Love + Hate by Hanif Kureishi Read Free Book Online

– teenagers generate more hate, rage and envy than even the steadiest people can bear. A teenager can turn a fine person into a maniac in ten seconds. The more they need you the more anger they might need to get away – hatred is an important catalyst for change – and you can only have power over those who are dependent on you. You’ll never get anywhere with a teenager byappealing to your own interests, but they usually respond to money, and if you can involve them in something they like, or want to say, they can, for a bit, be good, amusing company.
    There is a lot here for the parent to learn about separation. For what the kid sees as growing up and freedom is, from the angle of the parent, a fatal break-up. During the long divorce of the child’s teenage years, it can feel as if you are slowly being deserted by one of your dearest friends. You will ask yourself what is left now you have almost completed this job. I can recall wondering at the time I left home, in the mid-70s, who my father would discuss literature and sport with.
    Now I must remind myself, since Muslim fathers are very present, that I am the son of a mother too. Not that my mother much enjoyed being maternal; it was all a nuisance. She liked us as an excuse or obstacle, so we could appear to be in the way of something better. Yet when we were gone, nothing new happened. At the time I was leaving home, Mother seemed to become defensive and almost inert, as if she’d lost her vitality under layers of her own body. Television had been a novelty when I was a kid; we were amazed it existed at all. Soon Mum barely moved from the intoxicant of the TV, which she watched with increasing avidity. To me, she had fallen in love with something or, indeed, someone else, an insidious thing, a shadow-world, which appeared to provide no sufferingor condemnation, unlike sex or alcohol, but only a constant, mild level of diversion. Eternally distracted by the only truly living figures in what we misguidedly called the living room, it soon seemed as if television was the single life which could compel her – people on a screen she couldn’t actually reach and didn’t have to talk to. In a way, I had lost both my parents.
    The lesson here might be: you cannot use your kid or your parents as a prop, as a substitute for other relationships, or as a reason for not relating as an adult to other adults. Even parents have to grow up.
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    What will be significant in a life can’t be discovered in advance, or even at the time. Meaning, trauma even, is a later construction arising from a realisation. I mean that people experience some sort of pain or feeling of loss; they know there’s been some inexplicable breach, but they don’t know exactly what it means. A writer, like a dreamer, is an ‘interpreter’ of experience, which makes writing an important form of thought, inscribing an event in the right place in the narrative you’re using at the time, or opening a space for a new one.
    Speaking is easier than writing. There are no ‘creative speaking’ classes, though there should be. The danger and virtue of speaking is incontinence or spontaneity – speaking as a form of unpredictable performance. Mostpeople can speak, they rarely stop, they need to get it out. You can’t really plan a conversation; it’s an improvisation made by at least two, and truth escapes through one’s fingertips. Someone can pull you through your defences, like picking a winkle.
    Writing appears to be more manageable. Writing, like reading, is usually done in solitude, and there is nothing natural about it. Since people are their own obstacles and like to undermine themselves, it is an effort in overcoming. To write is to find out if you can be less afraid of yourself, less inhibited – freer, wilder, and yet able to structure your work. A thought occurs; you put it down, and revise it a dozen times, and then another ten. Most people can’t write well; it’s awkward, slow work, when