The next stage was a scan in an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner: a large plastic tube that looked a bit like a space-age tanning booth, in which I was instructed to remain absolutely still for half an hour while hidden machinery rhythmically banged and whirred around me, using strong magnetic fields and radio waves to produce images in the form of thin slices taken through my brain and spine. Then I did it again, this time after a contrast dye had been injected into my bloodstream to reveal any hidden areas of inflammation. It was a boring but painless hour or so, and for most of it I felt rather as I imagined a baby might in the womb, assuming its mother enjoyed listening to techno music at ear-splitting volume. An interesting experience, I reflected, but surely a waste of everybody’s time.

He finally left hospital at Easter 2019. What’s eerie about this in retrospect (and anyone who reads his book, the first literary account of such a procedure, is bound to feel it) is the way that his isolation – a long pause attended by many masks and gowns – prefigured the pandemic, which would arrive only months later. He nods. “Yes, I’d had many months to prepare for the pandemic – and again, this is going to sound holier than thou, but I think it gave me more empathy for people when it began. I thought: I know what this is like. I’ve rehearsed this. It turns out I’m not a soloist, after all; there’s a whole chorus of people going through the same.” My polemic of the year is Victoria Smith’s righteously angry Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? The first major book event of 2023 was supposed to be the publication of Prince Harry’s long-awaited (OK, opinions may vary) memoir, Spare (Penguin, January). But that was before a certain six-hour Netflix show, as a result of which it seems highly unlikely his literary effort will contain anything we haven’t heard already. So let us, having spared only the briefest of thoughts for his livid publisher, turn our attention instead to some other forthcoming memoirs, in what looks set to be a bumper year for autobiography. At the top of my list are Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Cape, February), a brilliant account of one man’s tilted world following a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, and Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia (4th Estate, April) by Hadley Freeman, which does what it says on the tin with all of its author’s usual wit and insight. I’m eager to read Blake Morrison’s Two Sisters (Borough Press, February), an account of sibling relationships that will be published 30 years after his classic And When Did You Last See Your Father? , while fans of another poet, Don Paterson, should look out for his memoir, Toy Fights: A Boyhood (Faber, January). Douglas-Fairhurst has called the book he has written about his illness Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces – a reference not only to the way his MS has transformed him physically, but a nod also to Franz Kafka’s novella of 1915, in which a salesman called Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find that overnight he has become a giant insect. In the days and weeks after his diagnosis, when things seemed frightening and bleak, Douglas-Fairhurst often thought of poor Gregor. Would his own fate be similar? (Though Samsa is at first cared for by his family, it isn’t long before he becomes a prisoner in his own bedroom, where eventually he dies.) Sometimes, it felt like it would.You may feel that there is already way too much politics in your life right now. But let me whisper it all the same: it seems likely that Johnson at 10: The Inside Story (Atlantic, April), Anthony Seldon’s new book, co-written with Raymond Newell, will be a gripping, if not to say utterly horrifying, read. One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry-Up by Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary (Hodder, August), may be a sight better than the average political memoir, and I’m looking forward to This Is Not America: Why We Need a Different Conversation on Race by Tomiwa Owolade (Atlantic, June). Widening the frame, A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War (Hutchinson, March) by the award-winning journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad has already been likened by William Dalrymple to Michael Herr’s classic Dispatches. My polemic of the year is the deeply researched and righteously angry Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women by Victoria Smith (Fleet, March), a book that could not be more necessary (a sword and a shield) in the current climate. Uh oh, I say, groping it tentatively. This is a bit #MeToo. But what’s this? There’s something… stiff beneath his jeans. “Yes, I’ve started wearing knee pads,” he says. “For when I fall over.” Has he fallen over a lot lately? “No, but it means that when I do, there’s less chance I’ll end up in A&E.” This sounds so worrying and grave – and yet, he is smiling. His MS has, you see, changed his relationship with his body in ways that are – unlikely as this may sound – good as well as bad. His legs, these days, are often obdurate. But better wilful legs (and knee pads) than some other things: “The less the body works, the more you appreciate any bit that still does. My eyes, for instance, have settled down in the last couple of years, which for me is hugely significant. When I ended up in hospital with eyes that weren’t focusing properly, that was very scary. I don’t want to be too Pollyanna about this, but it’s better to be grateful for what you can do than to pine for what you can’t.” This book is a mirror through which to examine the ways in which society has tidied up illness narratives, in this case those of people with MS, to sell, sculpt and shatter realities that only those living with the condition know. It is a powerful exploration of how to deal with loving relationships under the strain of a new serious diagnosis. The book is dedicated to “M” through whom the writer explores the complicated space of love in the face of devastating diagnosis. A darkly comic and moving reflection on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor If this treatment works, nothing changes. That’s all you want’: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst at Magdalen College, Oxford. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

