With his grey cap, his grey T-shirt, his frizz of grey hair and his shapeless black jacket, Nick Hornby hardly looks like a best-selling author. Instead, he resembles the sort of character you might see in a Bertolt Brecht play – probably nearer the back of the stage than the front. But anyone harbouring doubts need only glance at his sales figures – his nine books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide. And now there’s a 10th, a new novel called Juliet, Naked, which is why we’re having lunch in Islington, not far away from the office where he works.
To begin with, Hornby proves to be a surprisingly nervy interviewee, stumbling over his words and holding one arm protectively over his chest, his elbow cupped in his spare hand. But perhaps this has something to do with the fact that he’s just given up smoking. At the end of lunch, he sucks on something that looks rather like a dog whistle. It turns out to be a plastic cigarette which – taken in conjunction with Nicorette gum – helps reduce his cravings.
How long is it since he last had a real cigarette?
He looks a little abashed. “Um… the weekend. [We’re meeting on a Wednesday.] I’ve had about four or five in the last two weeks. But not that long ago, four or five a day would have been a miracle so I’m feeling quite good. The trouble is, I haven’t exactly chosen a good time.”
For the next few months, Hornby’s life is going to be dominated by publicity campaigns – the first for Juliet, Naked, the second for An Education, his film adaptation of Lynn Barber’s memoir, which comes out in October. He always gets nervous before publication, he says, and without cigarettes, the clamour of attention is likely to prove even more stressful than usual.
Have the nerves got any better as you’ve gone on, I ask?
“Not really. I think you could plot them on a graph. With Fever Pitch, I had no expectations so I wasn’t really troubled about it coming out. To a certain extent with High Fidelity, I’d gone back to the beginning again, because it was a novel and it wasn’t about football. But when that worked as well, I knew that whatever I did was going to be reviewed. That’s what I’m nervous about, of course – reviews.”
Except that Hornby himself won’t be reading them – he stopped long ago. “The thing is, I don’t get a lot of pleasure from good reviews while bad ones can hurt. And they all tend to be much the same, don’t they? A 300-word synopsis, 300 words recapping your career and 300 words saying you’re either an a‑‑‑ or you’re not. People claim you can learn a lot from reading reviews, but I’m not sure if that’s true. I mean, I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about the book than they have.”
In one sense, Juliet, Naked marks a significant departure for Hornby. It’s not set in north London for a start, but in Gooleness, a grotty fictional English seaside resort, and in America. The emotional landscape, however, is more familiar. A couple in their mid-thirties, Duncan and Annie, are drifting apart – largely because Duncan is obsessed with the music of Tucker Crowe, a singer-songwriter who produced one brilliant album in the mid-Eighties and then disappeared.
“The initial spur for the book was seeing this article in Vanity Fair about Sly Stone [another famously reclusive rocker]. But that also fed into some other stuff I’d been thinking about – mainly about how the internet has allowed people like Duncan to spend all day talking to one another.”
Once again – as he did in High Fidelity – Hornby is writing about musical obsessives. In Juliet, Naked, though, the tone is darker and less forgiving than before. The fascination with obsession is as keen as ever, but here it comes mixed with an awareness of how easily it can turn people into colossal blinkered bores.
Hornby chuckles – he has a throaty, generous laugh. “Well, I do think these people are ripe for satire. Especially for the way they view everything through a prism of someone’s perceived brilliance. There’s a line in Janet Malcolm’s book about Chekhov where she talks about how his weaknesses began to seem like mannerisms after a while – they became Chekhovian. As I was writing Juliet, Naked, I was thinking, my God I can’t wait for that to happen to me – where all my rubbish becomes Hornby-esque and people are studying it thinking it’s brilliant.”
Once Hornby was as obsessive as the characters he writes about, but nowadays, he insists, his life follows a much steadier course. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that obsessive about music. But football… that’s the one that didn’t feel healthy. Not anymore, though. I think it’s going to be very hard for anyone to be obsessive about football now. It’s so uncool; it’s become a game for old men or little kids. When I was growing up it was dangerous and it wasn’t corporate. There was no Niki-isation.”
For years, Hornby used to play football himself – in a team made up of north London-based writers and journalists. But now this, too, has gone. At 52, the combination of sore legs and two young children has taken its toll. “It got to the point where I could hardly walk the day after. I’d ache for the next week, and then I’d go and play again.”
