Hanif Kureishi - ‘I Write To Stay Alive’

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 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 goes on up there. 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 that wedding day. Everyone thought you were marrying him rather than me.

• 0:27Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  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 in my womb is like, everything is packing up and leaving town, baby.

• 0:47Elizabeth Day?

  How to Fail is brought to you by Aala Lacto Free. Delicious dairy 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 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.

• 1:23Elizabeth Day?

  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 Ernesta appealed to me. Ernesta 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.

• 2:03Elizabeth Day?

  I also love the fact that you can order five oversized 12 by 12 samples for just $10 before committing. And Ernesta's design team will help with sizing completely free of charge. Visit ernesta.com and order five samples for only $10 and you'll get $50 towards any rug of your choice. That's ernesta.com. The writer Hanif Qureshi grew up in Bromley, Kent, 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.

• 2:48Elizabeth Day?

  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 Day 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. Qureshi went on to write novels, including The Buddha of Suburbia and Intimacy, and screenplays for films including Venus and The Mother.

• 3:27Elizabeth Day?

  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 were 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.

• 4:11Elizabeth Day?

  If you have ever been a victim, you might find that creativity provides you with authority over your experience, Qureshi writes. Even now, in my current predicament, unable to use my arms and legs, I use writing as an urgent reinstatement of the self. Hanif Qureshi, welcome to How to Fail.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Cheers. Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

• 4:35Elizabeth Day?

  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 endeavour, 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?

• 4:55Speaker 00

  Well, when I first had my accident in Rome in the end of 22, and I woke up paralysed, more or less, Carlo said that people kept ringing up, find out what had happened to me and what was the story. So eventually we decided to write a statement saying, you know, this has, that has happened to Hanif, et cetera. 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,

• 5:40Speaker 00

  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 went, I talked about my childhood, I talked about being a writer, I talked about race.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  What I like is Carlo, my son, who's here now. He turns up 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, you know, you're of no use. You're just there to be looked after, to be fed, to be washed, to be cleaned. You become a kind of object. But I earn a living despite the fact that I can't do anything except natter. And that gives me a sense of pride and fulfillment. I'm still useful.

• 8:33Elizabeth Day?

  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?

• 8:57Speaker 00

  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 hospital. You get really intimate with all kinds of people from everywhere. And you've got to be interested in other people.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  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. You know, with my wife, for instance, I think.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  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, et cetera. So I thought a lot about conversation.

• 10:19Elizabeth Day?

  I mentioned the recurrence of kinds of transgression in your work. Are you experiencing now what you would categorise 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?

• 10:43Speaker 00

  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 dehumanising.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  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 of Stanmore, 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. The Shatter was about my year in hospital, the new book, Are You With Me Now? It's really about the first year out of hospital and what it's like, particularly at the beginning.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  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 I, 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.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  I mean, one day I was going down the street with Sasha, my mother's son, and I saw a guy I knew vaguely, but I saw him around and I always said, hey, how are you doing? Stuff. He came over to me, he looked at me and he said, hi. 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.

• 13:29Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's Exposure and Response Prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable so you can live more of the life you want to live.

• 14:15Elizabeth Day?

  If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 50-minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail. Let's get on to 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 dog-eared so many pages, I've sort of doubled the size of the book.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:40Elizabeth Day?

  But your first failure is your failure at school. School wasn't a happy time for you, was it?

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Well, one of the things you notice about being alive is that 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 that, then they take you to school. And again, you're with a load of people you don't particularly like or necessarily

• 15:13Speaker 00

  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 setup 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 weren't 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 of the time.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  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 amount of racism.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  The 70s was a very dangerous time for Asian people. And it was dangerous to go out and around and here and there. There was a sense of threat and of course, there was Enoch Powell and his speeches and so on. So it was quite a hairy time as well, which I, it must have impacted on my feeling of, I guess, not being able to fit in.

• 16:31Elizabeth Day?

  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?

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Well, I'd 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, that 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.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  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. And they didn't oppose it, in fact, they encouraged it.

• 17:44Elizabeth Day?

  You've described your parents as both failed artists in their own way.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:50Elizabeth Day?

  Your father with these unpublished novels and your mother had been a visual artist.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:55Elizabeth Day?

  How much do you think their failure as artists influenced you and your artistry?

