That Joan Didion line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” is ubiquitous because like so much of her work, it gets at an essential truth. But the thing about that quote—the idea that we form narratives out of the things that happen to us—is that it suggests we do it in order to move forward in some way. “In order to live” implies that those stories make life easier, more understandable, maybe even conquerable. Didion is a master at also showing how those stories fail us, and yet there is still a kind of optimism embedded in her words. Didion may have been fragile, her life may have been difficult towards the end, but on the page, maybe in part because of her facility with landing on the mot juste, she always seemed like she could handle it—like she was fundamentally indestructible.
So what happens when you tell yourself stories for a less inspiring reason? When the narrative you form out of the things that happen to you is in fact designed to keep you stuck? Or, my therapist’s preferred term: tangled up. “We tell ourselves stories in order to die” doesn’t have quite the same lift. It’s also not exactly accurate. But there are plenty of us who tell ourselves stories, incessantly, relentlessly, which make it harder to live. We take the things that happen to us, and only see the dark side, even when the people around us keep on trying to extend some light our way. “You do it to yourself,” my therapist told me recently, to which I did not respond (but wanted to): “And that’s what really hurts.“
In our sessions, we have talked about Christina Applegate more than once. He actually brought her up first. He was using her as an example of how your own narrative can affect you. Applegate was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021. A year later she gave an interview to The New York Times in which she said she had noticed some early signs of the autoimmune disease while filming the first season of her show Dead To Me. “I wish I had paid attention,” she said. “But who was I to know?” Then, only a few months ago, on Conan O’Brien’s podcast, she said: “I think that the first thing that I hear from people is, ‘How did you get it?’ Meaning I must have done something wrong in my life to have this disease.” My therapist brought all of this up because of the retrospective quality to it all—Applegate wishing she had done something different, giving air to people asking what she did that led her here. He saw it as someone still living in the past. We’ve all done it; I was doing it at that very moment (hence the example). But his argument to me was that, baseline difficulty aside, what was making things worse was this: You’re not living in the present. You’re not dealing with what’s going on now. Instead, you’re looking at now as deficient because you’re comparing it to an idealized past. Which seems reasonable to me, but, as he explained it, that’s nothing more than a story, a story that keeps telling you the same thing: I was better off before.
I bring all of this up because of Hanif Kureishi’s new memoir, Shattered, based on the diaries he wrote in the immediate aftermath of a fluke accident that left him paralyzed. The book, newly out in paperback in the U.K. and being adapted for the screen by Kureishi and Luca Guadagnino, chronicles in real time how the British bon vivant behind The Buddha of Suburbia and My Beautiful Laundrette suddenly, at 65, became entirely dependent on everyone around him. What it also chronicles, in real time, is a man trying to change the story he tells himself in order to live.
The book opens on Boxing Day 2022. Kureishi has just been for a stroll through Rome (where his girlfriend is from), and is at home drinking a beer when he suddenly feels dizzy and goes to put his head between his legs. The next thing he knows he’s in a pool of blood, neck twisted. It seems he has suffered a “kind of whiplash” which has resulted in a severe spinal cord injury that has left him unable to move. So how is he writing? That is thanks to his girlfriend, his kids, the family that he now has to rely on for everything, including keeping him tethered to the past. “I am determined to keep writing,” he says. “It has never mattered to me more.”
Shattered toggles between Kureishi’s bleak new circumstances and the unexpected new possibilities it affords him. He writes about his experience in the various hospitals he moves in and out of, the various indignities and stupidities and bodily functions he now has to deal with, amid interjections of his trademark humour. “Excuse me for a moment, I must have an enema now,” he writes, and later describing his new mattress being like “lying between the breasts of Jayne Mansfield.” Yet he also writes about the new relationships he forms, the increasing depths of the old ones, the long conversations he calls “innovations.” Every person, every moment, becomes an opportunity for digression into stories about the past, his family, his friends, his work. As much as it is a document of the first year of his accident, Shattered is a document of the things that shaped Kureishi as a person. The undercurrent of creation—of people, of work, of new realities—thrums through this book. “Out of these unexpected breaks, there must be new opportunities for creativity,” he writes. In that sense the book is alive with expectation, sometimes even despite itself and its author. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” Kureishi writes. “Someone new is emerging.”
But the transformation isn’t seamless. “I will have to learn how to inhabit who I have become,” Kureishi writes. “But I do not wish to, there is a struggle in me, I do not want to give up my former self.” It’s a theme that he keeps going back to across his diaries, like a drum beat, like a metronome, like an incantation. “What would I do if I could go back in time?” he asks, and as if to torture him further, a friend brings Kureishi a picture from his 30s, when he was promoting his first novel. “The picture reminds me of all that I have lost,” he writes. At the same time, a different narrative keeps breaking through like a stubborn weed. While Kureishi notes his feelings of “guilt and rage” at being so dependent, he writes of all the offers of help from others, “I am profoundly moved and grateful.” His darkest moments always seem accompanied by acts of self-preservation. “I feel I lack the strength to take this on,” he writes, before a fellow patient rolls into his room, who he implores not to leave him. “Why me?” he asks another friend, who replies, “Why not you?” He writes of a sliver of Italian sky that he can see from his hospital bed, leaving him hopeful, then in the same breath of “a hopelessness I’ve never known in my life.” It’s as though the conversations with friends have seeped in and become conversations with himself. At one point he thinks about killing himself, then acknowledges the “useful reminder” from his kids that his suffering right now is only temporary. “People say when you’re about to die your life passes before your eyes,” he writes, “but for me it wasn’t the past but the future that I thought about—everything I was being robbed of, all the things I wanted to do.”
I always think about George Clooney when I think of this stuff. In 2005, he severely injured his spine on the set of Syriana, causing the kind of chronic pain that became so insufferable he contemplated suicide. As he told GQ in 2020, “a lot of times what happens with pain is you’re constantly mourning for how it used to feel.” This is the comparison to the past that Kureishi keeps falling into, that Applegate keeps bringing up. But Clooney saw “a pain guy” who gave him what amounts to a simple piece of advice—see the pain as normal and it ceases to be a problem. It sounds simple. It is not. As Zach Baron wrote in that GQ story: “Clooney says it felt like ‘euphoria’ when his brain finally tricked itself into feeling normal again.” The point is, Clooney’s pain did not change—he just wasn’t loading psychological pain on top of it, which is to say the pain was no longer a constant reminder of what he had lost. It simply just was.
I’m aware of how frustratingly “mind over matter” this all sounds. But that’s not what this is. The matter remains, the mind is just no longer struggling to fight it. That is itself hard enough. Sometimes it seems impossible. But like Kureishi, sometimes I also see a sliver of possibility. Sometimes I get a taste of the kind of life that no longer requires a story in order to live it. There’s a reason Kureishi stopped writing fiction. Which is not to say he isn’t telling a story, just that his story is now a living, breathing thing, a story of constant creation, and in the last lines of his book, sitting in his wheelchair, dictating to his family, he embodies the words as he speaks them: “We are in constant development, never the same as yesterday. All the time we are changing, there is no going back. My world has taken a zig where previously it zagged; it has been smashed, remade and altered, and there is nothing I can do about it. But I will not go under; I will make something of this.”