I wear my mother’s cropped grey jacket to the book launch party in LA. Her navy blazer with pinstripes to my book reading in Brooklyn. Her leopard print scarf on my way to introduce Jennifer Egan at Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh. In Seattle, Corte Madera, Kansas City, I wear her thin platinum bracelet beaded with the tiniest diamonds cuffed around my wrist.
Sacks showed generations of doctors (and patients) how medicine is just the starting point for an exploration of the possibilities of being human. With these letters, his legacy as an extraordinary writer, humanitarian and physician is secured.
In Rome on St Stephen’s Day 2022, the writer Hanif Kureishi took a fall that left him almost completely paralysed. Throughout the subsequent year he spent in hospitals – first in Italy, then in his home city of London – confronting the horror of his new reality as a severely disabled person, Kureishi dictated “dispatches” to his wife, Isabella, and his sons, which were published online. Helped by his family, the author has expanded these dispatches into a memoir of catastrophe whose driving question is nothing less than that of how its author is meant to go on: “Paki, writer, cripple: who am I now?”
I imagine that Shattered was at once the hardest and the easiest book Kureishi has ever written: hard because of the irreversibly awful circumstance that occasioned it; easy because, with material this intrinsically interesting – a reversal of fortunes so dramatic and grotesque – any halfway talented writer could fashion something readable. Sure enough, Shattered is an enthralling report on how a person can be forced to reckon with sudden, shocking change.