HOW TO BEAT YOUR DAD

I’ve always thought of myself as an ideal example: decadence and discipline. (Some answers to your questions at the bottom).

Dear Readers

Thank you for reading The Kureishi Chronicles. I am still unable to use my hands and am writing, via dictation, with the help of my family.

Your contributions go towards my care, which is considerable. If you enjoy my writing, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Shattered, my new memoir, is available in all book shops and online.

At the bottom, some answers to your questions.

“Pawn to C5,” I say.

Carlo shifts my piece and makes his own move. We haven’t done this for a while. He and I often played chess during lockdown, drinking beer and smoking grass in the early evening after a long cycle ride through a deserted London—strangely beautiful, the bones of the city exposed.

“Sicilian Defence?” he says.

“The Bum-Tickle Offense, actually… I wouldn’t want to be one of those people who uses such terminology.”

“You’re a pompous bastard, Dad.”

As I can’t actually grip the pieces, Carlo moves for both of us. The openings of our games are usually innocuous and pleasant—neither of us wanting to do anything risky or rash—each setting out their pieces into pretty formations, exchanging a few pawns in a kind of handshake.

“Right, I’m moving my queen out of her hive,” Carlo says.

As a kid, my dad beat me at everything—boxing, cricket, chess—and he helped make me self-destructively competitive. I liked to blow myself up before anyone else could. Even recently, just before my accident, I became briefly obsessed with online chess and would play dozens of games against strangers, ensuring that I lost each one, making myself furiously self-hating. Isabella eventually hurried me off to my therapist.

It’s a collaboration, this game, but it’s still competitive. Father and son sitting down for an hour or so and saying whatever comes into their heads. The game itself should be unhurried and thoughtful—a scrap with oneself, a meditation, a mind-art.

But I want to kill him. I want him to suffer—which is why I become agitated.

“Must be strange, having a child and then playing against them. This challenger you’ve created,” Carlo says.

“Children should be challengers,” I say.

A couple of pawns are traded, and Carlo goes on a meaningless excursion with his knight. I’m in a good spot, and he doesn’t know it. I castle and mobilise a useful black-square rook.

“You were depressed when I turned up this morning,” Carlo says. “Normally you’re quite cheery.”

“I’ve got much to be depressed about. The fact that I can’t use my hands isn’t getting any easier.”

“On that move?”

“Knight to F6,” I say. “Have you noticed you can’t turn on the radio or walk down the street without hearing about someone’s so-called mental health?”

“What do you mean?” Carlo says.

“It’s odd that Freudian vocabulary—much derided—has become ubiquitous. These issues have escaped the psychoanalyst’s consulting room and a relatively small coterie of middle-class people who could pay for therapy.”

Carlo says, “But life in the West is depressing. The problems we have are intransigent. People’s lives aren’t improving.”

“Everyday discomfort has become pathologised,” I say.“Diagnosing quotidian anxieties and fears as if there existed a standard of serene mental functioning that each of us could attain if we had the right therapist, self-help book, or parents.”

“But shouldn’t we at least attempt to reach what you call ‘serene mental functioning’? And creating a vocabulary is the first step,” Carlo says.

Carlo creates a mating net with his queen which I foil easily.

“What Freud wanted was to convert people’s symptoms into words. If you were impotent with your wife, for example, it could well turn out on examination that you were either homosexual or that your father had told you the female genitalia could devour your Johnson.”

“What the fuck is a Johnson?”

“An old word for penis,” I say.

“The language of mental health has become a superego demand—convincing everyone they have to talk and talk about their problems—which has become a problem in itself.”

“You sound like Tony Soprano.”

“Why? What does Tony say?” I ask.

“Something like: ‘Nowadays everybody’s gotta go to shrinks and counsellors and talk about their problems.’”

“Top man Tony.”

The game goes cold; both of us are thinking of other things. Carlo feeds me my weed pen and opens the back door, letting in some fresh air.

“Do you know what my first memory is?” Carlo asks.

“What?”

“Crawling around on all fours on a stretch of carpet in the Lyric Theatre, feeling lost. I must have been one or so. You were reading a newspaper in the lobby, having a beer.”

“Sounds like me,” I say.

“You were always a better friend than a dad.”

“Fuck off. I was a great dad.”

“You weren’t.”

“I saw you every single day.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did! And I went to a lot of trouble to do it. My partner at the time did her best to keep me away from you.”

