Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
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From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, how life can change in a second. Hanif Qureshi's writing career got off to a remarkable start after briefly writing porn to make a living. His first screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette, was nominated for an Oscar. In 2022, he fell, lost consciousness, and when he came to, he saw these objects he didn't recognize until he realized they were his hands.
But I had no agency over them. I thought that they were, you know, sort of live creatures, curled live creatures.
We'll talk about life before and after the fall. Also, journalist Clay Risen takes us back to the anti-communist frenzy of the post-World War II era. Risen sees a through line running from that era to our own. And TV critic David Bianculli reviews the new mystery series Ludwig. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. I first became aware of Hanif Qureshi when the 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette was released. He was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay about a side of contemporary England that had rarely been explored on screen, Pakistani immigrants and their children. The film was a lively romantic comedy about gay love, family, racism, and punk rock.
It was directed by Stephen Frears and co-starred Daniel Day-Lewis as a young man in a relationship with the son of a Pakistani immigrant. Qureshi has since written other screenplays and novels, including The Buddha of Suburbia. His new memoir, called Shattered, begins in 2020 after a fall that injured his spinal cord, leaving him unable to move his arms or legs. He describes being unrecognizable to himself, disconnected from his body, totally dependent on others. feeling helpless and humiliated, dealing with rage, envying other people who could do even basic things like scratch an itch. While spending too much time on his back staring at the ceiling, he reflected on earlier periods of his life. He shares those reflections in his book.
He spent a year in hospitals before he was able to return home with round-the-clock caregivers. He started writing the memoir just days after the accident by dictating to one of his sons. The book's narrative is occasionally interrupted by asides like, excuse me for a moment, I must have an enema now. Qureshi is the son of a British mother and a father who emigrated from Pakistan in the late 1940s. Hanif Qureshi, welcome back to Fresh Air. We first spoke in 1990 on Fresh Air, and you've been on two times since then, so welcome back. How are you now? How much movement do you have?
I'm thrashing my arm about a bit now as I speak to you, but I can't use my fingers. I can't grip. I couldn't pick up a pen or anything like that. I can move my shoulder. I can move my legs a bit. Obviously, I'm in a wheelchair. I can't stand up. But I can't actually use my hands. So I'm around the clock dependent, as you put it earlier. But I'm stronger than I was. And I have physio every day. And so I'm stretched out. I move a bit. But I think this is pretty much where I'm going to remain from now on.
And physio is physical therapy.
Yeah, I have the physio every day. Someone comes to the house and I stand up in a standing machine and they stretch me out, manipulate my fingers and my feet and so on so I don't deteriorate. That's the main thing. I don't want to get worse. I'm doing a lot of stuff at the moment. This morning I was writing here at my kitchen table with my son Carlo doing my blog. We're writing a movie based on my memoir, Shattered. So, you know, it's a full working day for me.
And your arm is strong enough to maneuver the controls of your motorized wheelchair.
Yeah, I buzz around my house. I can go out on the street. Obviously with somebody else and I can go up and down the road into coffee shops and I have lunch and I can do stuff. So it's not as bad as it might have been.
So I'm trying to figure out what happened. You were dizzy and then you woke up in a pool of blood.
Yeah, that's the story. I've been unwell with a stomach infection. And I've been taking a lot of painkillers and antibiotics and suppositories, all kinds of other stuff. So I was very weak. So I was at Isabella's apartment in Rome.
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