N I C K H O R N B Y .
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Copyright Penguin UK
Penguin UK
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Confessional
Nick Hornby talks exclusively to Penguin
Watch the video interview
The one that got away
Tony Lacey, Nick Hornby's editor, on Fever Pitch
Frances Barber on Nick Hornby
Audiobook reader, Frances Barber, on Nick Hornby
Nick's top fives
Nick Hornby talks exclusively to penguin.co.uk about mystics, marriage and modern parenthood in his brilliant new novel, How to be Good. Plus, we discover the inspiration behind the bestsellers Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About a Boy, and delve into the secret life of an author.
- How to be Good
- Fever Pitch
- High Fidelity
- About a Boy
- Nick on writing
- Nick on Nick
Penguin.co.uk: You have a female narrator in How to be Good. Did you ever see that as a struggle, or did you always conceive of it as being narrated by a woman?
Nick Hornby: The reason I chose a female narrator is because of the way the book is structured. I wanted to write about a marriage, about how some kind of spiritual conversion affects one of the partners in the marriage, and I wanted the other partner to comment on it. I have to say it seemed much more dramatic that the male was converted, somebody who was grumpy, cynical and bitter. This sounded much more to me like a man than a woman. So that left me with the woman narrator.
I didn't really worry about it as I really don't think we're so different anymore. I think that fifty years ago it would have been hard for any of us to write in a different gender, but we live very similar lives now. I don't think men and women are as different as the glossy magazines would have us believe. Men spend much more of their time talking to women in the workplace, and the nature of relationships, of marriages and of friendships are very different. So I didn't really feel I was writing from the point of view of an alien species.
P: What has been the reaction of female readers?
NH: The female narrator hasn't been an issue so far, although you can tell from the almost all-female list in the acknowledgements that I actively sought female opinion!
P: As a reader I found myself asking the questions that the narrator was asking herself. Were these the questions that were unsettling you too?
NH: There's a line that David, the husband, has at the beginning of the book, where he says "I'm a liberal's worst nightmare, I'm going to walk it like I talk it". Basically all the idle thoughts we've ever had about trying to be nicer and more charitable, David puts into physical action and he won't be deterred from that course.
P: You've chosen to continue living in Highbury in north London. Do you feel you could have insulated yourself from these kind of questions?
NH: I think that my son Danny, who is autistic, has had a great influence on the book because I have been more involved and asked to do things that I wouldn't otherwise have been asked to do if Danny hadn't been autistic.
I think you're bound to think about these things if you are exposed in that way, it wouldn't be very easy to say "No, I'm not going to get more involved with autism, I'm not going to try and raise money for the school, I'm not going to help out any other parents". You're exposed to a kind of need and concern in a way that I think a lot of other parents aren't. Well, certainly not in such a dramatic way.
P: Would it be fair to say that the book juxtaposes two kinds of ways of dealing with how to be good?
NH: I think what I wanted to write about was how the wife had always previously been the moral conscience in the relationship. Katie is a good person in the way that most of us are, or have the potential to be. She does something socially useful, she worries about things in a way that we all do. But David takes things up to a whole new level that might actually accomplish something.
I didn't ever want to rubbish him or his Guru side-kick, DJ GoodNews. I wanted them to ask proper questions that have no answers and for her to be put on the back foot morally. So Katie goes from having been the moral conscience, to somebody who is struggling to answer questions all the way through.
I think that's the bargain we all seem to have made. We have a moral duty to our nearest and dearest and if there's anything left over we'll put a few bob in a tin somewhere. I read somewhere that there had been a lot of research done, on 'activists' and good people, with a capital G, capital P, and they always found the same thing. The immediate family was in complete chaos; I mean what must it have been like to have been a child of Gandhi?
P: The portrait of David when he's grumpy is some of the funniest stuff in the book.