“We’d come round for the weekend and there’d be no toothbrushes,” Carlo says.

“Why didn’t you bring your own fucking toothbrush?”

“I was four,” Carlo says. “And dinner was always Pot Noodle.”

“That’s a lie! Pasta with cheese sauce was my speciality! Anyway, friends are more equal—which I prefer. I still don’t know what sort of thing it is exactly: fathering—a skill? A craft? A gift? I don’t know.”

Carlo pokes at my sparse kingside. I need to retreat or find a new channel. The game has moved from the middle-game into the endgame with a series of rapid exchanges.

I’ve always thought of myself as an ideal example: decadence and discipline. I say follow the pleasure—if not the excitement. Children can steal your spirit and leave you with nothing.

I say: “I remember when you won the 100 metres at school—it was glorious to see! And after, you pushed your bull-necked head into my shoulder—rough and tender you were: my baby—and a man. You knew how I gloried in you.”

“Steady on,” Carlo says.

“You’ve always wanted my attention and approval, and you’ve always had it. It’s wonderful to admire your own child for good reason. But of my three sons, you make me maddest of all. My face gets red; I want to explode. You can turn me into someone I can’t recognise—you always did that.”

Carlo offers me a sip of wine through a straw.

My life’s work now is to stop other people from falling out of love with me, to stop them getting bored or turning away, which is my greatest fear. I have to use financial, moral, and other forms of soft coercion to keep the family rallying every day.

Carlo says: “But mental health is a real thing—so what is good mental health? Can anyone answer that?”

“Freud said it is ordinary unhappiness—as opposed to pathological depression—but I would add to that and say it has to do with competency in the world—and forms of sociability: ‘love and work,’ as he put it—but with a third thing: play. Like this: pointless activity—with a point.”

I take Carlo’s queen but it was a trap, and now there is nothing left but to hurry my impotent little king into the far corner.

I no longer feel the same self-directed anger at losing. That’s ageing for you. Jung said that with some of his patients, their symptoms just disappeared as they got older.

“Resign?” Carlo asks.

“If I could give you my hand I would.”

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IN ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTIONS

SOPHIE: How do you feel about your work being analysed and written about for exams/essays? Do you think it ruins what the work was intended as, or are you interested in the ideas?

HANIF: As you can imagine, I am not keen on having my work taught in an atmosphere as sterile as a classroom. I would much prefer that someone picked up the book, went to bed, and read it for fun. But of course, writers can’t choose who, where and when someone reads their work. I read books at school that have stayed with me my whole life. Books I would never have picked spontaneously. So, I have to say, I am thrilled if teachers present their pupils with more up-to-date works by authors like myself and Zadie Smith, for example. It is important that there are British writers of colour on the curriculum as an example to young people of what the possibilities are when it comes to storytelling.

ESTHER GREEN: I always associate you & your writing with music. What music are you enjoying listening to right now?

HANIF: When I was in hospital, I stopped listening to music entirely, partly because I can’t use my hands, and can’t operate Spotify at all. The other reason is because it would make me feel even sadder than I was already. Now I am back home, I rarely listen to music, whereas before my accident, in my normal life, I would listen to music all day long, as I worked. My life has changed completely, even in these small ways. One day, I went through a door which was shut behind me.

PITKIN’S PAPERS: Is it necessary to have a healthy dose of narcissism to be a good writer?

HANIF: I would imagine that there is no simple, psychological explanation for why one person rather than another becomes a writer. There is so much writing around, and so many authors, it is impossible to privilege one pathology over another. I think of a narcissist as someone who adores his own history, and wishes to show himself in the brightest and best light. But good writing requires more nuance and subtlety; you could for example point to someone like Knausgard, writing so many volumes about himself, as a kind of narcissist. But those books are too good, too original, to be reduced to such a label.

DAVID PARKER: Since you began dictating sentences and working with others to scribe etc, how would you say the act of writing has changed for you as an imaginative process? Is thinking ideas through before setting them down more important now? Is editing after a draft less important? Has it taught you anything new about what makes for good prose??

HANIF: The new method of writing I have adopted since my accident, using one or other family member – mostly Carlo – as my collaborator, means that the nature of the writing has altered as well. For me, the main difference is in not being alone, and having an editor right there in front of you all the time, someone who is critical and intelligent, and who can enable you to say things you haven’t said before. Writers, like everyone else, can become repetitive in their old age, lacking the energy or inclination to think new thoughts. There are, of course, exceptions to this: think of Phillip Roth’s later work.

