones that somehow become disproportionately complicated. For me, rugs fall squarely into that category. I've known for a long time that a rug can completely change how a room feels, but I've always found sizing for a space tricky.

That's why Ernestor appealed to me. Ernestor makes designer quality rugs custom cut to the exact dimensions of your space, so instead of making do with something that's close enough, you're choosing something made specifically for your home. I also love the fact that you can order five oversized 12 by 12 samples for just $10 before committing and Anesta's design team will help with sizing completely free of charge. Visit Anesta.com and order five samples for only $10 and you'll get $50 towards any rug of your choice. That's Anester, E-R-N-E-S-T-A.com. The writer Hanif Koreshi grew up in Bromley, the son of a white British mother and an Indian father who worked in London's Pakistani embassy.

His childhood became intimately enmeshed with Britain's own history of immigration, social change and post-war creativity, themes that later found their way into Qureshi's work. His debut 1985 screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette, was nominated for an Academy Award and became one of the most celebrated British films of the decade. It told the story of a relationship between a skinhead, played by Daniel de Lewis, and a South Asian entrepreneur, and was deemed scandalous not only for its depiction of gay romance, but for its subversion of capitalist rapaciousness.

Transgression, whether sexual, political or familial, became one of his recurring themes. Koreshi went on to write novels including the Buddha of Suburbia and Intimacy, and screenplays for films including Venus and The Mother. He was awarded the CBE and named by the Times as one of the 50 greatest living writers. Then in 2022, Qureshi's life, as he knew it, came to a shuddering halt. A fall in his partner's Rome apartment left him without the use of his hands or any other limbs. This traumatic experience and his subsequent rehabilitation, with the subject of his 2024 memoir, shattered. Now, Qureshi returns with, are you with me now, a collection of essays written in collaboration with his son, Carlo,

a funny, shrewd, and occasionally savage insight into what survival really means when conventional life falls apart. If you have ever been a victim, you might find that creativity provides you with authority over your experience, Koreshi writes. Even now, in my current predicament, unable to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be. to use my arms and legs. I use writing as an urgent reinstatement of the self. Hanif Koresh, you're welcome to How to Fail. Cheers, thank you. I'm happy to be here.

It's so lovely to have you here. And I should also explain that Carlo is sitting next to you in case anyone sees him in shot. And this was a collaborative endeavor, this book. And you have said quite honestly that sometimes you irritate the hell out of each other. But what was it like for you, writing with your son?

Well, when I first had my accident in Rome in the end of 22, and I woke up paralyzed, more or less. Carlo said that people kept ringing out, find out what had happened to me and what was the story. So eventually we decided to write a statement saying, you know, this is, and that has happened to, and if, etc., so we didn't have to, keep writing the same thing to everybody.

So I sat down to write this statement with Isabella, my wife, and it became the first blog, because I started to talk about the day that it happened, how I fell over, how I fainted, how I woke up in a pool of blood, and how I went to the hospital. So I started to tell the whole story, even though I was still in the ICU, and she was sitting on the end of the bed trying to type my rather rapid words into her phone. So that's how it started. And she and I would write blogs every day at the beginning. And most of those blogs went into the book you just described shattered.

And then Carlo and my other sons came to Rome, and I carried on doing the blogs with them. And then the blogs became more general. I talked about my childhood. I talked about being a writer, I talked about race, but mostly I described exactly what was happening to me on that day. You know, if you've been lying in bed for a month, sitting on the edge of the bed, for instance, for the first time,

is incredibly traumatic because the world goes the other way out and you feel very dizzy. So I wanted to describe that experience or the experience of having physiotherapy and then standing up in the rehab in Rome, for instance. So I began to describe in detail, what was happening to me. And it went around the world.

It became really big, really quickly on Twitter and later on on Substack. And then loads of people started writing in and responding and telling us about their misfortunes, many of which were far worse than my own. So we had this huge correspondence going. And that was very moving for me because, you know, I was in bed. I was totally fucked. I was there for days and days, staring at basically a fly going around the ceiling,

wondering whether the fly was making more progress than me. And then when I came back to London after a year, I didn't want to give up writing. I can't write on my own because I can't type. And I like somebody else now to be there. I never write on my own. I guess I could dictate it to the computer in some way. But I don't want to do that.

