The book's central formal gamble is the collaboration itself. Kureishi, tetraplegic since a Boxing Day 2022 fall, can't scroll a phone or type a word. So each essay is the product of a conversation with his son Carlo, transcribed and shaped between 10am and 1pm, originally posted to Substack before being gathered here. The result isn't the warm father-son memoir that premise might suggest — it's more friction than tenderness, which is exactly why it works. An argument about what to write becomes a disquisition on art versus politics, Kureishi insisting on beauty, Carlo insisting the only subject is Gaza. The gossip is as good as advertised. Taking acid with Billy Idol, a schoolmate. David Bowie calling at 2am with urgent questions about serial killers while Kureishi stood in his underpants, new father of twins. Dennis Hopper at the 1992 Venice film festival — a disappointing square. Isabelle Huppert at Cannes 2009, sweet and intelligent ally in what Kureishi calls a frantic, crazy party you could never leave. These aren't name-drops for their own sake; they are the texture of a vanished life that Kureishi allows himself to miss without being destroyed by the missing. The care-home comedy running underneath is extraordinary. Carers fighting in the kitchen. A woman matter-of-factly telling Kureishi she really doesn't like penises as she washes his. Someone always has a finger up his arse. These scenes are played as farce, not pathos, which is the only honest register available: sentimentality here would be a betrayal of the reality. Kureishi's gift, always present in his best fiction — the clear-eyed quality that can border on cruelty — has been repurposed from anatomy of desire to anatomy of dependency, and it cuts just as cleanly. The re-punking project deserves its own paragraph. Diamond stud from Westfield, the same piercing that enraged his father at 17. A Maga cap worn to the farmers' market in Shepherd's Bush, hoping for vitriol, getting nothing. These quiescent scumbags only cared about themselves and their shopping, he grumbles. Being a fascist is far less thrilling than I imagined. This is not a political position — it's a man staging minor provocations to test whether sensation is still available to him. It mostly isn't, which is the joke. The Substack origin matters. Kureishi revels in writing that gets written back to — discursive, energised by response, freed from the weight of the novel form. That freedom shows. These essays move fast, pivot hard, and are not especially interested in resolving their contradictions. The book ends with his marriage to Isabella, Elton John arriving in a cherry-red Bentley. Kureishi is rawdogging life, he tells his son Sachin — in the gen Z sense, doing it without distraction, compelled to be present. Sex is difficult. Desire — for everything — remains. The book looks death and decay in the face and asks: is that all you've got? It's the right question, and he earns the asking.
