Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces

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And there is mischievous laughter breezing throughout the book, forbidding any maudlin false sentiment. No one would be able to enter his room without first disinfecting themselves in a decontamination area. But, after all that is a socially common response in most people in the presence of serious illness or bereavement. You either struggle against that, or you relax into it, and it turned out that I was one of those who could relax into it. Reading', he suggests, 'allows us to work out who we are by imagining who else we might have been, or who we might yet become.

Radio and television appearances include Start the Week and The Culture Show, and he has also acted as the historical consultant on TV adaptations of Jane Eyre, Emma, Great Expectations, the BBC drama series Dickensian, and the feature film Enola Holmes. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. it persuasively builds the case for the ability of stories to offer hope and solace; to help us become ourselves, over and over, even in extremis. This is a homage to the healing power of reading as much as to the incredible medical advances of stem cell transplantation. A series of boxes had to be ticked – involving MRI scans and a lumbar puncture – before he was accepted for treatment.Since then, one drug has been approved by Nice [the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence], albeit not a very effective one. Parallels with the life and writings of this fellow traveller in the realm of compromised faculties run through the book in counterpoint to the progress of his own disease, but there is a stylistic parallel too. Yet, as with everything Douglas-Fairhurst does, it's also beautifully written, with great humanity, and wit (occasionally laugh-out-loud funny), and it doesn't dodge the serious business of being at the mercy of one's own increasingly self-defeating body.

But he knows there are few better places in which to be ill than an Oxford college (he has been at Magdalen for 20 years).These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

In that environment you’re just an object to be filled with drugs, and drained, poked, prodded, moved around. An account of living with multiple sclerosis that is both deeply literary and painfully honest as it charts his journey into ill health. In the days and weeks after his diagnosis, when things seemed frightening and bleak, Douglas-Fairhurst often thought of poor Gregor. Metamorphosis is the best book I have read about multiple sclerosis , and that is because it is about so much more.It persuasively builds the case for the ability of stories to offer hope and solace; to help us become ourselves, over and over, even in extremis. It took him deep into his own mind: his hopes, his fears, his loves and losses, and the books that would sustain, inform and nourish him as his life began to transform in ways he could never have imagined. His books include Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist , which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland , which was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, and The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World . M, too, was sanguine about what might lie ahead – Douglas-Fairhurst carefully outlined a series of increasingly grim scenarios, beginning with whether M would be willing to cut his toenails for him – and he was also funny about it, ready to take the piss. Amongst many other devastating reassessments of his life and his place in the world, Douglas-Fairhurst was faced with the question of how to tell family, friends and colleagues what was happening to him.