• 18:04Speaker 00

  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, 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, god, we sit down, we work. And I really admired that about my dad. And although...

• 18:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:03Elizabeth Day?

  What about your mother?

• 19:05Speaker 00

  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. Um, 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.

• 19:44Elizabeth Day?

  Do you think boredom has an important function in creativity?

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think boredom's really important. Um, that you take time and wait to see what you think about. When I was in hospital, I was bored out my mind. But as I lay there, I used to write the blogs and I'd 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. Yeah, 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 shit, really. I was just, apart from talk to people. But imagine and think and write in my mind.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  And began to think that I could turn these little pieces into, into a book.

• 20:40Elizabeth Day?

  Twins run in your family. Carlo is a twin.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:44Elizabeth Day?

  And you were a twin.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:48Elizabeth Day?

  Your twin, very sadly, died before you were born.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:52Elizabeth Day?

  How much, if at all, do you think about your twin?

• 20:56Speaker 00

  I don't particularly. My mum used to say, thank God, there's not two of you. My sister has identical twin boys and, 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.

• 21:12Elizabeth Day?

  Cause 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 shadows of failure and success. And I just wondered if that had informed your life for you at all.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  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 be, we'd 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 travelling around Italy, being in Rome and, and going to festivals and so on. And then suddenly we were both still to this day, sitting in my kitchen. I did go out and about here and there, but it's very difficult for me to travel.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  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. They 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 wanna 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.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  And we had lots of conversations about how he could kill himself. It's quite hard to kill yourself in hospital, actually. It's quite, probably the worst place to choose if you wanna kill yourself. But we did decide, um, that he could kill himself by taking off his shirt and going out into the garden and freezing to death. So we decided to do that.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, the weather really warmed up, so, uh, I said, listen, mate, you're gonna be out there for fucking days. You're not gonna die anyway. You're just gonna get a bit cold. So we abandoned that idea.

• 23:32Elizabeth Day?

  Did you ever discuss you doing it?

• 23:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think about it. I thought, I think about it all the time. But I think about it in terms of, do I wanna be this person? Do I wanna, do I wanna 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, um, the carers come. And they wash me and clean me and get me dressed and all that. Takes ages. But I can't get out of bed until that's done.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  And I think, fuck, do I have to go through this again? I have to go, 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. Or wants to talk to you about something they've read in the papers and you cheer up.

• 24:48Elizabeth Day?

  Or you get married.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I get ma, I get married in the book, don't I?

• 24:52Elizabeth Day?

  You do get married in the book.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Elton John came to my wedding.

• 24:56Elizabeth Day?

  I know. Talk about, it's like burying the lead.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's very cool. Well, we invited everyone to the wedding. But a couple of weeks before, Elton John had rang 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 corresponded. Anyway, he rang up my carer and he talked to me. And then he started sending me flowers and gifts and stuff. He's a very sweet guy. Really nice. And he used to ring up for a chat. And then he'd say, I'm gonna come round, come round to your house. And we were really freaked out. So we had to get a cleaner.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  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, um, 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 our wedding day. Everyone thought you were marrying him rather than me. But that was a gas. That was really sweet. He's a nice guy. Sends stuff over all the time.

• 26:20Elizabeth Day?

  That's lovely.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  Always has a Christmas hamper. No booze in it.

• 26:27Elizabeth Day?

  Your second failure is your failure at directing a film. Now, are we talking about London Kills Me?

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I made a film in the late eighties called London Kills Me. Which was a little film set in Notting Hill. Um, 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. My family and the suburbs and my friends moving to London and so on. And I felt that after my beautiful laundrette, I hadn't said it all. I've got a lot of material still cooking. And it hadn't been that long before my being an adolescent.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  So I went home after the film. I thought, I'm not gonna do this anymore. I wanna 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 eighties. Even then, it was a relatively new subject and I was in a position to do it. I'd lived through it with my dad and coming from a mixed race background and so on. So I, I went and wrote that and the book came out with a lot of spirit, a lot of energy.

• 27:53Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, you say in Are You With Me Now? That 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?

• 28:15Speaker 00

  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 and what it was like at school. And how abused you felt 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 gonna be very direct about this. I'm gonna say all this. But also write it in a comic tone from the point of view of a late adolescent. Seventeen or eighteen, nineteen years old, that boy.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Because the world is very funny for young people. Adults are particularly hilarious.

