Fact vs fiction: Sister accuses writer Kureishi of selling family

LONDON, May 9: Lucy in Woody Allen's new film "Deconstructing Harry", holds a gun up to the successful writer Harry and says , &qu...

LONDON, May 9: Lucy in Woody Allen’s new film "Deconstructing Harry", holds a gun up to the successful writer Harry and says , "You’ve taken our lives and turned them into gold .. literary gold". Lucy, hysterical and outraged, like every other character in the film with the exception of Harry, echoes what many people whose stories have been turned into "fiction" feel. Some speak out and are bruised by their encounter with a world that rates the imaginative reconstruction of reality higher than the reality of "small" people.

This week it was Hanif Kureishi’s sister, Yasmin’s turn. Yasmin said that her brother had sold her family "down the line". She wrote, in a letter to The Guardian, that if her family’s history had to become public she would not stand by and let it be "fabricated for the entertainment of the public or for Hanif’s profit".

Yasmin takes up issues with her brother not merely for his thinly disguised autobiographical references in his first novel, Buddha of Suburbia, but also for theimage about his past that he portrays in newspaper interviews. Yasmin Kureishi’s letter to the editor in The Guardian seeks to correct the impression that her brother created in an interview last week of a working class family, and an unsuccessful and bitter father. She says that his description of her family’s working class roots are fictitious. Their grandfather was not "cloth cap working class", their mother never worked in a shoe factory, and their father, she says, was not a bitter old man.

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Her most cutting remarks refer to Hanif Kureishi’s claim that he was close to his father who was proud of him.

In the interview, Kureishi said that his father had been delighted with the publication of "Buddha of Suburbia". "He always said to me that film was not a form for a real writer," he said.

Yasmin Kureishi wrote to The Guardian: "My father was angry when the Buddha of Suburbia came out as he felt that Hanif had robbed him of his dignity, and he didn’t speak to Hanif for about ayear."

Associates feel that the fact that Yasmin chose to make her criticism in public reveals the deep anger in the Kureishi family over what Hanif Kureishi presents as fiction and his family sees as only nominally disguised biography.

Neither Kureishi nor his publisher were available for comment.