Birthday Book Recs 35/50 : Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi
Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi
Birthday Book Recs: 35/50
Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi
Once upon a time, I was in a book club with Zarna Garg, who is now a wildly famous comedian. Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi was her selection, and many of the book club members were pissed. This group was comprised of spouses or partners of Columbia Business School students, and given the demographics of fulltime MBA programs (at least at the time?), we were all in our 20s. Many of us were newly married. (If I recall, there was some drama and subsequent heated email exchanges because someone felt jilted because she and her partner weren’t married and she thought others were making a judgement call on that? Book clubs = drama from the beginning of time.) But Intimacy was Zarna’s pick, and this short novella is about a man and his reflections the night before he leaves his wife. It starts like this: “It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back.” Similar to my experience with Room (bday rec 11), a lot of the book club members were focused just on the plot and how it pertained to their lives (or didn’t want it to, as if it were a hex). In the bigger world outside of this small book club, many reviewers focused on the totally autobiographical (and therefore cruel) nature of the book.
But I was more into the language and mechanics of this compact book. In just 100 pages, Kureishi explores how we become the people we are and how we interlock and interface with others. How the narrator (Jay aka Kureishi) grapples with bridging his upbringing with the person he wants to become. How maybe he isn’t sure who he wants to become. It should be read to glimpse a person who is flummoxed by intimacy — or perhaps doesn’t even want to understand it. No need to like him.
Intimacy was published in 1998, so if anything, read it knowing that it’s autofiction before autofiction became the big thing it is today. I appreciated Zarna foisting something different on us. (And the internet tells me she is still married so, no, reading a book about a thorny subject doesn’t turn you into a different person. That said, I totally get this may be a no-go for some…no book club-esque judgement here!)
You can find all my 50th Birthday Book Recommendations HERE.
originally published on instagram