Ghost writer: how Martino Sclavi's brain tumour helped him write a book

Expected to die, and having lost the ability to read, the Italian film producer devoted himself to a near-impossible task

I meet Martino Sclavi in Islington, north London, where he shares a small flat. It's a perfectly ordinary summer morning: pigeons are cooing and somewhere far off, a siren sounds. But in Sclavi's kitchen, everything is slightly skewed, our encounter just a notch off normal. For one thing, there is the peculiar food he is trying to make me eat at only 10 o'clock: a pie filled with grey-looking onions, mushrooms and nuts, which tastes powerfully of chilli. For another, there is the fact that while he talks in an unstoppable flow (and in English, too, which is his second language), certain words will keep evading him. When, for instance, I reject the pie, and he offers me a sweet concoction instead, all he can tell me is that it is made of yogurt and "a fruit"" What kind of fruit? "A big one, and when you peel it, there is just this long bit." A mango? "No." An avocado? "No." The pair of us stumped, he falls silent for a moment. "Bananas are my treat," he says, after a while. So it's banana? "No." He shakes his head forlornly.

Six years ago Sclavi, a film producer, was in Los Angeles, working on a movie project with his best friend Russell Brand, when he began suffering from severe headaches. Soon afterwards he was admitted to hospital as an emergency, whereupon surgeons opened up his skull - they flipped a bit out, he says, as if it was on a hinge - and operated on his brain in a desperate bid to remove what turned out to be a grade four glioblastoma (the most malignant kind of brain tumour). Six months later he travelled to Rome, where he underwent a much longer operation, during which doctors had to wake him twice, the better to check he could still count to 10 backwards.