Joan’s MRI scan confirmed the diagnosis: several patches or ‘plaques’ of demyelination were visible in her brain and spinal cord. These plaques tend to become scarred over time, a process called ‘sclerosis’, visible to pathologists at postmortem as grey-pink blobs in the brain. The first neurologist to describe it was Jean-MartinCharcot of the Salpêtrière in Paris, who in 1868 called it ‘sclérose en plaques disseminées’. In German the disease became known as ‘Multiple Sklerose’ and in English ‘disseminated sclerosis’. By the 1950s the anglophone medical community had settled on ‘multiple sclerosis’. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. A darkly comic and moving reflection on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor. On an ordinary day in 2017 a trapdoor opens in the room of an Oxford neurologist’s office and from then on, for Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, nothing is the same. In Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces, the weather mirrors the moment as the author watches “a few dead leaves scurrying for cover”. He sits silently waiting for the words from his doctor that will change his life. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

This began with a first dose of chemotherapy, which meant spending a day being hooked up to a machine that gradually dripped a bag of innocent-looking clear liquid into my veins. It was cyclophosphamide, a highly toxic drug that would kill my blood cells and encourage my stem cells to migrate from my bone marrow into my bloodstream to replace the lost cells. The unique power that stem cells have to heal existing damage in the body means that researchers have long recognised their potential to promote the repair of diseased or defective organs. Haematopoietic stem cells have been used to treat conditions such as leukaemia and lymphoma, in a process that involves severely weakening the patient’s immune and blood system through radiation or chemotherapy, and then transplanting stem cells derived from either the patient themselves or a matched donor’s bone marrow or peripheral blood. This is known as haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). What was going to happen to him? And what, if anything, could be done to prevent it? His neurologist had nothing good to tell him. MS is unpredictable. Each patient’s disease is as unique as a set of fingerprints. He might go blind, or lose his voice, or be incontinent. He might one day need to use a wheelchair, or be unable to feed himself. His thoughts might become confused. No one could say for sure. As for treatments, though individual symptoms can to a degree be managed, the neurologist could offer no pill that would slow down the progress of the disease, beyond the possibly beneficial effect of taking high doses of vitamin D. His treatment was intended to reset his immune system. But it recalibrated so many other things besides: his relationships with other people, and with his surroundings. He has, he believes, become a kinder, more empathic person, and like the writer Dennis Potter, who famously thought, as he was dying of cancer, that the apple blossom outside his window was “ the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom there could ever be”, he finds the world to be so much more vivid now. “When I came out of hospital there was this blooming, buzzing confusion that I write about, and I don’t think that’s ever gone away. I’m more sharply aware of everything. I’m reborn.” He laughs. “When I finally lose my legs, maybe I’ll lie in bed hating the world. I’ll probably be deeply bitter. But for now…” Legs: I can feel my toes, but this early in the morning everything from the hips down is stubbornly refusing to do what I want it to; when I stumble downstairs to make a cup of tea in a few minutes, I will look like Frankenstein’s monster dressed in a bathrobe

I completed my BA at the University of Cambridge in 1990, before spending a year as a Procter Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. In 1992 I started a PhD at Cambridge, which I completed in 1998. I was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Fitzwilliam College in 1995, and the following year I joined Emmanuel College as a Fellow in English. I moved to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 2002 as a Fellow and Tutor and CUF Lecturer in English Language and Literature. In 2015 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Up until this point, he had been experiencing mobility problems to which a previous doctor had responded: “Hmm”. The creeping sense of dread leading up to the next moment is offset only by the sense that the voice speaking is in total narrative control. As a reader, and a person with several chronic illnesses, I want to follow this voice. Despite the omen from Mother Nature, the expectation from the writer is freedom, that all is well, but the narrative flips and a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis arrives. Bladder: no alarms are going off just yet, but I will need to remain in a cat-like state of readiness all day Mood: tantalisingly close to hitting that elusive sweet spot between optimism (the hope that things can always get better) and realism (the understanding that I should just be grateful if they don’t get any worse)ed. with Seamus Perry), Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays (Oxford University Press, 2009)