NH: David has a sort of job writing a newspaper column for a local paper, called 'The Angriest Man in Holloway'. He is an exaggerated truth of an awful lot of people I know, and particularly men. There's a scene in the book where David goes to this dinner party and I had been thinking about what it would be like if one took cynicism and extracted it almost surgically from conversation, so you weren't allowed to say anything bad about anyone. I think ordinary social discourse in Britain would completely grind to a halt. You know, you're not even allowed to say anything bad about Jeffrey Archer, who is an accepted whipping boy; David doesn't even like judgement of somebody like that. I just thought it was a quite a funny idea, if we weren't allowed to bad mouth people we wouldn't know what to say.
P: The book doesn't come to any resolutions, because I suppose these things are not resolved in anybody's life and it is after all a novel. It is quite an ambiguous ending.
NH: Somebody interviewed me in Germany a couple of weeks ago about the book and she said, "It reads like an advert for the nuclear family". I thought blimey, if an advertising agency had made that I'm not sure I'd pay them at the end of it, if that's what I had wanted them to do. I suppose the most important question for Katie is "can you be a good person and get divorced and leave your family?", which is what she is very tempted to do.
She's clearly not very happy within the relationship and yet she doesn't want to leave it. Her husband's put her in such a moral fever, she thinks divorce isn't really an option. It's so clearly a big sacrifice to her and a huge compromise to think, 'OK, for the next however many years I'm going to stay here'.
P: Don't you think a lot of people would think 'why the hell doesn't she just get out?'
NH: I think an awful lot of people are both troubled by their relationships and troubled by the thought of leaving them. People say, "well I'm going to stay here until my children are 18 or 19". There is an acknowledgement of unhappiness and imperfection, which can be corrected perhaps at some stage, but in the meantime involves an awful lot of sacrifice. I suppose I am sufficiently old-fashioned to believe that the notion of having children should at least involve some kind of self-sacrifice.
P: Did anything about the process of writing and reading come into conjunction with thoughts of how to be good?
NH: The book comes up with no answers, and cannot. I think it's really the first time that I've been aware that it's not necessary to try and answer the questions that you pose. As long they are posed with some complexity, and they make people think, it's simpleminded, really, to try and answer everything that you raise yourself.
P: The narrator of How to be Good is having an affair. She could of course have been swept off her feet and had a grand sexual passion, but the sex in the book is pretty downbeat.
NH: Katie has sex, but in terms of the affair Stephen is a rather hopeless character. He came in at a stage of her life where she was flattered by the attention, but, yes, I think the sex in the book is comic and flat.
P: Is that because you don't believe that sex can be a grand and overpowering passion that can change people's lives, or because you're dramatizing a particular character in this case?
NH: I think dramatizing particular characters in this case, but I think that it would give the book a different tone if the sex had completely swept her off her feet. I don't particularly enjoy writing about sex. I think it's really hard to write about sex in a way that's interesting or meaningful. I can't think of a passage about sex in a book that has made an awful lot of sense to me. I think it's a private thing and its joys are almost inexpressible on the page, and within the confines of the comic novel I think it can be particularly difficult.
P: It does seem that Katie has a particular guilt which perhaps women suffer from more than men do - juggling an important job at the same time as bringing up the children. Do you think that's still a major thing in women's lives?
NH: I think it's increasingly becoming an issue. The particular situation with Katie and David is that Katie is the breadwinner, and her work is more important than David's. But she is also a mother and I think to most families the crucial relationship is between mother and children, and yet the mother in this case is absent more often. I do think that that places women in a very difficult situation, and a lot of them do feel slightly stricken about it and haven't really managed to sort it out in their heads, even if they've sorted it out very well in their day-to-day lives.
P: I think the children are really interesting. The book seems to touch on emotions that are not often dealt with in books - that it is possible for parents to feel that their children are not completely wonderful 100% of the time.
NH: It's interesting because there were many debates in the editorial process about whether a woman would ever say she does not like her children. In fact I remember reading Alison Lurie's The War Between The Tates, and there's very clearly a sense in there that this woman's children are a great disappointment to her in their teenage years - they are an older Molly and Tom. There's an endless circular argument about whether, as a male author, I have made a mistake in projecting these feelings onto a mother. I mean we all know enough about parenting now to be able to confess that sometimes we'd rather not have to do it.
