Reading this book is an answer to a question you might prefer not to ask: what would it be like, as the middle-aged father of two small boys (an 18-month-old and a six-year-old), to be diagnosed with motor neurone disease? This clear-sighted memoir, with its nod in the direction of fellow sufferer Stephen Hawking’s famous book A Brief History of Time, grew out of an article Joe Hammond wrote for the Guardian in which he described writing cards to his children for future birthdays he would not live to see. No one reading that piece could fail to have been moved by his task. But if this book is written for his sons, as Hammond says it is – it could be seen as an extended version of those birthday cards – what makes it appropriate for us to be reading it? Is it not shameful to be familiarising oneself with tragedy from a comfortable distance?
The sense I get is that Hammond would (in the nicest possible way) like comfortable distances abolished. He makes the point that even if his illness is uncommon, his destination is shared: “Unlike you, perhaps, I know I am dying. And because of that I fear it less.” He approaches his plight with a curiosity that rises above self-pity. Although he can no longer take part in family life as he once did, he never disappears into illness (as many do). And the book itself keeps him connected. What one notices throughout is the ascendancy of the writing: fit and unaffected and strong. And the images he alights upon are brilliant – there is a gallantry to them. At one point, he describes the way in which his body “curled inwards like a fortune-telling fish on a hot palm”. After writing the birthday cards, he beautifully likens the imagined and yet unimaginable future to “a street market in the hours before opening”. When his body first starts to go wrong, he notices himself walking “like a passenger in the aisle of a plane going through gentle turbulence”. At every turn, his witty precision deepens the narrative’s impact. He did not choose his subject, MND chose him. He is a real writer and real writers have to write (he started out as a playwright who took part in a Royal Court studio writers’ group in 2012).
I’d been about to add that he is, stylistically, a safe pair of hands – only the image could not be more inept given that nothing about his body is safe. The opening line reads: “If I could just stop falling over, this would be a funnier book.” He goes on to relate, with tragic slapstick, writing off a kitchen cabinet, collapsing into his son’s cot, being found bleeding in a shower until his wife, Gill, runs in “like a Greenpeace activist to a seal cull”. The family had been living up a mountain in rural Portugal when they got the diagnosis. He says: “This book is everything – the experience of my body as it changes and declines. The experience of saying goodbye to those I love. I’m scared – I know I am.” But more often and in contrast, he achieves an unexpected calm. There is an interesting passage in which he tells us about an episode in his youth, during a depression, in which God spoke to him. Now he states: “I’ve waited all my life to know this peace. To know I am nothing more than this body.”
Autobiographical flashbacks include a fascinating account of the relationship with his parents, particularly with his defective 83-year-old father – subtle and adroit in its dysfunctional sadness. Hammond confesses he grew up learning to be calm as a survival technique: “carefully concealed fear dressed up as serenity”. That strategy would seem to be still standing him in good stead. At the end, what one feels is that this is a book to extend empathy, to ensure one understands what it is to have MND and to witness one man facing it with exceptional courage. It is also a moving reiteration that a “short” history is our human lot. And even though he ends with a bittersweet chapter describing the family’s upbeat move into a sylvan bungalow, it could not be clearer: there is no such thing as happy ever after.
• A Short History of Falling by Joe Hammond is published by 4th Estate (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
