Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces

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This is a very honest account of MS and it is clear the author has encountered many of the issues which people face.

What I needed was laughter,’ Douglas-Fairhurst says, and later, ‘the worst was not, so long as I could still look at it with a comic squint. But he knows there are few better places in which to be ill than an Oxford college (he has been at Magdalen for 20 years).

This is a homage to the healing power of reading as much as to the incredible medical advances of stem cell transplantation.

But he is kind and practical and generous, and those are the things you need if you’re ill – and my book, in part, is a love letter to him. One understands his mistrust of the demeaning face of pity, and mistrusts it, recognising that it is mingled with the fear that the horror might happen to you. 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.It took him deep into his own mind: his hopes, his fears, his loves and losses, and the books that would sustain, inform and nourish him as his life began to transform in ways he could never have imagined. After his transplant, he would need to remain in an antiseptic bubble until his body started to repair itself with the help of his new stem cells. This is a beautifully written memoir- the story of a devastating diagnosis but it is so much more than that. 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.