SELLY DEE: So how do you prefer your friends to say goodbye when you part: a kiss on the cheek (or double kiss), a handshake or something else (presumably, not being patted on the head three times!)

HANIF: I prefer a fist bump. What I hate about the modern world is hugging. Whenever I watch football, which I do most weeks, what I dislike is the amount of hugging I see on the pitch.

There seems to be more and more hugging in contemporary football. If I envisage myself as a professional footballer, as I often do, I have to imagine being hugged by, lets say, Harry Maguire. His body, close upon mine, his lips at my ear. And it is a thought that turns my stomach, and I am pleased that I became a writer rather than a sportsman. There is not much hugging in the literary world, at least not for me, since you’d have to bend down at quite an angle in order to grab me, and pull me to your bosom.  

ANG C: I am an unpublished novelist and unknown playwright. Next year I want to either spend time concentrating on finalising my niche horror novel or devote time to getting my play to stage. I think the novel would be the better choice first but my heart draws me to theatre and working with other people. How can I decide so I don’t flutter between the two and end up achieving nothing?

HANIF: Many writers work in a number of forms. Novelists, for example, writing TV shows. The whole point of writing a novel is that it is entirely your work; there are no actors or directors involved. That would be a good reason to write a novel, other forms are collaborative, and that would be a good reason to work in them.

ALYSSA PALMER: What are your thoughts on writers having to do so much promotion on their releases? In my own experience (and that of writer friends), unless the publisher decides that they want to throw the whole weight of their marketing department behind you, an author is on their own. Any ideas on how to push the publisher for more marketing support?

HANIF: Your question is an interesting one, and very pertinent to what I am going through at the moment, having just published my latest book, Shattered (Hamish Hamilton). The book has received a lot of publicity, on TV, radio and in newspapers, as well as receiving excellent reviews. But it is still difficult to shift the amount of books required to eat into the advance. Most writers are less well-off than you would imagine. But the one good thing to be said for books is that they hang around for a long time. There is Christmas up ahead, and then the paperback, and then another Christmas, and then perhaps the movie of the book. It might be years before a reader picks up a particular book and engages with it, but it doesn’t matter. My first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, recently stage by the RSC at the Barbican, is selling really well at the moment, and has reached a new audience, who seem to be enjoying it.

KEITH STAEL: A trivial question, but was David Bowie really as funny, clever and nice as he seemed?

HANIF: Yes he was. He was full of laughter, David, he wasn’t a miserable person at all.

JULIA: Do you think that your new, more collaborative, method of writing (which has worked so well for Shattered), would also work for a full length work of fiction? Would it make controlling the story threads too difficult to manage? Do you think you would be able to fully know your characters, or is there the danger that you would feel slightly distanced from them?

HANIF: I don’t know the answer to your question – whether you could collaborate and produce a significant fiction – but I would say that some of the blogs I have been writing with Carlo, particularly recently, have come to resemble short stories. We have organised the material to give it a specific shape and density, using fictional techniques – cold opens, dialogue, conflict - to hurry the thing along and make it as dramatic as we can within the constraints of the material. Fiction and non-fiction writing have to be treated the same way.

DEN CARTLIDGE: What are your favourite memoirs or autobiographies? I'm trying to write a memoir at the moment and have always thought (naively, maybe) that reading (the good stuff) widely makes you a better writer, so I'm looking for recommendations in other words.

HANIF: Off the top of my head, since my accident, I enjoyed very much Elton John’s witty and compelling autobiography. Keith Richard’s autobiography, and my favourite, Sebastian Horsley’s Dandy in the Underworld.

MINDFUL WRITING: What's your advice for becoming a writer of non-fiction when you spent most of your early years developing your voice in a very different genre?

HANIF: It sounds to me that you are an interesting and intelligent person, with something important to say about how this country has changed as a result of immigration. And I think that with academic writing about important subjects, it doesn’t matter so much how the work is shaped or presented, what the reader would want from such writing, his ideas and insights into the real world. I read a lot of non-fiction, in fact I rarely ever read fiction at all now, and what I am interested in are ideas and insights into the contemporary situation. I don’t expect the writing to be glamorous, just competent.