• 29:02Elizabeth Day?

  Let's rewind a bit. So you get nominated for an Academy Award for your first ever screenplay. You've been writing plays.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:10Elizabeth Day?

  What's that like, first of all, being nominated for an Oscar?

• 29:15Speaker 00

  If you're gonna be nominated for an Oscar, it would be, the ideal is for you to be completely naive and innocent. You know, but that you would nev, 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 Caen, pretty skin.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  Um. And then some, someone, Tim Bevan, round working title still does, came up to me and said, oh, you've been nominated for an Oscar. And was completely blown away. So then me and my girlfriend go down Oxford and we get our glad rags and so on and off we go. We fly first class to Los Angeles. We go to this ceremony and then you see um Dustin 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, uh, the food. And it turned out to be Betty Davis.

• 30:22Speaker 00

  And I was, she was very sweet to me, really nice to me, but she had no idea who I was. And I certainly had no idea who she was. The thing is, 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, 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 round the back with everybody. And we stayed in um that fantastic hotel.

• 31:07Elizabeth Day?

  Chateau Marmont.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, Chateau Marmont, there was a very uh dirty place in those days, very naughty. And I thought, this is the life. And then we went back to West Kensington.

• 31:19Elizabeth Day?

  And then, a few years after that, you try your hand at directing.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:24Elizabeth Day?

  Why do you consider your stint as a director as a failure?

• 31:28Speaker 00

  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 and they say, you want, you want him to be wearing blue trousers or green trousers? And you think, I don't fucking know, I don't care what trousers. I mean, I've got lots of mates who are film directors. Stephen Frey is 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 is natural for them.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  But it didn't suit me, but something else suited me.

• 32:14Elizabeth Day?

  How do you know when to quit?

• 32:17Speaker 00

  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 chuck it away. I mean, all writing is a 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 night stand that becomes a marriage, you know, it's just a nightmare.

• 33:00Elizabeth Day?

  Boredom again.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:02Elizabeth Day?

  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?

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Um. I realised that you couldn't be a novelist. Uh, 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 go around the corner and shoot a movie. I mean, they're completely different artistic tasks, actually. And I remember Salman Rushdie saying to me one time, he said, the thing about you, honey, if you said you're owning a screenwriter. And I thought, no, I'm fucking not, I'm gonna, I'm gonna write a book as well. I can do that. So I did.

• 33:50Elizabeth Day?

  I'll show you, Salman.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:55Elizabeth Day?

  There are so many things I wish I'd known when I started this podcast and my production company, Daylight. Like, why am I spending hours trying to make a website look good? Why am I designing everything from scratch? And why am I spending all my time just doing admin? What I really needed was one place that could do all of this for me. Enter Shopify. Shopify has beautiful, ready-made templates that make your website look polished without needing to become a graphic designer overnight. Its AI tools can help you get your site up and running quickly. And Shopify checkout makes it really easy for customers to actually go from, ooh, I like that, to, yes, I'll have one.

• 34:35Elizabeth Day?

  If Shopify had existed when I started out, I could have saved myself a lot of time, stress and some rogue design choices. If you're ready to hear the

• 34:46Elizabeth Day?

  of your first sale today, head over to Shopify.co.uk/fail to start your free trial today. That's right, start your free trial at Shopify.co.uk/fail. Your father died in the early nineties, I believe.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:03Elizabeth Day?

  So he was alive to see the starts of your considerable success.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:08Elizabeth Day?

  Did he acknowledge it? Was he proud of it?

• 35:10Speaker 00

  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 a 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 success is that it's dangerous.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  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 has written a book, it's a bestseller. I could do that, why can't I do that? What's he got? And people get annoyed with you and you don't understand why they hate you so much.

• 37:16Elizabeth Day?

  Gosh, did it scare you?

• 37:19Speaker 00

  People got pretty pissed off.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  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.

• 37:37Elizabeth Day?

  And now, has that shifted again, given what you have gone through bodily?

• 37:44Speaker 00

  You mean?

• 37:45Elizabeth Day?

  With your relationships and your friendships?

