With everyone in the picture, Douglas-Fairhurst proceeded to do what he has done ever since he was a child: he read furiously, hoping to make sense of the new world in which he found himself. Scanning his bookshelves, he found a volume he’d bought on the strength of its title alone. The Journal of a Disappointed Manis a memoir, first published in 1919, by the naturalist Bruce Cummings under the pseudonym WNP Barbellion. An account of its author’s experiences of what was then known as “disseminated sclerosis” – Cummings died the year it came out, aged just 30 – it had a powerful effect on Douglas-Fairhurst, one he describes compellingly in Metamorphosis. “Reading someone like him, who goes through a worse version of what I’m going through, is a form of homeopathy,” he says. “You introduce this element of trauma into your life, but at one remove, in a way you can control. It allows you a critical vantage point, enabling you to understand the illness from the inside and the outside simultaneously.” You either struggle against that, or you relax into it, and it turned out that I was one of those who could relax into it

Editor of the Tennyson Research Bulletin, 2002-11, and series editor of the Anthem Press series Nineteenth-Century Studies 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…” 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. Autologous HSCT (aHSCT) begins with the extraction of the patient’s own stem cells and their storage in a freezer. The patient is then treated with high-dose chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy, a process designed to destroy cancerous cells that also removes the ability of the patient’s bone marrow to grow healthy new blood cells. Finally, the stored stem cells are thawed out and reintroduced into the patient’s bloodstream, where over time they replace the old tissue and allow the body to resume normal blood cell production. In effect, the body is given the help it needs to start repairing itself. 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.”If this treatment works, nothing changes. That’s all you want’: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst at Magdalen College, Oxford. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer 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).

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.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. 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 The idea that someone who has been forced to adjust nearly every aspect of their lives to suit the demands of their disease should be grateful may sound strange. Yet I cannot help thinking that for all I have lost in recent years, there are also some things I have gained, such as a better sense of proportion, and maybe even a better sense of humour. (Perhaps deep down they are the same thing.) Every day feels like a new adventure in the world of the possible.

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)

Select a format:

Bladder: no alarms are going off just yet, but I will need to remain in a cat-like state of readiness all day

When the trapdoor opened for Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, he plummeted into a world of MRI scans, a disobedient body and the crushing unpredictability of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. But, like Alice tumbling into Wonderland, his fall did something else. 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. 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? It would have been easy for this Oxford English professor to write a simple book that explores his experience of MS. It would have done well and garnered words like “courageous” and “brave” but this approach is far more interesting. This book is about the life of an artist seeking meaning and motivation in a world that others him and oscillates between witnessing and isolating those that it doesn’t understand.

My polemic of the year is Victoria Smith’s righteously angry Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women 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.