Stephen Fry wants us all to know that he did not have a fall. He did fall last year, that's true, but it was not "a fall", he told Brendan O’Connor. In fact, the writer, actor and polymath walked off a stage and dropped down onto concrete, breaking his leg, his hip, his pelvis and some ribs. He’s fine now, he says, because he did everything his physiotherapist told him to do. He also took the oxycontin his doctor gave him, despite its well-documented addictive qualities:
"I saw Michael Keaton in Dopesick, you know, and I read the book Empire of Pain about the Sackler family and this, this is destroying parts of America, great swathes of the country are being decimated by this awful addiction to this dreadful opiate."
The decision to take the "dreaded opiate" was taken after his surgeon told him that without it, he would be in a great deal of pain for many months and would have a far, far longer road to recovery than with it. And, as it happened, Stephen – aside from pain relief – got no pleasant effects from the oxycontin at all.
"It just made my skin incredibly itchy and I just felt stupid, rather than luxuriating in a pleasant stupor, it was just stupid stupor, so I was very pleased to get off them, actually."
Odyssey is the fourth book in Fry’s Greek Myths Retold series, after Mythos, Heroes and Troy. The new book tells the story of how Odysseus leaves Troy to travel home to Ithaca – a journey that takes 10 years. Stephen is a great admirer of Odysseus:
"What’s so great about Odysseus as a Greek hero is he’s not all butch, hench, warrior. He’s a thinker. He came up with the Trojan Horse [...] he comes up with all kinds of clever ideas. He’s also curious, which is almost a new human quality. He wants to know how other people live. He’s an explorer as well as an adventurer."
Of course, Stephen Fry is famously busy in many different areas and as well as the new book, he’s made a documentary on mental health during wartime, which involved him visiting Ukraine to talk to soldiers and civilians who’ve been living through war since the Russian invasion began in February 2022. He spoke to Brendan about how soldiers often become dependent on the curious camaraderie that happens during war:
"The soldiers, as soldiers so often do, use humour and the veery strong camaraderie that is engendered by fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with someone on the same side. You know, you – a kind of new quality descends. Our word is camaraderie."
Fry is the president of the mental health charity Mind in the UK and he was invited to Ukraine to share his experience of mental health challenges with the people whose lives have been under attack and threat of attack for more than two years. He spoke to a woman who’d lost her husband in the fighting two weeks previously and she told him that her young daughter still WhatsApps her dead father:
"Which is like, you know, people have done since time immemorial, is talk to people they know are dead. My mother talks to my dead father around the house. It’s perfectly natural and expected. It’s just rather weird when you hear it’s WhatsApping instead."
Fry’s own mental health issues have been largely in the public domain since 1995, when he disappeared during the run of a play he was in following a breakdown. He subsequently made two television programmes detailing his bipolar disorder and he spoke to Brendan about how undiagnosed mental health issues can ruin lives, often, he says, because no one has considered that a person may have an illness:
"If it’s a sugar illness you think of diabetes, if they’re not breathing properly, you think it’s asthma, maybe they have an asthmatic issue and it’s understood. But when it’s the mind, you think it’s personality or they’re just a bad person or a weird person, or they’re just being silly."
One of the leading causes of asthma in children is pollution in the air and Fry draws a comparison when it comes to mental health with what we see on social media:
"Maybe we should recognise too that pollution in our culture, in social media and in society and in all kinds of ways is an equivalent for mental health problems that needs to be addressed."
Odyssey by Stephen Fry is published by Michael Joseph.
Stephen Fry into Ukraine can be found on YouTube.
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
