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The Buddha of Suburbia
Kureishi and his partner of several years, Tracey Scoffield, his fomer editor at Faber. The relationship became increasingly sour in the next few years and the effects and details of his subsequent separation from Scoffield are widely evident in his output since The Black Album. 1997 saw the publication of Love in a Blue Time, his first collection of short stories and the release of his fourth film, My Son the Fanatic, which returns to some of the problems addressed in The Black Album. In 1998, the novella Intimacy appeared; it was interpreted by many as a thinly-veiled and spiteful account of recent events in Kureishi's personal life. The following year, Kureishi returned to drama with Sleep with Me, which played at the Cottesloe and was very badly received, both on aesthetic grounds and because it was perceived to retrace the events described in Intimacy. 1999 also saw the publication of Kureishi's second collection of short stories, Midnight All Day, which represents a significant extension of the first collection, both stylistically and in terms of Kureishi's social and moral vision. In 2000, the French director Patrice Chereau shot a film based on Intimacy and some of the stories in Love in a Blue Time.