Dear Readers, my dispatches will always be free and open to everyone. I am unable to use my hands and I’m writing, via dictation, with the help of my family. If you could become a paid subscriber and support me, it’d mean so much. Sushila was walking in the park when she saw Mateo and his male assistant sitting on a bench. As she approached them, she noticed that Mateo was dishevelled in his black suit; in fact, he was very drunk, which was unusual for him at that time of day, late afternoon. She greeted him, kissing him on both cheeks, and he asked if she would sleep with him. Why hadn’t they slept together? he went on. They could do it right now, at his place, if she had time. He had always found her sexy but had been too nervous to mention it.
I'm enjoying the male perspective on relationships, and the male perspective on female perspectives, the real predicaments of our human condition. Understanding one another is not something to take for granted. And certainly goodwill isn't.
I regret that it has taken your sending these lovely missives for me to read your writing. I have always associated you with the marvellous My Beautiful Launderette. I love your writing. It is brave and funny and compelling. I hope things are going ok for you (Under the circumstances of course, which are horrid!).
Very compelling. Another reader mentioned the New Yorker- and while I was reading this I thought of the piece I read a few days ago in the New Yorker, Agnes Callard's Marriage of the Minds- two analytical ways of looking at seemingly (but are they really?) anomalous relationships.
I feel like I know Mateo so well, too well - the insult and trespass that make defending myself to be seen as overstepping the mark. Ha, like Len, perhaps I am repressed, confused and left at the airport, pointing a judgemental finger at the departing flights. This representation of mounting conflict left me outside the staffroom again.
Muchas gracias, Hanif Kureishi. Espero que la rehabilitación esté funcionando. Gracias por todo, por estas entradas al dictado y por tus libros. Acabo de leer Nada de nada y ahora estoy con Amor+ruido. Te tengo presente en mi corazón y en mi mente. Un abrazo.
A few days ago I was listening to a podcast. I won't mention the name, as it is associated with a website that many people find objectionable. The host was making fun of a man's online dating profile, which was so poorly judged that it seemed like a subconscious act of self-sabotage; one that was unlikely to garner a single request for a date, or elicit any emotion in a viewer beyond offhand disgust and a well-conditioned response to swipe left.
The critique of this person's total absence of self-awareness evolved into a discussion of a breed of men who claim to want nothing more from a woman than to cuddle in front of some semi-obscure anime show, and how disingenuous these people are when it comes to concealing their true intentions; at least the men who explicitly ask for sex are more honest regarding what they want...
Between these two poles of desire, there are lines of courtship: For example, a simple evening walk between two branches of Waterstones, perhaps incorporating a discussion of the broad themes at play in the works of Jane Austen.
Meeting up at one of the nicer Starbucks, and discussing the direction of the Labour party over seasonal lattes, might generate a static erotic charge sufficient to raise the fibres on your M&S cardigans, and perhaps also the hairs on the back of your neck.
If these testings of the romantic waters don't appeal, then what about a reading of the poetry of Stevie Smith in a drained lido? You can't spell libido without lido.
I enjoyed this story because, unlike my response to it, there is no preamble; nothing that sounds like the writer getting his papers in order: A man immediately asks a long-standing female friend – the wife of a man who he is also friends with – if she will have sex with him. Throw a rock like that into still waters and it will give you ripples for decades.
One quality that I admired in The Spank (a play that was recently serialised on this Substack) and that is evident in this story too, is the way that it expands with the gradual inevitability of a freshly-unwrapped foam mattress. Like the aforementioned mattress, you are never getting it back in the bag. The stimulus that sets events in motion (in this case the twice-repeated proposition) is the story's irresistible force in search of an immovable object that probably doesn't exist.
It's like a maths problem wrenched from the objective world of numbers and allowed to run amok. No neat integers – just trailing decimal places and equations half in and half out of brackets.
It begins with two friends and something that upsets the balance between them. As more and more people become involved, the number of variables and possible outcomes increases at a bewildering pace. Different games are played, out of sequence with one another, on the same board. Justifications are rephrased; positions are superficially re-evaluated.
At the heart of all this is an uncomfortable truth: There is the potential for somebody within your circle of friends to do something so destructive to the harmony of the group that it transforms every individual and changes the web of relationships forever. You can't go back. Maybe you feel you can't live with it either, but you have to.
There is a line that I wrote down because it carries a lot of resonance:
“Len said that self-destructive things were what people most enjoyed doing.”
I think also that, as people get older, the energy and/or the willingness to maintain a façade, or to care too much about what other people think, can go into irrevocable decline. Old women clothe themselves from head to foot in purple. Old men adopt the Charles Bukowski fashion of wearing a bathrobe – unfastened at the front, while standing on the front porch.
One of my parent's friends took a couple of small items from their home the last time they visited. It is hard to know how to evaluate a sudden challenge to a long-standing friendship; even harder to know how to respond.
I read, in fact, I heard your voice, read this story in the New Yorker. Its beauty is the economy of words that convey such a unresolvable dilemma between friends, the tension between expressing sexual desires between males and females, the conflict of this era, if you will. Recently, I heard an interview about desire/love from a Latin American woman, and then the views of her man: For Valentines Day, she wanted flowers, chocolates, a special gift and an invitation to a lovely evening in a fine restaurant. In the meanwhile, he said, she can knock on my door, naked, but bringing plates of food she made. I thought Geez we are eternally incompatible.
I hope you are seeing progress. I don’t forget to pray daily for you.
I knew it the second I started reading that I had first seen these people in The New Yorker! I loved this story so much. I remembered it from 2019. Thank you so much for reprinting it here!