In A Long Way Down, his novel before last, Hornby wrote about a group of suicidal depressives who meet on top of a north London tower block. One of the characters, JJ, is a failed rock musician – someone who, in his eyes at least, has never fulfilled his potential. Tucker Crowe in Juliet, Naked is his opposite – he’s had his moment of fulfilment, except now the spark has died.
Hornby says that he’s never worried that much about running out of creative steam. “But I don’t think there’s any doubt that with both Tucker Crowe and JJ I was writing about writing. JJ is a kind of projection of what might have happened to me in my early thirties if life hadn’t taken a different course.”
Do you think you would ever have become suicidal?
“No,” he says firmly enough. “I certainly got very lost when I turned 30. But after that I started to find my way a little bit. Then when Fever Pitch came out, the act of publication was a redeeming thing as far as I was concerned. I started to feel better about myself and to see where I might be going.”
Hornby has remained in therapy ever since, though, and at one point over lunch he mentions going through a period of depression early last year when he couldn’t write, or even read for a while. I wondered if there was any correlation between his state of mind and the tone of the books he wrote?
“Well, A Long Way Down was actually written at a time when I was very content. How To Be Good is my post-divorce book. It’s probably the most brittle of the lot.” Because it’s infused with a sense of sadness and a desire to atone for the hurt that’s been caused?
Hornby clasps his elbow to his chest and gives a bleak smile. “Yeah… I think that’s probably right.”
But however much the content of Hornby’s work may have changed over the years, the way he writes has stayed much the same. He still embarks on a book with no clear idea of what’s going to happen, or how he’s going to finish it. “I’ve always got the characters and I’ve got their back-stories. I kind of know where they went to school – that sort of thing. But it always makes me puke when I read those interviews with writers where they say things like, 'I can’t wait to turn on my word processor in the morning and see what my characters have been up to overnight.’ I just don’t believe that – it’s certainly never happened to me.”
As we are talking, Elgar’s Nimrod suddenly starts blasting out of the restaurant speakers. This comes as a bit of a surprise – it’s hardly a natural choice for background music – but it does seem oddly apt. Although Hornby has always looked to the United States in terms of the writers he admires, he’s unmistakably English in his attitudes and preoccupations. “Mmm, I know. In some ways I resent how strong those ties are. But there’s no doubt that they have provided me with a lot creatively. I think in that mixture of the US and England, I’ve managed to carve out something that is my own, and one wouldn’t work without the other.”
As Hornby has grown older so have his readers – although they’ve been supplemented by a steady stream of younger ones. “When I started out I had a very clear idea of who the reader was. Now, though, I try not to think about it too much because it gets a bit confusing.”
But if he had to identify his ideal reader, what would he or she be like?
“I think it’s a woman. She’s probably best exemplified in the shape of my wife. Maybe that’s why I married her. If she likes something I’ve done, then I’m happy.”
As well as being his sounding board, Hornby’s second wife, Amanda Posey, produced An Education. Together, they have two boys – Lowell, six, and Jesse, four. His oldest boy, Danny, now 16, is autistic and Hornby is one of the founders of the TreeHouse Trust, the national charity for autism education.
Throughout his work, Hornby has had a particularly sharp – and humane – eye for the little deceits that go on in a relationship, the lies that people tell to try to keep their lives on track. Recently, he found himself telling some lies of his own when his youngest son became very upset by the death of Michael Jackson.
“My wife said to him, 'God you’re looking so brown, Jesse,’ and he immediately burst into tears. When she asked why, he said, 'I don’t want to turn black and die like Michael Jackson.’ We tried to explain that Michael Jackson had actually turned white and died – not the other way around. The terrible thing is how quickly one resorts to religion. I have staunch atheistic principles, but the moment Jesse became upset, I’m going, 'It’s all right, don’t worry. Michael Jackson’s gone to heaven’.’’
Outside, Hornby puts on his grey cap and walks with me to the Tube. On the way we talk about rock concerts that we’ve seen – or rather that we haven’t seen and wished we had. Then we shake hands and he walks in one direction and I go in the other. After a few yards I turn around to see if I can spot him. But he’s already gone, swallowed up in the crowd.
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