Doctor-turned-comic Adam Kay is busy man, fresh off the triumph of his bestselling book, his new memoir, Undoctored, is all about what happened after he hung up his scrubs as a medic and made a go of his comedy career.
The fact Undoctored follows on from his mammoth success with This Is Going To Hurt in 2017, which itself was adapted by Kayand he’s also found time to release follow-up Twas The Nightshift Before Christmas, as well as few children’s books, would suggest that it’s all gone swimmingly well.
‘I’ve had a bunch of messages from people who said, “I’ve read that book and now I feel empowered to press the ‘f**k it’ button”, to do the thing to blow up their life and leave the thing in their world that isn’t working for them,’ he toldAcknowledging that careers nowadays have more of a ‘jagged, weird trajectory’, he adds: ‘But I think this is hopefully a borderline success story of someone who’s tried something else and it’s worked out, even though for a very long time after leaving...
‘There’s a couple of chapters that came in and out of the book half a dozen times before the end, and I ultimately decided that for the particularly difficult topics they should stay in because it was meant to be a book about opening up. I didn’t want it to be out there and for me to know there was stuff that I’d held back.
Kay has been focused this week on Amazon’s Kindle Storyteller Award, for which he acted as a judge in selecting the winning self-published story, Peter Gibbons’ King of War. He found the adjudication process ‘tough’ as the books were all so varied, as well as being impressed by the entrepreneurship of the shortlisted writers.
Judge Adam Kay with Peter Gibbons , winner of the Kindle Storyteller Award 2022 for his book, King of War, at the ceremony in the Houses of Parliament As a former junior doctor, we asked current junior doctors to submit their questions for Adam Kay.‘It’s a very big question, and it’s a bigger question than ever. When I left medicine, I was the first or second person in my cohort of hundreds to leave.