I'm enjoying the male perspective on relationships, and the male perspective on female perspectives, the real predicaments of our human condition. Understanding one another is not something to take for granted. And certainly goodwill isn't.
I regret that it has taken your sending these lovely missives for me to read your writing. I have always associated you with the marvellous My Beautiful Launderette. I love your writing. It is brave and funny and compelling. I hope things are going ok for you (Under the circumstances of course, which are horrid!).
A San Francisco reader who today arrived in London, could not ask for a more valuable gift from you. Thank you for this delight, Mr. Kureishi!
Very compelling. Another reader mentioned the New Yorker- and while I was reading this I thought of the piece I read a few days ago in the New Yorker, Agnes Callard's Marriage of the Minds- two analytical ways of looking at seemingly (but are they really?) anomalous relationships.
I feel like I know Mateo so well, too well - the insult and trespass that make defending myself to be seen as overstepping the mark. Ha, like Len, perhaps I am repressed, confused and left at the airport, pointing a judgemental finger at the departing flights. This representation of mounting conflict left me outside the staffroom again.
Muchas gracias, Hanif Kureishi. Espero que la rehabilitación esté funcionando. Gracias por todo, por estas entradas al dictado y por tus libros. Acabo de leer Nada de nada y ahora estoy con Amor+ruido. Te tengo presente en mi corazón y en mi mente. Un abrazo.
I feel like I read this in The New Yorker a few years ago. Is that possible?
Brilliant A rewarding read.
A few days ago I was listening to a podcast. I won't mention the name, as it is associated with a website that many people find objectionable. The host was making fun of a man's online dating profile, which was so poorly judged that it seemed like a subconscious act of self-sabotage; one that was unlikely to garner a single request for a date, or elicit any emotion in a viewer beyond offhand disgust and a well-conditioned response to swipe left.
The critique of this person's total absence of self-awareness evolved into a discussion of a breed of men who claim to want nothing more from a woman than to cuddle in front of some semi-obscure anime show, and how disingenuous these people are when it comes to concealing their true intentions; at least the men who explicitly ask for sex are more honest regarding what they want...
Between these two poles of desire, there are lines of courtship: For example, a simple evening walk between two branches of Waterstones, perhaps incorporating a discussion of the broad themes at play in the works of Jane Austen.
Meeting up at one of the nicer Starbucks, and discussing the direction of the Labour party over seasonal lattes, might generate a static erotic charge sufficient to raise the fibres on your M&S cardigans, and perhaps also the hairs on the back of your neck.
If these testings of the romantic waters don't appeal, then what about a reading of the poetry of Stevie Smith in a drained lido? You can't spell libido without lido.
I enjoyed this story because, unlike my response to it, there is no preamble; nothing that sounds like the writer getting his papers in order: A man immediately asks a long-standing female friend – the wife of a man who he is also friends with – if she will have sex with him. Throw a rock like that into still waters and it will give you ripples for decades.
One quality that I admired in The Spank (a play that was recently serialised on this Substack) and that is evident in this story too, is the way that it expands with the gradual inevitability of a freshly-unwrapped foam mattress. Like the aforementioned mattress, you are never getting it back in the bag. The stimulus that sets events in motion (in this case the twice-repeated proposition) is the story's irresistible force in search of an immovable object that probably doesn't exist.
It's like a maths problem wrenched from the objective world of numbers and allowed to run amok. No neat integers – just trailing decimal places and equations half in and half out of brackets.
It begins with two friends and something that upsets the balance between them. As more and more people become involved, the number of variables and possible outcomes increases at a bewildering pace. Different games are played, out of sequence with one another, on the same board. Justifications are rephrased; positions are superficially re-evaluated.
At the heart of all this is an uncomfortable truth: There is the potential for somebody within your circle of friends to do something so destructive to the harmony of the group that it transforms every individual and changes the web of relationships forever. You can't go back. Maybe you feel you can't live with it either, but you have to.
There is a line that I wrote down because it carries a lot of resonance:
“Len said that self-destructive things were what people most enjoyed doing.”
I think also that, as people get older, the energy and/or the willingness to maintain a façade, or to care too much about what other people think, can go into irrevocable decline. Old women clothe themselves from head to foot in purple. Old men adopt the Charles Bukowski fashion of wearing a bathrobe – unfastened at the front, while standing on the front porch.
One of my parent's friends took a couple of small items from their home the last time they visited. It is hard to know how to evaluate a sudden challenge to a long-standing friendship; even harder to know how to respond.
Dearest Hanif,
I read, in fact, I heard your voice, read this story in the New Yorker. Its beauty is the economy of words that convey such a unresolvable dilemma between friends, the tension between expressing sexual desires between males and females, the conflict of this era, if you will. Recently, I heard an interview about desire/love from a Latin American woman, and then the views of her man: For Valentines Day, she wanted flowers, chocolates, a special gift and an invitation to a lovely evening in a fine restaurant. In the meanwhile, he said, she can knock on my door, naked, but bringing plates of food she made. I thought Geez we are eternally incompatible.
I hope you are seeing progress. I don’t forget to pray daily for you.
With admiration,
Tu lectora Ruth
Really really like this. It achieves - just that! Thank you for surprising me and making me think ⭐️Now this would be a great play ⭐️She said.
Lovely again, Hanif… wheels within wheels. Even prone, you're in the zone... Thanks.
I knew it the second I started reading that I had first seen these people in The New Yorker! I loved this story so much. I remembered it from 2019. Thank you so much for reprinting it here!
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/22/she-said-he-said