On St Stephen’s Day 2022, author and playwright Hanif Kureishi was in Rome watching a soccer match on television and sipping a beer when he blacked out and fell over. He came to on the floor, convinced he was about to die. “I saw my arms moving about but I didn’t know what they were,” he says. “I thought they were sea creatures.”
He recalls the incident, which has left him with life-changing injuries, towards the end of In My Own Words: Hanif Kureishi (BBC One, Monday), a moving and engaging documentary by his old friend Nigel Williams in which the writer revisits his life and career via the medium of old archive footage.
There is much to revisit. Kureishi is one of the last of a generation of British male authors who were more like rock stars than pasty-faced scribblers (no coincidence David Bowie was delighted to soundtrack the BBC adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia). This club also included Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, with whom Kureishi shared a knack for iconoclasm and a talent for rubbing people the wrong way.
Among those with whom he fell out were his own family, annoyed at the thinly veiled caricature of their life as first-generation migrants from Pakistan that he sketched in the The Buddha of Suburbia in 1990. His dad was especially appalled to be portrayed as a cheating husband when, in reality, he was at home “watching Dad’s Army like everyone else”, notes Kureishi.
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The author is a refreshing throwback in that, aged 69, he isn’t much bothered about being liked. He’s a flinty presence, with little interest in nostalgia as he and Williams pore over old footage from his early days as a playwright and the success of My Beautiful Launderette, the 1985 gay love story he scripted and which was directed by Stephen Frears.
The film tells the story of Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a young British-Pakistani man who enters the laundry business and falls in love with his skinhead partner (a baby-faced Daniel Day-Lewis).
He hasn’t watched My Beautiful Launderette since it was released, and looking back now, he sees it as a “celebration of Thatcher-ism in a very surreal way”. The Pakistani-British community he grew up among had the enterprising spirit Thatcher so cherished: they went into business, worked hard, and didn’t complain.
Kureishi says he is “often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman – a new breed as it were”. He certainly felt closer to the London of pubs and soccer matches than to the Pakistan of his father – and was baffled by the Islamist fundamentalism that came bubbling through when his friend Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988. “This was the first time people in Britain would have been made aware of this kind of fanaticism. and how alien and dangerous it is,” he says.
In contrast to many of his peers, Kureishi had the blessing/curse of self-awareness. He walked out on his partner and their children shortly after becoming a father – unable to give up the hedonistic lifestyle of a literary gadfly. He recounted those experiences in 1998′s semi-autobiographical Intimacy – a dazzling exercise in self-loathing. “The main character is a bit of a twat,” he says. “Having kids is a form of self-sacrifice. They are more important than you are.”
The accident has changed him. He is entirely reliant on his now grown-up sons – who set down his thoughts on the page and allow him to continue as a writer. He also has a unique insight into the frailty of the human form – and the importance of having people around you whom you can trust.
“You lie in a zone of death and a zone of illness. You are aware of how close every individual is to being completely vulnerable,” he says. “I’m the same irritating person that I was before, except that I’m entirely dependent on other people.”
