He didn’t want to be a doctor, but he became one. He didn’t want to be a straight married man, but he became one: he married a woman. He plotted adultery – he took a comedy gig in New Zealand so he could go to a gay sauna – and was raped there. He developed bulimia after a fellow doctor – a psychiatrist no less – called him “a big lad” when they slept together. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

Undoctored by Adam Kay review: the real pain behind This Is

Behind Kay’s intensely critical voice – the one I objected to in This Is Going to Hurt, when it faced his female patients – the voice that whirrs on, presumably full time in his head, is his mother’s. Perhaps it is artistic licence, perhaps exaggeration, but he presents his mother as intensely critical, oblivious to his pain. Though medicine broke him, she yearned for him to return to it, as if she could not hear. He needed a microphone.THIS IS GOING TO HURT was the bestselling non-fiction book of the century – a frank, funny and furious look at the brutal realities of life in the NHS.

Adam Kay on new book Undoctored and This Is Going To Hurt Adam Kay on new book Undoctored and This Is Going To Hurt

That’s what Kay does: bodies exploding. But Undoctored is also – and I do not know how conscious this is – an exploration of the comic personality type. Comics explode too: with words; with rage. Stand-up is both diagnosis of pain and cure: the fury and the laughter that soothes it. I’m not surprised he wanted to bring babies into the world: he is all in pieces. I now see Kay’s attempt at medicine as a great act of transference: to heal others at the expense of himself; to birth others who would be happier than himself, in a kind of thwarted renewal.

It opens with a nightmare: his recurring nightmare of a baby he cannot save. But that is only the first of his agonies. His prat falling is vast in its scope, the self-destruction of an artist. Now I understand him better, I understand his cruelty. He never extended kindness to himself. This book is breathtakingly sad, and I suspect that will anger him, too.