What I like is Carla, my son, who's here now, he turns out my house every day at 10 o'clock and we go to work. And it's very important for me to go to work because disabled people can easily feel that they're a nuisance, that you're just a burden now, that you're of no use. You're just there to be looked after, to be fed, to be washed, to be clean. you become a kind of object. But I own a living, despite the fact that I can't do anything except Nata.

And that gives me a sense of pride and fulfillment. I'm still useful. You are. And this book is a profound meditation on many things, living in a differently abled body, but also creativity as resistance. And one of the essays that I really connected with was the idea. of conflict as its own form of intimacy in a way. Can you expand a little bit more on that?

There's an essay in the book about people having arguments and how useful arguments are and how important it is to provoke people to say things that are shocking or surprising to them, to wake them up, and obviously vice versa as well. because I spent a lot of time in hospital having conversations with strangers, having conversations with people from all over the world

about all kinds of subjects. And I found that really rewarding. I mean, if you want to get to know people, it's a good idea to spend a year in a hospital. You get really intimate with all kinds of people from everywhere. And you've got to be interested in other people, otherwise your life in the hospital is utterly boring. But I wrote in the essay about conflict

because I think it really wakes people up It's really important I don't mean that you should try and destroy one another I think that you should You need to wake each other up And know them better And you know With my wife for instance

I think What can I learn about her today Is there anything I haven't asked her Is there anything I need to know Could I really annoy her Into saying something unprovoked You know etc. So I thought a lot about conversation.

I mentioned the recurrence of kinds of transgression in your work. Are you experiencing now what you would categorize as a sort of bodily transgression? A sort of transgression of the bodily norm, let's put that in quotation marks, and that conflict with your own body perhaps leading to some kind of creativity that you wouldn't otherwise have explored? Well, the trauma, the accident, got me writing again. I hadn't written very much for a while, really, and I wasn't particularly bothered about writing. I was happy to hang around in my house and walk the dog and watch TV.

It was fine. I'd worked really hard. But then I got back to writing after the accident because I had so much to say. But also, I was writing to keep myself alive. as a person because in hospital you're just an object. The nurses come in, they turn you over, they wash you, they talk to each other in whatever language, they listen to Abba,

but you're just a thing for them. And it's very dehumanizing. So I wrote to kind of put myself back together, become a person. Most of the people I was in hospital, all of the people actually that I was in hospital with in the rehab at the end at Stammore, none of them went back to work after they had a stroke or they fell over. A lot of people fell down the stairs, usually quite drunk, so I would avoid going up the stairs or down the stairs when you're pissed, that's my advice.

I mean, it's very humiliating being a disabled person. If Shatter was about my year in hospital, the new book, Are You With Me Now, is really about the first year out of hospital. And what it's like, particularly at the beginning, when you go out on your street and you go down the road and you go into Tesco's and you do all the things that you did before, everybody looks at you as a disabled person because they've seen you around the neighbourhood for years. And they all look at you funny. And you feel very humiliated.

And you feel their pity. And you feel them thinking, Christ, thereby, but for the grace of God, go why, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And also people react oddly to you sometimes. They don't know how to speak to you or they don't know how to greet you. I mean, one day I was going down the street with Sashin, mother's son. And I saw a guy I knew vaguely. But I saw him around and always said, hey, how are you doing stuff?

He came over to me, looked at me and he said, hi, honey. And then he stared at me and then he patted me on the head. three times. And I thought, well, you wouldn't do that if I was standing up, would you mate? And I thought, well, you don't know how to relate to me. You just can't figure it out. I thought it was rather a nice gesture, but it was a bit patronising. Let's get onto your failures, because the other thing that your book reflects on is the nature of failure and success. And I told you before we started recording, I've dogged so many pages. I've sort of doubled the size of the book.

Yeah. But your first failure is your failure at school. School wasn't a happy time for you, was it? Well, one of the things you notice about being alive is you don't really have any choice for a long time. I mean, suddenly you wake up and you're in this family with these people. You don't even particularly like them. They don't even particularly like you necessarily.