P: I suppose there comes a time in a parent's life when you realise that this child is becoming something separate and possibly, entirely different from you. It's quite a shock of recognition and if you're honest about it, there may well be things you don't like in that different person.
NH: I think if you look at any family, or anyone you know, there are certain family relationships that just don't work. I know lots of people who are not very close to their siblings - they were very close when they were younger but they've grown up into different people. There is a terrible pressure of guilt that makes us feel that we must love and like our parents, our children, and our brothers and sisters, and of course there is no real logic behind that. The idea that you must automatically empathise with a close blood relative I think is preposterous.
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P: What were the circumstances surrounding the writing of Fever Pitch?
NH: There was literate fan journalism about football and I felt that Fever Pitch reflected that culture. When I was talking to publishers and agents about it they told me no chance, trying to sell a football book. I think the view at the time was that as fans didn't even buy the hopeless, ghosted, football autobiographies, they couldn't understand what chance they would have with another sort of book. But I think they were looking at things the wrong way round. There was a market and an appetite for a better book about football, but there was still resistance within publishing.
P: What were your hopes or ambitions for Fever Pitch as you wrote it?
NH: I hoped it would chime with people who followed a team seriously. I suspect that anyone who writes a book has two levels of ambition - the modest and the grandiose. I saw no reason why the book shouldn't appeal to lots of people, of different ages and genders and class. But of course you never seriously think that they're actually going to buy it!
P: In the book you do talk a bit about how football has been a kind of glue with people. Tell us something about your teaching experience and the way you related to the kids through popular culture.
NH: I have always listened to a lot of pop music and I have always watched football, so you think, how hard can this be? But of course kids just presume that you know nothing about what they're interested in, and even if you do know something you start to feel kind of phoney. I can remember when I was on teaching practice, saying to this kid "I'm an Arsenal fan", and he just looked at me with complete contempt, as if my job automatically ruled me out from being able to go.
P: I suppose kids do want to feel that there is territory that is theirs, and they just don't want adults coming into it.
NH: There was a clear generation gap between me and my parents, and really in the last twenty or thirty years there are two or three generations that have grown up completely within popular culture. So you're listening to the same stuff as your kids, which I think must be quite uncomfortable for them.
P: There are quite a lot of class issues in Fever Pitch that are both buried but also rather explicitly dealt with.
NH: There's been this thing, probably ever since Fever Pitch, about how the middle classes have colonised football and that this is a completely new phenomenon. I think if you were middle class you were certainly aware of it in football stadiums in the seventies, but I can remember talking to Tony Parsons about it, and he said "Who do they think has been sitting up in those seats for the last sixty years?" I think that the media tries to re-invent problems every 5 or 6 years and I think they've probably always been within football. But I think the class issue was important to address in Fever Pitch in a way that it wasn't in High Fidelity.
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P: In High Fidelity one of the issues I suppose is whether music, that kind of thing, enables one to live life better or whether it's actually a retreat.
NH: One of the reasons I wanted to write High Fidelity was that I wanted to write from the point of view of a narrator who didn't have any of the hindsight that I was able to have in Fever Pitch. There seems to be more drama in somebody who is trying to make up his mind all the time and failing, and there's more potential for comedy.
In About a Boy, I think it is quite clear that Will is 'retarded' by popular culture. The kind of things he listens to and the kind of stuff he does is trivial. Whereas I think Rob in High Fidelity has got some soul, and his relationship with the music is quite soulful, but his relationship with other people is all over the place.
Round about the time I was writing Fever Pitch the publisher I now have at Penguin said he didn't feel that it did him any good. He read these manuscripts all day, and they were all about life and death, and he listened to great music in the car, going to and from work, and he felt that art gave him too much intensity. In a way Rob's job in High Fidelity is a trope, if you like, for writing. He listens to very raw stuff all day and it probably doesn't do you any good. I think over the last 10 to 20 years we've all had much more opportunity, more leisure time, and there's certainly more stuff around in terms of radio and TV, so I think we have a slightly distorted sense of what life is.