• 37:48Speaker 00

  What happened to me is a bomb.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  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.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  And when you're in hospital, people come to see you, to look after you. They respond with great love and passion and caring for you. You are the victim, you are the burden, you're the one making demands. You become a kind of tyrant. I can't do 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.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  All conversation is a demand, demand to know something, or 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 head. Carla's good at scratching the back of my head, he knows where it is. But other people, you have to, you depend on their kindness.

• 39:13Elizabeth Day?

  That brings us on to your final failure, which is, as you put it, my, my body failing me.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:22Elizabeth Day?

  This is obviously the big one that has shaped all of our conversation. And 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?

• 39:41Speaker 00

  Well.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  But I don't wanna be myself now. I don't wanna be in this body. I wanna get up and walk out. I wanna 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

• 40:33Speaker 00

  that I would go back to being who I was before. I always thought, well, this'll be over a bit, after a bit. Then I'll get up and I'll buck 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.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  But then what you realise 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've all got friends who have been ill and we will get ill ourselves. You know, the care home beckons 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,

• 41:39Speaker 00

  that what's happened to you isn't really the exception, it's 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 realise, because you feel, I felt, that I was exceptional. That all the bad shit that happened 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.

• 42:17Elizabeth Day?

  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 happened. But for those who don't know what happened, would you mind?

• 42:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, in December twenty-two, I'd been sick. I had an infection in my colon. And I'd been taking antibiotics for it and I was really feeling weak. And Isabella, my missus, was in Rome and I was gonna go to Rome. I went to Rome. My son Sashin said, when he saw me the night before I left for Rome, he said, "I suddenly thought at 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.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  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.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  And I passed out. I felt faint.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  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,

• 43:47Speaker 00

  with blood seeping 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 realised I was dying. I could speak, but I didn't realise I couldn't move. I could speak and I was talking to Isabella, saying, "I think I'm gonna die now. I think I'm probably gonna die in the next five or 10 minutes. So, cheerio." Then I decided to ring up the kids.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  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'll be a bit of a shock." Suddenly their face of their dying father appears. I'm cheerio. So she put me off that, actually. And then I went to hospital. But I realised when I was lying on my head, that I saw these funny objects out of the corner of my eye.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  And I thought they were like animals

• 45:06Speaker 00

  that were gonna 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.

• 45:26Elizabeth Day?

  Thank you for explaining that.

• 45:31Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  I mean, if you're a friend of mine, you might come to the hospital in the afternoon. Then you might spend the whole afternoon reading the newspaper to me. Then you might make me my supper.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Then you might feed me my supper.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  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 love, abstract love of other people who wanna help you, who wanna be kind. People would bring all kinds of gifts to the hospital. There were tonnes of people. There'd be queues outside of mates coming around to do things to see how you were. So you really become aware of other people's generosity

• 47:06Speaker 00

  and how sweet they are, actually. That I learnt. 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, my son, comes to my house every day to work at ten 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 the question, all the things that people are doing for me,

• 47:51Speaker 00

  they do 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?" And I think, I can't answer that. I don't know till 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.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  But it's an abstract love, abstract human love.

• 48:23Elizabeth Day?

  What an answer. Thank you.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 48:26Elizabeth Day?

  I've got one more question.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, go on.

• 48:28Elizabeth Day?

  It's about the title of your book.

• 48:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:30Elizabeth Day?

  "Are You With Me Now?"

• 48:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:32Elizabeth Day?

  Tell us the story behind the title.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  Well, me and Isabella, about three or four times a year, we would drive from her apartment in Rome down to her little house on the Malphi Coast. Malphi Coast is very, very beautiful and it's high up and there's these winding roads. Anyway, we'd drive down, pass to Naples, Pompeii, et cetera, 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 Bon 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?

• 49:17Speaker 00

  Who will vouch for you? Who will sacrifice something for you? Because I'm actually dependent on other people, on their love.

• 49:27Elizabeth Day?

  Hanif Qureshi, it has been a humbling privilege to speak to you today. Thank you so, so much for coming on How to Fail.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  Thank you, Elizabeth. I hope I failed enough for you.

• 49:38Elizabeth Day?

  You have. You absolutely have. And you've made it profound and moving and funny, which is all I could ask.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  Good. I did my best. Thank you.

• 49:49Elizabeth Day?

  I hope you got as much out of this episode of How to Fail as I did. Brought to you by Arna 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.