And then, not only of that, and then they take you to school. And again, you're with a lot of people you don't particularly like or necessarily get along with. And then they try and teach you a lot of things that you're not necessarily interested in. And after a while, this whole set up really annoyed me. And I really felt a failure because I couldn't get along with it. I just didn't want to be there. And the schools that I went to, certainly the secondary school, I mean, the teachers just were very entertaining. I can get interested in anything.

I'm an intelligent person. If someone excites me and says something about something I don't know about, I'd be curious about it. But I was bored so much at the time. And I felt a failure because I couldn't concentrate and I couldn't work. Also at that time in the 1970s in London, there was a huge about of racism. the 17th was a very dangerous time for Asian people

and it was dangerous to go out and around and here and there was a sense of threat and of course there was Enoch Powell and his speeches and so on. So it's quite a hairy time as well which I must have impacted on my feeling of I guess not being able to fit in. At what point did you start to think maybe I'm not the failure in this corrupt and polluted system.

Maybe the system is failing me. Was there ever a point where you started thinking that? Well, I've grown up at the end of the 60s. So the 60s was full of people who were failures, but who were pop stars. John Lennon hadn't done great at school either. I mean, it was a very creative time to go up in Britain. particularly the music industry with fashion, photography, journalism and so on.

So there were a lot of stimulating people around who they didn't fit in. So I thought around the age of 15, 16, I'd become a writer. And my father had been writing, he wrote novels, most of which, all of which were unpublished. But I come from a writing family. So me, you know, my uncles ran magazines in India. So the idea of me becoming a writer wasn't such a weird thing for them at all. They didn't oppose it. In fact, they encouraged it.

You've described your parents as both failed artists in their own way. Your father with these unpublished novels and your mother had been a visual artist. Yeah. How much do you think their failed? failure as artists influenced you and your artistry? Well, I particularly admire my dad. He got up every morning before he went to work in London at the Pakistan embassy. Before he went to work, he would write in the morning.

And I would hear his typewriter, big old-fashioned typewriter, thundering through the house in the morning. And he had the discipline. You know, like I still do that. I'm still my dad. I get up morning, I go to work, go to work, go to work. I really admired that about my tired. And although you could call him a failure,

he didn't consider himself to be a failure. He was someone who was about to be successful. And I like that. He didn't give up. He didn't, I mean, to give up would be pretty depressing, to be honest. He liked what he was doing. And the books of his I've read,

which were really about his Indian childhood. They're charming. What about your mother? She had been a painter. She'd been at art school in Bromley, and then she went to Paris, and she worked as an artist. But she gave up as well.

To look after us, and my dad went to work, we were quite a conventional suburban family at that time. It was beginning of consumerism. people were doing up their houses. I mean, my family were poor, but we had a house, and we had a garden, and we were near a park. The suburbs were quite, they were incredibly boring place to live, but they were a decent place to live. Do you think boredom has an important function in creativity? Yeah, I think boredom's really important.

That you take time and wait to see what you're. you think about. When I was in hospital, I was bored out of my mind. But as I lay there, I used to write the blocks, and I write them in my head and try and remember them, but I'd see the sentences and the paragraphs piling up. And then I think, okay, I've written that one, and then I'll write another one to pass the time. Because I can't use my hands. I couldn't fiddle around with my phone. I couldn't play with a computer. I couldn't do jack-ship. really. I was just, apart from talk to people, but imagine and think and write in my mind and began to think that I could turn these little pieces into a book.

Twins run in your family. Carlo is a twin. And you were a twin. Yeah. Your twin very sadly died before you were born. Yeah. How much, if at all, do you think about your twin? I don't particularly My mum used to say Thank God

there's not two of you My sister has identical twin boys And obviously I do as well My grandmother was an identical twin There's loads of it about So I've always been very interested Because I'm interested In how much twin lives

Play through Your recent book Because there's the life that you're living And there's always Obviously the life unlived They're the sort of twin shadow of failure and success. And I just wondered if that had informed your life for you at all.

Well, Isabella and I used to have very, very upsetting conversations. She'd get more upset than me. We'd sit in the kitchen and she'd be feeding me. And I would say, well, what would we be doing now if I hadn't had the accident? What kind of life? Where would we be in the world? Because we had a lot of good times together. a lot of good times traveling around Italy, being in Rome and going to festivals and so on.