P: Do you think it's a particularly male thing to try and find metaphors for life rather than life itself?
NH: The male/female thing is interesting because when I wrote Fever Pitch and High Fidelity I presumed I was speaking on behalf of males to females. But particularly with High Fidelity the response I have had from readers has made me think that actually the gender thing doesn't apply anymore. There are an awful lot of women who responded to High Fidelity in what I would have previously thought of as a male way.
P: As a male reader I thought that phenomena - of collecting, arranging, listing - is a very male thing, but you think not?
NH: I think that the categorisation of things is maybe more male than female, but I think that the things women responded to in High Fidelity were more about just feeling messed up generally and clinging onto music or books as a way of getting through. Women who read the book seemed to look past that and look at Rob as a lost soul and identify with him because of that.
P: How should we read the ending of High Fidelity?
NH: The way I intended the ending was that it had the form of one of those old rock and roll films. At Rob's party he DJ's and everyone gets together and dances. It has the feel of a happy ending, but I'd always intended for it to be very doubtful, and that Rob had taken the first tiny step on a road to something. It didn't necessarily mean that everything was going to work out, particularly in the relationship.
P: What did you think of the film of High Fidelity?
NH: I really liked it. What I liked most was that the film was personal to the filmmakers in the same way that the book was personal to it's writer: they grew up in Chicago, where the film was set, and they are all music addicts. So it became a film about them, which is the best sort of adaptation. People kept asking me about the transposition to the US, but it meant that the book retained all it's best features.
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P: Is About a Boy a book about having to grow up too early - not being a real child and never experiencing childlike things?
NH: I think it's about learning to experience childlike things in exactly the same way as everybody else in order to survive. All the things that make Marcus unique and such a weird kid are the very same things that are damaging him. So it's more about learning to be the same as everybody else in a slightly depressing way, I think.
P: Do you feel that About a Boy is darker than High Fidelity with its suicide attempts and broken marriages, and screwed up children and so on?
NH: I was conscious of wanting to be a bit darker when I wrote About a Boy. I think the process generally is to try and get darker and funnier as much as I possibly can, and I think How to be Good is a step on in that way, as well.
P: I suppose all your novels have slightly ambiguous endings don't they, particularly About a Boy?
NH: I think the resolution in About a Boy is not so much ambiguous as double-edged. Clearly Marcus is going to be alright, but in the process of being alright he has completely lost any sense of himself and we lose sense of the child that there was throughout the book. I think that that's quite sad and quite a sacrifice.
P: How do you feel about Hugh Grant playing Will in the forthcoming film of About a Boy?
NH: Good. He's wanted to do the part for a long time, which I think is a good sign, and his post-Bridget Jones incarnation as a baddy will serve him well.
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P: I'm always rather amazed when people talk about your books as being jolly accounts of popular culture. There are a lot potential disasters for your characters and they're hanging on by the skin of their teeth.
NH: Somebody said that it was the 'comedy of depression'. I think it is why a certain group of people respond so strongly to the books, all the characters are depressed.
P: I think you actually use the word depression in all the books?
NH: I guess there are an awful lot of people out there who do feel depressed and don't find that low level depression reflected in many books that they read. Literature is usually much more crisis-focused.
P: You wouldn't describe your books as 'domestic', but you write about daily lives and ordinary things, which maybe one doesn't get in a lot of books.
NH: I don't mind my books being described as domestic at all. It was very much an impetus when I started writing. I read a lot of books by women and identified with them much more because I lived a domestic life - and most of us do - and that really wasn't reflected in any of the books written by men. It seemed odd to me that most of us bring up families and go to work and yet the books our male representatives are writing are about huge things in history and people on the edge. Of course we have a need for those books, but there did seem to be a bit of a hole where no one was writing about what actually happened.
P: Was that reflected in your own reading? Who are the writers you admire most?
