THE ART OF FICTION NO. 265

Hanif Kureishi - The Paris Review

Dear Readers,

This week, I am sharing an excerpt from my recent interview with The Paris Review.

If you wish to read it in its entirety, please follow the link at the bottom of the page.

As always, if you believe in paying for good writing, and want to help with my recovery, do consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Hanif Kureishi was born in 1954 and grew up in Bromley, in London’s commuter belt, spending his early years above the grocery shop run by his maternal grandparents. His parents, Audrey Buss and Rafiushan Kureishi, had something of an unusual relationship in postwar Britain, as a white working-class Englishwoman and an Indian civil servant at London’s Pakistani embassy. Kureishi started writing as a teenager and by his twenties had come to the notice of the Royal Court Theatre, which staged several of his plays, works that dealt with the British Asian experience, a subject barely represented at the time. In 1987, his debut screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), was nominated for an Academy Award and became one of the most celebrated British films of the decade; the story of a relationship between a skinhead, played by Daniel DayLewis, and a South Asian entrepreneur, played by Gordon Warnecke, was scandalizing not only for its depiction of a gay romance but for its subversion of the Thatcherite rapaciousness sweeping the nation. His debut novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), a 106 Hanif Kureishi bildungsroman about a Kureishi-esque young man making his way in the artistic world of eighties London, cemented his reputation as a central figure in a moment of optimism and national transformation, in which the so-called second generation asserted itself as a cultural force.

Kureishi has three sons: Carlo and Sachin, with Tracey Scoffield, a film producer; and Kier, with Monique Proudlove. He fictionalized his split from Scoffield in his novella Intimacy (1998), which attracted controversy—perhaps amplified by Kureishi’s charming and rather roguish public persona—for its exploration of male desire and irresponsibility. Having warned of the alienation and radicalization of young British Muslims in his second novel, The Black Album (1995), Kureishi turned, in the novels and short stories that followed, to the travails and anxieties of middle-class fathers. His popular screenplays, including a well-loved trio of collaborations with the director Roger Michell, deal, in one form or another, with sex and aging. “When 9/11 happened,” he told me, “I was writing the script for The Mother (2003), in which there was no terrorism but Daniel Craig with his trousers down.”

Our early sessions took place at Kureishi’s Victorian house in Shepherd’s Bush, where the front steps had recently been replaced by a ramp—the first sign, to a visitor, of the changes in Kureishi’s life since a fall on Boxing Day, 2022, left him without the use of his limbs due to severe spinal injuries. He spent much of 2023 in an intensive care ward in Rome, then in three London hospitals. Less than two weeks after the accident, Kureishi began writing about his new condition, his family members acting as amanuenses; he continues to publish weekly newsletters, with Carlo’s help, on his Substack, which has more than thirty thousand subscribers. A newsletter published shortly before one of my visits was a meditation on shame, recounting the experience of bumping into an old acquaintance who, on seeing Kureishi in his electric wheelchair, and the splint that supports the hand he uses to nudge its joystick, patted him on the head three times.

We spoke in the front room, surrounded by bohemian clutter. A hospital bed occupied one corner, next to a table with a computer and a large monitor. Leaning against one wall was a poster for Kureishi’s early play Borderline (1981), and on the others the art of fiction no. 265 107 were prints and posters, including an M. C. Escher image, a photo taken on the set of a Larry Clark movie, and portraits of Borges and Maxim Gorky. On the mantelpiece was a plastic bust of Alex Ferguson, the former manager of Manchester United. One of Kureishi’s carers hovered at a discreet distance while we talked and, at his prompting, fed him coffee through a straw, out of a mug with a picture of himself on the side, a gift from his friend the fashion designer Paul Smith. From time to time his partner, Isabella d’Amico, would appear, at one point to share news of the delivery of three large kippers from a friend in Scotland. Kureishi was preparing for his first public event since his accident, to celebrate the release of his memoir Shattered (2024), and when d’Amico passed on a question from the venue, asking whether he’d prefer to be onstage with his interviewer as the audience arrived, he replied with characteristically mordant humor. “No, I don’t want to sit there like an ass,” he said. “The Rolling Stones don’t go on first and then the audience comes out.”

—Hari Kunzru

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INTERVIEWER

You know, I’ve been thinking of doing a Substack myself.