And then suddenly we were both still, to this day, sitting in my kitchen. I do go out and about here and there, but it's very difficult for me to travel. But, you know, we always ended up crying because of everything that we had lost together, everything that I've lost. All the things, I can't even go. you know, into my study upstairs. I have no idea what was going on up there. There could be having orgies up there as far as I know.

Who knows? But it's a good idea not to dwell on that too much. Really on what you've lost because you just feel sad. And at times you wonder, I wondered whether it's, whether you want to live like this. I've often thought, and I had long discussions in hospital with a friend of mine about suicide. He wanted to die And we had lots of conversations about how He could kill himself

It's quite hard to kill yourself in hospital Actually it's probably the worst place to choose If you want to kill yourself But we did decide That he could kill himself By taking off his shirt And going out to the garden and freezing to death So we decided to do that

But unfortunately the weather really warmed up So I said, listen, mate, you're going to be out there for fucking days. You're not going to die anyway. You're just going to get a bit cold. So we abandoned that idea. Did you ever discuss you doing it? Yeah, I think about it. I think about it all the time.

But I think about it in terms of, do I want to be this person? Do I want to live this life? Can I bear to be this person? You know, when I wake up in the morning, I start to move my hands. I think, oh God, I'm still disabled. It wasn't a bad dream. I've got to go through another day as being disabled. And not only that, I've got to lie in bed till the carer's come.

And they wash me and clean me and get me dressed and all that. It takes ages. But I can't get out of bed until that's done. And I think, fuck, do I have to go through this again? I have to go through it twice a day. It takes hours. It's so boring. I can't just jump out of bed and go and have my breakfast.

So, yeah, you think all the time. I hate myself. I hate my body. I hate my life. It's too difficult. I can't go on. And then someone walks into the room and tells you a joke. I wants to talk to you about something they've read in the papers and you cheer up.

Or you get married. Oh, yeah. I get married in the book, don't I? You do get married in the book. Yeah. Elton John came to my wedding. I know. Talk about burying the lead.

Yeah. It's very cool. Well, we invited everyone to the wedding, but a couple of weeks before, Elton John had rung up my carer, which was a bit of a shock. We got the same agent, but I don't know him.

I've never met him. I've never correspondent. Anyway, he rang up my carer, and he talked to me. And then he started sending me flowers and gifts and stuff He was a very sweet guy Really nice and he used to ring up for a chat And then he'd say I'm going to come around

Come around to your house And we were really freaked out So we had to get a cleaner Anyway I invited him to the wedding I didn't think for a moment he'd come I'd never met him Anyway we're at the wedding It was a nice day

We were all standing outside drinking and this huge cherry red Bentley rolls up and the door opens and out gets Sir Elton with David Furnish and he comes into the party and everybody goes mad. My wife said to me, she said, you spent more time with Elton John than you did with me on that wedding day. Everyone thought you were marrying him rather than me. But that was a gas, that was really sweet.

It's a nice guy who sends stuff over all the time Always sends a Christmas hamper No booze in it Your second failure Is your failure at directing a film Now are we talking about London Kills Me Yeah I made a film In the late 80s

Called London Kills Me This was a little film set in Notting Hill And what I learned I guess from doing that was that I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to write what became the Buddha of Suburbia which was a book really about me as a adolescent and my family and the suburbs

and my friends and moving to London and so on and I felt that after my beautiful laundret I hadn't said it all I got a lot of material still cooking and it hadn't been that long before my being an adolescent. So I went home after the film. I thought, I'm not going to do this anymore.

I want to write this book. And there aren't enough people really writing about race in Britain. It was a relatively, I'm talking about the end of the 80s. Even then it was a relatively new subject, and I was in a position to do it. I'd live through it with my dad and coming from mixed race background. so on. So when I wrote that and the book came out with a lot of spirit, a lot of energy. Yes, you say in Are You With Me Now, the thing that you should pursue is the thing that won't leave you alone, which I found, I mean, I know you're not talking about people, but creativity in terms of the subject matter, it has to be the thing that you can't stop pursuing. And it sounds like the Buddha of Suburbia was that for you. Yeah, I had to really push myself to say difficult things.

