At times he felt like Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, buried up to her neck or like Prufrock (“how his arms and legs are thin”) or like Robinson Crusoe (“No rest all night, violent pains in my head”). As well as the medical texts he read, he became fascinated by novels and plays in which serious illness plays a major part. For MS, they offered “narrative medicine”. It’s not so much that he’s an Oxford literature professor but that, from childhood onwards, he looked to books for companionship and for lessons in how to live. Metamorphosis shows the value of keeping a diary when you’re ill, as a way of finding order as your life is falling apartĭouglas-Fairhurst’s bookishness is as essential to the story as his MS. “Don’t stop inviting me to things,” he asked friends in a long message on Facebook, “don’t even ask me how I am.” His partner, M, set the right example: rather than maunder or end the relationship, he lightened the air with jokes. When he came out as gay, he’d been direct with people – and now he was again, about MS. Less predictably, he began asking himself “Who are you?” The early part of the book answers that, harking back to his south London childhood, lanky teenage awkwardness and love of acting (“being myself was much easier when I was pretending to be someone else”). Fear of immobility, then death, was unavoidable.
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