HANIF KUREISHI

Substack’s a great place. It’s a great opportunity. You can write whatever you like, whatever’s on your mind. You don’t have to go to an editor and say, “Are you interested in me writing x, y, z?” The only problem is that then you’ve got to keep doing it. If you drop off, then the punters are going to fuck off. They want something to pop into their inbox every Saturday afternoon. If you stop for six weeks, they’re gone.

INTERVIEWER

“You’ve taken my five quid this month for nothing.”

KUREISHI

But it suits me. Carlo comes in the morning at ten and stays till 108 Hanif Kureishi one. I’ll say, “I want to write about gentrification,” and he’ll make me focus my thoughts. I published one newsletter yesterday, and now I’ve got to do another one. I don’t know what I’m going to write, but I’ve got to think of something. Maybe I’ll write about you coming to visit, or about me going out to lunch later. There’s a café with a big window where you can look out onto the Goldhawk Road—it’s nuts what you see on the Goldhawk Road. I like the idea of turning relatively small things into stories, because I can’t travel now, I can’t really go anywhere.

INTERVIEWER

Have you always kept a diary of sorts?

KUREISHI

I’ve got one upstairs that I kept from the age of thirteen or fourteen for five years. So if I want to know what I was doing on the twenty-third of July, 1970, or 1971, or 1972, I’ve got all that written down. Things like “Chased by a gang of skinheads around Bromley High Street,” et cetera. I remember reading some of it to Carlo. He was quite shocked. The seventies were a dark period in London. Bromley was full of East Enders who’d moved there during the Blitz. You can ask any person of color what the seventies were like and they’ll remember the violence. You’d be running around in the streets, hiding behind dustbins.

INTERVIEWER

Same as Essex for me. How was school for you?

KUREISHI

I was literally the only brown person at my high school, Bromley Technical. Every day, some cunt would kick me, or someone would say, “Fuck off, Paki scum.” It was one of those old-fashioned places where the teacher would stand at the front and read to you from a book, and you had to write down everything he said. At home, I’d be reading Rolling Stone, reading about music, Vietnam, abortion, feminism. There was really interesting shit going on, none of which ever showed up in class. I got three O levels, then left at sixteen and went to a college attached to an art school to do my A levels. I’ve always considered the day I left to be one of the happiest of my life.

INTERVIEWER

Were there any spaces where you did meet other brown kids?

KUREISHI

My family were the only brown people I knew. But, Hari, that went on for years. I mean, when I’d go to a publishing party in the mid-eighties, there’d basically be no other person of color there, apart from maybe Salman [Rushdie]. You’d look around and think, Where is everyone?

INTERVIEWER

I remember, when I started going to publishing parties in London as a young writer, pretty much every time, someone or other would call me Hanif. There was a picture of me printed in the Observer with the caption “Hanif Kunzru, novelist.”

KUREISHI That’s fantastic, isn’t it!

INTERVIEWER

Did you speak Urdu at home? I never learned Hindi—my father didn’t want to exclude my mother.

KUREISHI

My father spoke Urdu with his siblings, so I understand some. I was in the shop the other day and they were going, “This guy’s a real idiot.” I spent a lot of time with my uncles growing up, because they would come to London for the cricket. They would go to either Lord’s or the Oval or they would watch it on the TV, eating curry, drinking beer, literally for five, six days. It was a bit like a Scorsese film. They were rough, swearing, smoking, putting their feet on the table. My mother didn’t like my uncles particularly. She thought they were really loud.

INTERVIEWER

Did your parents get along?

KUREISHI

They bickered all the time. I never understood why my dad, who was a very charming and intelligent man and good company, liked my mum, but he was always in love with her. I’ve got a lot of beefs about Mum. Tracey and I used to argue about it a lot, because Tracey found her quite charming, but I couldn’t get through to her at all. She was depressed, I would say, lonesome and isolated. She’d got a place at the Royal College of Art—I’ve got some of her paintings here in my house—but she didn’t go. She gave up painting altogether when I was young. I was going to be a twin, but she lost the other child. She used to say, “Thank God there’s not two of you,” but I often wonder whether that contributed to what I thought of as her big dragon’s nest of sadness.

For the rest of the interview, please head over to The Paris Review by following this link:

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/8374/the-art-of-fiction-no-265-hanif-kureishi