I mean about the things that had hurt me, to do with race, really, to do with the racism I'd gone through when it was like at school and how abused you fell and what it was like when people chased you or they spat on you or they humiliated you in some way. and I thought, well, I'm going to be very direct about this. I'm going to say all this, but also write it in a comic tone from the point of view of a late adolescent, 17 or 18, 19 years old, that boy, because the world is very funny for young people. Adults are particularly hilarious.

Let's rewind a bit. So you get nominated for an Academy Award for your first ever screenplay. You've been writing plays. What's that like? First of all, being nominated for an Oscar. If you're going to be nominated for an Oscar, it would be... The ideal is for you to be completely naive and innocent.

You know, that it would never occur to you that anything like Hollywood will ever go anywhere near you. If you're a kid like me living in a council flat in West Cairn, pretty skinned. And then someone, Tim Behn, round working title still does came back to me so no you've been nominated for an Oscar and was completely blown away so then me and my girlfriend go down oxford we get our claire brags and so on and off we go we fly first class to los angeles we go to this ceremony

and then you see um dastin hoffman a famous movie star and i was sitting next to this this old, nice old granny, very nice old woman, and she was very, very sweet to me when you have your food. And it turned out to be Betty Davis. And I was, she was very sweet to me, really nice to me. She had no idea who I was, and I certainly had no idea who she was.

The thing is, at the Oscars, you don't sit in the audience. No one sits in the audience. They're all around the back getting pissed. All the people in the audience are stand-ins. They're all actors who've got DJs on. So then Jack Nicholson goes in and sits down. They take a shot of Jack Nicholson laughing,

and then he gets up and fucks off around the back to sit around with his mates. So I was sitting around the back with everybody. And we stayed in that fantastic hotel. Chateau Monta. Yeah, Chateau Marmont. There was a very dirty place in those days, very naughty. And I thought this is the life.

And then we went back to West Kensington. And then a few years after that, you try your hand at directing. Yeah. Why do you consider your stint as a director as a failure? Because I didn't like being in charge of all those people. I mean, a film director is also a bit like a Sergeant Major. You've got to corral all these people into working on this project and people come up to you all the time.

They say, do you want him to be wearing blue trousers or green trousers? Anything I don't fucking know. I don't care what trousers. I mean, I've got lots of mates for film directors. Stephen Frears, my late friend, Roger Michelle, people who've made movies all their lives. And they love being on a movie set. You know, they're in charge.

They went to public school. They went to Cambridge. Being on a movie set is bossing people around. It's natural for them. It didn't suit me, but something else suited me. How do you know when to quit? When you're writing, it's quite difficult. Because obviously you get stuck all the time.

You can't go on. So you leave it. You go back to the beginning. You put it in a drawer. You go, and then eventually you get it going again. But sometimes you really do get stuck. it really is terrible and you can't move on and then it's a good idea to jack it away

I mean all writing is the process of throwing things away and sometimes you really have to throw things away I'm sure most writers have got lots of manuscripts and novels discarded it's like a one nightstand that becomes a marriage you know it's just a nightmare boredom again yeah and how did you know

to quit directing Was it that you felt writing was more your thing? Or was it that you instinctively knew directing wasn't? I realised that you couldn't be a novelist and a movie director. I mean, you can write screenplays and be a movie director. But there aren't many people who are actual novelists. You know, you don't imagine that Philip Roth

will write a novel, then you go around the corner and shoot a movie. I mean, they're completely different artistic tasks, actually. and I remember Salman Rushdie's saying to me one time. So the thing about you, Henney, if he said, you're owning a screenwriter. And I thought, no, I'm fucking not. I'm going to write a book as well. I can do that. So I did.

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That's right. Start your free trial at shopify.com.com. Your father died in the early 90s, I believe. Yeah. So he was alive to see the start. of your considerable success. Yeah. Did he acknowledge it?

Was he proud of it? Yeah, he was. He was proud and he was sort of envious at the same time. He was proud because I'd done well. I was on the telly. I got nominated for an Oscar and stuff like that. On the other hand, it rather annoyed him. Because writing was a breeze for me.

