By Megan Thomas
I absolutely adored This Is Going To Hurt when it came out in 2017, and have seen Adam Kay perform a few times. Along with not many others, it was the kind of laugh-out-loud funny that had me reciting passages to unsuspecting audiences. I never got a chance to read Twas The Nightshift Before Christmas, but I think I’ll need to, now that I’ve read (and loved) Undoctored.
While Twas The Nightshift Before Christmas appears to be more of the same sort of anecdotal excerpts from Kay’s diary from his days as a junior doctor, Undoctored is more the story of after he had quit and his experience finding his feet again. Since he was a teenager, his whole world revolved around medicine – a necessity to pass the requisite exams and compete/survive in a grueling hospital environment. Once he had quit, he had to redefine himself and come to terms with what he wanted from life – a challenging and emotional task, when he’d spent so long responding to what others wanted from him.
I don’t want to give spoilers because the whole reading process was a really shocking and eye-opening one. From a general perspective, though, it really delves deeper into Kay’s sexuality and his experience of coming out, how this impacted his marriage (to a woman) as well as his current relationship (to a man) as well as his trepidation to be a father, his disordered eating (easy to disguise in a hospital environment, it seems) and how these different struggles all stemmed from crushing himself into what he thought was the right mould – for society, for his parents, for his colleagues.
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