In this interview, acclaimed author Salman Rushdie speaks with Erica Wagner about the deeply personal costs of championing free speech, the process of writing his new memoir, Knife, optimism as a disease, and the comedic foreshadowing of the attack that nearly took his life.
The task you undertook is different from therapy, but what did you gain from writing in this way?
Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor says that you shouldn’t treat illness as metaphor: illness is illness and metaphor is metaphor. And I felt something the same about this: writing is writing and therapy is therapy, and I had a very good therapist. But what it did do, I feel, is it gave me back control of the narrative. So, instead of being a man lying on a stage in a pool of blood, I’m a man writing a book about a man lying on a stage in a pool of blood, and that felt like it gave me back the power, you know? My story. My story that I’m telling in my way. And that felt good.
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