I was successful straight away. My plays got put on, my movies got made, my novels got published. It wasn't at a strike. struggle and people, you know, were paying me to write more. And I think that made him rather baffled and rather annoyed and rather hurt, actually. I mean, the thing about successes, that it's dangerous. Success is, in a way, much more dangerous than failure.

If you're successful, you're in a lot of danger because it really pisses people off. other people really hate you they really hate you irrationally they're really jealous of you because you're young you're good-looking you've got money you're a talented successful writer

makes them absolutely furious so and that's quite draining or you're not guarded enough for that there you are with your usual mates and then suddenly one of you becomes very glamorous and successful, it really fucks with their heads.

They think, why him? Why not me? What's wrong with me? And it changes our relationship with everybody around you. And so, you have to be quite careful about how you deal with yourself because you're humiliating other people just by being alive, just by being you. You're not deliberately humiliating them. but they feel humiliated. They think this bloke, he's written a book, it's a bestseller. I could do that.

Why can I do that? What's he got? And people get annoyed with you, and you don't understand why they hate you so much. Gosh, did it scare you? People got pretty pissed off. And you can see all the people around you, those you don't mind,

or those who appreciate it and like you and think, He's smart. He's done well. And other people who just can't bear it, who hate it. And now has that shifted again, given what you have gone through bodily? You mean? With your relationships and your friendships. What happened to me is a bomb. It's a bomb going off in your whole relationship structure

with everybody in your family, with your children, your friends, your neighbours with every single person. As soon as you go out on the street in a wheelchair, everyone looks at you different. And when you're in hospital, people come to see you to look after you, they respond great love and passion and caring for you. You are the victim, you are the burden.

You're the one making to bounce. You become a kind of tyrant. I can't do anything. anything, I've got to ask Carla to give me my coffee. I can't do jack shit for myself. I can't use my hands at all. I mean, life is a series of exchanges, of demands, of micro demands and also bigger demands, or conversation as a demand, demand to know something about the other person, to get inside the head of the other person. But I have to make demands about the smallest thing.

I can't even scratch the back of my hair. Carla's good at scratching the back of my head. He knows where itches. But other people, you have to, you depend on their kindness. That brings us on to your final failure, which is, as you put it, my body failing me.

Yeah. This is obviously the big one that has shaped all of our conversation. And I think, I think some people talk about the idea of being at peace with the post-bomb explosion. But you're not at peace with it, are you? Well, it's like trying to be at peace with your own death. I mean, you might be lucky, you might get there and slide off effortlessly, I guess.

But I don't want to be myself now. I don't want to be in this body. I want to get up and walk out. I want to be able to walk down the road, have coffee, cycle, run around in the park with my kids, do stuff that I used to do. So I hate it. So I'm aware all the time of how restricted I am. Also, I've always believed,

unconsciously that I would go back to being who I was before. I always thought, well, this will be over a bit after a bit. Then I'll get up and I'll fuck off out of this hospital and live the life I lived before. And then in the morning when I wake up and I'm still crippled, I find it really depressing.

But then what you realize is, that your situation is similar to other people's situation, that there's a fantasy of health that we all have, that we will be healthy, all of us for most of our lives. But the truth is, we won't be. And we've all had parents who die or will die. We all got friends who have been ill, and we will get ill ourselves. You know, the care home beckon. for all of us

and we'll all need the love and help of other people so once you make that link with other people that what's happened to you isn't really the exception is happening to them too and so then you join the general

human complaint and that is more comforting you're not exceptional that's a really good thing to realize because you feel I felt that I was acceptable that all the bad shit would happen to other people. It wouldn't happen to me.

And I would sail on being, you know, glamorous and successful. And then one day someone punches you in the face and it's all different. I'm aware that we are talking about an extraordinarily traumatic part of your life. And please tell me if you don't want to retell the story of how it. it happened. But for those who don't know what happened, would you mind? Yeah, well, in December 22, I'd been sick. I had an infection in my colon. And I've been taking antibiotics for it. And I was really feeling weak. And Isabella, my missus, was in Rome. And I was going to go to row. I went to Rome. My son, Sassian, said,

When he saw me the night before I left for Rome, he said, I suddenly thought of that moment that I would never see you again. I said, well, I didn't know that. Anyway, I go to Rome, and I'm feeling really sick and weak. And then I go for a walk by myself, Isabella's working. Then I went home. I smoked a big joint and drank a beer. And I passed out.