NH: At the time that I started writing I had just discovered the books of Anne Tyler and Lorrie Moore. I'd never read a book that more precisely articulated what I wanted to do than Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. There were some depressed and lost characters and a lot of humour, and I just felt this is what I want to be when I grow up. I had read two Lorrie Moore books, Self Help and Like Life, just before Fever Pitch came out. Again they had very sharp humour but were incredibly accessible and I think it was something particularly at the time that had been lost from contemporary British fiction.
P: Do you feel much more at home with American contempory fiction than British fiction?
NH: Yeah, I feel much more at home. I think there's always been that strain of American writing that wants to write simply and accessibly, but intelligently. I think in this country we are much more hung up on demonstrating that you are writing a book and being clever about it, and consequently people weren't reading them much here.
P: Were not reading the British writers' books?
NH: Yes. If you have a short-list of six Booker Prize books, people read the one that wins. Because it won the other five are completely disregarded and this is somehow supposed to be representative of our literary culture. I do think in the 1980s there was a huge gap between best-selling books and literature, and there really wasn't anything inbetween.
For me Roddy Doyle was an important part of that. When I read The Commitments it was simple and funny. It was about things I understood and you could see a great rush of identification with Roddy's books.
P: You've mentioned the Booker Prize. Do you think that awards such as this misrepresent literature and the kinds of books that are out there?
NH: I think that the Booker Prize sets a tone of a certain kind of literary writer. As a young writer you're looking at two polarities that you don't really like the look of. There was the Jackie Collins stuff on one side, and there was this very difficult, dark, inaccessible literature on the other.
I think there is a general desire to read good books. People read books on the way to work and before they go to bed. We've all had that terrible feeling that you're making no impression on a novel at all and you're 30 pages in and there's 472 pages left and you've been reading it for three weeks already. I think the Americans have always understood that once you have a price on the back of your book there is some kind of contract you're entering into.
P: Yes, and American authors do have that pop-culture feeding in too.
NH: It seemed obvious to me that popular culture is an important part of all our lives and it should have some kind of reflection in the books we are reading. I've never understood why people didn't describe or just mention what TV programmes people were watching, I've always suspected it's something to do with having an eye on posterity.
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P: Take us through an average day in the life of Nick Hornby.
NH: I wander to my office, a small flat just round the corner from home. I smoke, mess round on the Internet, email, and, eventually, start writing - usually just when it's time to pick up my son from school.
P: What's on your bedside table?
NH: Back copies of the New Yorker, Andrew Rawnsley's book about New Labour, the new Michael Chabon novel and indigestion tablets.
P: What was the last film you saw?
NH: At the time of the interview You Can Count On Me, which I loved to bits.
P: You are now the pop critic for the New Yorker - could you see yourself ever living there?
NH: My domestic circumstances wouldn't allow it at the moment, but I'd love to live in the US for a while at some stage - San Francisco is the place I'd choose.
P: What are you working on next?
NH: I'm having a go at co-writing a screenplay, with Emma Thompson. She was shown the first draft of something I'd written, and she was so smart about what was wrong with it that I suggested we do it together. We did a bit of plotting last summer, but we haven't started the actual writing yet. I'm looking forward to it.
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'I don't think men and women are as different as the glossy magazines would have us believe...'
'I'm a liberal's worst nightmare, I'm going to walk it like I talk it...'
'...we have a moral duty to our nearest and dearest and if there's anything left over we'll put a few bob in a tin somewhere...'
'I think an awful lot of people are both troubled by their relationships and troubled by the thought of leaving them...'
'...we all know enough about parenting now to be able to confess that sometimes we'd rather not have to do it...'
'...they told me no chance, trying to sell a football book...'
'...the way I intended the ending was that it had the form of one of those old rock and roll films...'
'I think the process generally is to try and get darker and funnier as much as I possibly can...'
'I do think in the 1980s there was a huge gap between best-selling books and literature and there really wasn't anything inbetween...'
'...we've all had that terrible feeling that you're making no impression on a novel at all and you're 30 pages in and there's 472 pages left...'
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