For a long time, comedian/writer Adam Kay “was mystified why the body isn’t one of the things kids are obsessed with, in the way they’re obsessed with space and dinosaurs”.
Kay’s Anatomy is set to change that. After two bestselling medical memoirs for adults, Kay’s aiming this book at kids, exploring and explaining every system of the body, accompanied by his digestively-disturbed Airedale terrier, Pippin.
“Look, I get it,” he writes. “When you’re given a new toy, the last thing you want to do is read the instruction manual — you just want to start playing with it. But you’ve had your body for years and years now… It’s time to finally open the instructions.”
Illustrator Henry Paker brings out the personality of each organ —affectionately-tetchy married-couple lungs, reclusive appendix.Kay re-wrote the audiobook as dialogue for a starry cast, including Sandi Toksvig as the brain.
One fact in the book even surprised other doctors. “I sent it to four close friends, just to make sure I hadn’t got the number of ribs wrong or anything, and everyone came back and said ‘I didn’t know there was a name for that!’” It was gound (eye gunk).
Kay takes gunk in his stride, having grown up in a houseful of medics, where innards were on the dinner-conversation menu. Early photos show him equipped with doctor’s bag and Fisher Price stethoscope, though he is rueful.
“Being interested in the body is different from wanting to be a doctor and to be honest I probably confused the two,” he says, reflecting that no Jewish parent is going to put their kid off becoming a doctor. “I didn’t realise the emotional toll.” Reassuringly, “my son the author” is also on the parental approved list.
Which is harder to deliver, a book, or a baby? “It’s much more time-consuming to deliver a book — but you don’t need any training… If you’re doing a Caesarean, it’s probably better that the person is trained.”
Judaism is “a cornerstone” of Kay’s identity, though he’s “not the most observant Jew in the UK (unless my parents are reading this in which case I absolutely am). I reckon in an emergency, with about an hour’s practice I could probably do my barmitzvah bit…”
No Torah emergency yet, but he is performing This Is Going To Hurt Live, Covid-securely, at London’s Apollo Theatre. The first night was free, for NHS workers who, he hopes “we will never take for granted again”.
The TV adaptation of his first book starts shooting soon with Ben Whishaw as lead.
“It’s one of those dinner party questions —who would play you in a film of your life and it’s turned real!” he says, excitedly, calling Whishaw a national treasure.
Another dinner-party question, then — if Kay were a body part, which part would he be?
“I’m quite bossy,” says Kay, who seems anything but. “So probably I’d be the brain… I can be a writer, up in my garret in the skull.”
Kay’s Anatomy (Penguin, £14.99) is out now
