Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces

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As he says to his students at the end of his introductory lecture at the beginning of each academic year, literature is not a mirror, rather it is ‘a lens we could use to refocus our understanding of the world. Elsewhere the giggles bubble up from fantastical figurative language, comparable to Dickens’ zany similes and metaphors.

His books include Becoming Dickens (2011), which was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize, The Story of Alice (2015), which was shortlisted for the Costa Prize, and Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces (2023).

What he [Douglas-Fairhurst] gives us isn't just the story of an illness but a story about the importance of stories. While it was entirely possible that 20 years could go by and I wouldn’t notice any difference, it was also possible it could be the trigger for all kinds of disastrous things happening to my body. He has also acted as the historical consultant on BBC productions of Jane Eyre, Emma, Great Expectations and Dickensian, and both of the Enola Holmes films for Netflix. This is a beautifully written memoir- the story of a devastating diagnosis but it is so much more than that.

The white lesions revealed by his MRI scan suggested it was likely his central nervous system had already suffered permanent damage. In his lovely, book-lined room in Magdalen College, Oxford – open a window, and you may hear the sound of a deer coughing in the mist – Douglas-Fairhurst, a fiftysomething professor of English whose studies of Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens have won literary prizes, and who has acted as the historical consultant on, among other productions, the TV series Dickensian and the Enola Holmesfilms, gamely waves an ankle at me.

Too often, us middle-aged blokes with PPMS (the one that just gets progressively worse) get forgotten amidst the mass swirl of the c. 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.

But even as he read, and took solace in that reading, there was no ignoring the fact that his own disease was developing rapidly, symptoms that had previously been content to remain in the background now thrusting themselves wholeheartedly upon him. And, above all, it's a darkly comic and moving reflection on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain.

Other authors include Beckett, Burgess, Joyce, Keats, Tennyson, Heine – among many, many others – and, of course, Kafka – varifocal lenses on other worlds. No one would be able to enter his room without first disinfecting themselves in a decontamination area. Within weeks, he deteriorated further – had blurred vision for an hour when he woke up, fell over in the street by the Bodleian Library, felt electric shocks tasering his spine if he bent his neck. This is a homage to the healing power of reading as much as to the incredible medical advances of stem cell transplantation. It wasn’t clear the disease definitely would get worse, or how quickly it would if it did,” he says, handing me a slice of homemade fruit cake.