I felt faint. I put my head between my legs, as you're supposed to do, get the blood going. And the next thing I knew, I woke up on the floor, on my head, with blood sleeping out of my head, and a pool, you know, going across the floor. Isabella, who'd been in the shower, ran in, called an ambulance, everything. But then there was this interregnum, this space when I was lying there on my head, and I realized I was dying. I could speak, but I didn't realize I couldn't move.

I could speak, and I was talking to Isabella saying, I think I'm going to die now. I think I'm probably going to die in the next five or ten minutes. So, cheerio. Then I decided to ring up the kids. I said to her, it's a good idea. I'll ring up the kids and say goodbye. She said, I don't think that's a very good idea.

I think it would be a bit of a shock. Suddenly their face of their dying father appears saying chirio. So she put me off that, actually. And then I went to hospital. But I realized when I was lying on my head, I saw these funny objects. out of the corner of my eye. And I thought they were like animals

that were going to scuttle across the floor and attack me. Then I realised it was my arms that I'd become completely disconnected from my body. And I'm still disconnected. Thank you for explaining that. You say that you still feel disconnected from your body and I wonder whether this experience, what it's taught you, if anything, about the soul and who we are and how we exist beyond our physical selves.

You learn a lot about dependence. It's to do with knowing other people, them knowing you. and them loving you. And who loves you? Because your demands are quite extreme. I mean, if you're a friend of mine, you might come to the hospital in the afternoon. Then you might spend a whole afternoon reading the newspaper to me.

Then you might make me my supper. Then you might feed me in my supper. Then you might give me a head massage. I mean, the demands that you will make on your friends are much higher than you wouldn't, normally if you go down to the pub for a drink with a mate, it wouldn't involve any of those things. So what you mean by the soul, I would probably call love, the abstract love of other people who want to help you,

who want to be kind. People would bring all kinds of gifts to the hospital. There were tons of people. There'd be cues outside of mates coming up to do things to see how you were. So you really become aware of other people's generosity and how sweet they are. Actually, that I learned. That's a really good lesson to learn.

I mean, you'd normally learn that when you were dying, or you would see it. You see it at funerals, people's devotion to one another. but to actually be alive and live through it and see it, it still goes on. Carlo and my son comes to my house every day to work at 10 o'clock, and he's done that for three years.

I mean, that's a big, a pain, but that's a big duty. I mean, that's a very, I wouldn't have done that for my dad. You always think, you always ask yourself a question. All the things that people are doing for me, they do it out of love, would I do it for them? And I can't answer that question.

I wouldn't know. Isabella, I think, she says, would you have done this for me? I think, I can't answer that. I don't know until I'm in that situation. But you put other people through your disability in a very, very difficult position or they will want to prove their love for you.

But it's an abstract love. abstract human love What an answer Thank you I've got one more question Yeah go on It's about the title of your book Yeah

Are you with me now Yeah Tell us the story behind the title Well Me and Isabella About three or four times a year We would drive from her apartment In Rome

Down to our little house On the Amalfi Coast Malfi Coast Malfi Coast is very very beautiful and it's high up and there's this winding roads. Anyway, we'd drive down. Place past Naples, Pompeii, etc., down to the coast. And I would be the DJ.

She would drive the car. And we used to play this song by Kate Le Bonn, called Are You With Me Now? We used to sing along to it. And I thought, well, that's the story of this book. Who's with you? Who's on your side? Who will vouch for you?

Who will sacrifice something for you? Because I'm actually dependent on other people, on their love. Hanif Qureshi, it has been a humbling privilege to speak to you today. Thank you so, so much for coming on how to fail. Thank you, Elizabeth. I hope I failed enough for you. You have. You absolutely have, and you've made it profound and moving and funny, which is all I could ask.

Good. I do my best. Thank you. I hope you got as much out of this episode of How to Fail as I did. Brought to you by Arla Lacto-free, delicious dairy with all the taste, easier to digest. Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.