Nick Hornby

I used to think of Nick Hornby as a friend. We both live in Highbury and our children go to the same primary school. I like his jokes; I like his taste in pop music; I like his sympathy for wasters and losers and I like the graceful way he talks about his son’s autism. The only thing I don’t like is his passion for football. His first book, Fever Pitch, was about how much he loves Arsenal; I can’t stand football.

Apart from that, there has been only one thing wrong with our friendship: we’ve never met. Yet this has never seemed to matter: his novels are so approachable that I always assumed he was speaking directly to me. Lunch would simply be the consummation of a relationship that has been going on for well over a decade.

Just before cycling to meet Hornby at Fino in Charlotte Street, I decide to read his blog (www.nickhornby.campaign server.co.uk) and discover that his expectations of the meeting are different from my own. “I am now on full-time publicity duty,” it reads. “If you ever see The Times, the Financial Times, The Sunday Telegraph or about a hundred other English-language publications, you will be able to read the attempts of a number of nice, patient journalists to get me to say something articulate and interesting, initially about Juliet, Naked [his new novel] or An Education [his new screenplay], and then, as desperation sets in, about anything at all.”

In my case, desperation sets in before I even arrive at the restaurant. Having failed to write down the exact address, I wheel my bike up and down the street asking strangers if they’ve heard of Fino. Eventually I find the entrance tucked around the corner and hurry down into a modern basement, sweating and 15 minutes late.

At first I don’t see him. But then I notice a small, bald man sitting alone at a table drinking water and studying the menu. He gives a smile and waves away a torrent of apologies. I sit down and then can’t think of anything further to say. He’s not my old friend, I realise, but a stranger, a famous writer who is dutifully doing a lot of interviews to help flog his work.

Suddenly I feel like Duncan, the pathetic middle-aged man in Juliet, Naked, who has spent his entire adult life obsessed with Tucker Crowe, a retired, reclusive pop star. When the two finally meet by accident, Duncan is so wrong-footed, he asks to see Tucker’s passport. And then says, “I’m a, a long-term admirer of your work.”

In an attempt to prevent myself from saying this, I tell him that I, too, live in Highbury. He absorbs the news politely and asks where. I tell him the street name, and he inquires after the number. I tell him this, too, and then he says, “I had a one-bedroom flat at number 81 where I went to write.”

ABOUT A MIDDLE-AGED MAN

The list and times of Nick Hornby

1957 Born April 17 in Redhill, Surrey. Father Sir Derek Hornby is a self-made businessman. Half-brother Johnny is co-founder of advertising agency Clemmow Hornby Inge.

1968 Goes to his first game at Highbury, then home of Arsenal Football Club. Arsenal are lucky to beat Stoke City 1-0 with a goal from a penalty rebound. He is hooked.

1976-1979 Attends Jesus College, Cambridge, and obtains “a mediocre degree” in English.

1979-1992 Has series of jobs, which include working in a garage, teaching, proof-reading, and reviewing books.

1992 His first book,Contemporary American Fiction, is a collection of his critical essays on American authors, including favourite novelist Anne Tyler.
Publishes Fever Pitch, a memoir of his love of Arsenal. It wins William Hill Sports Book of the Year award.

1995 Publishes first novel,High Fidelity, about a commitment-phobe, list-obsessed record shop owner.

1997 Co-founds TreeHouse, a charity set up to provide an educational centre for children with autism; Hornby’s first son Danny is autistic.
Fever Pitch, starring Colin Firth in the Hornby role, is released.

1998About a Boy, a novel about a commitment-phobe thirtysomething man’s friendship with a schoolboy, is published.

2000 John Cusack and Jack Black star in film version ofHigh Fidelity .

2001How to Be Good, a novel about a doctor who is forced to question her extra-marital affair when her husband reforms his character, is long-listed for the Booker Prize.

2002About a Boy, starring Hugh Grant, is released.

200331 Songs, a collection of essays about his favourite music, including tracks by Teenage Fan Club, Patti Smith and Bob Dylan, is published.

2005A Long Way Down, a novel about four strangers who meet on a roof with the intention of committing suicide, is shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award.
Release of US version ofFever Pitch, with baseball’s Boston Red Sox replacing Arsenal. Film adaptations of Hornby’s work have grossed more than $228m globally.

2006The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of essays on books and culture.

2007Slam, a novel about teenage sex and skateboarding, is his first foray into young adult fiction.

2009Juliet, Naked is a novel about a middle-aged man obsessed with a reclusive rock star. Hornby’s books have sold more than 5m copies worldwide.
Co-writes film adaptation of journalist Lynn Barber’s coming-of-age memoir An Education, to be released in October.

Will Holloway

He tells me that he wrote About a Boy, How to be Good and Long Way Down at a desk just over the road from my own. If I had lifted my head from my computer – where I was mostly playing the solitaire card game FreeCell – I might have seen Hornby, head down, as he produced one gently comic bestseller after another.

Though I say how strange that I never bumped into him in the street, I’m now convinced I did see him, often, in the Turkish corner shop buying a pack of fags but never gave him a second glance. There is no I’m-Nick-Hornby swagger about him. And his clothes, pinstriped linen jacket worn over jeans and a T-shirt, are what every other middle-aged man in Highbury wears, too.

We both look at the menu, which is long. I’m too flustered by lateness and this revelation to be able to concentrate on food, so I ask if he could order for both of us.

“I was trying to work it out – there’s a peculiar tapas/non-tapas thing going on,” he says. His words are hesitant, almost stilted. The waiter stands by our side, waiting.

“Umm ... ” says Hornby. And then, after a pause: “We’d like some smaller dishes.”

But he doesn’t follow through with any choices and so I ask the waiter if he could chose something for us. Anything, we don’t mind. “Do you have any allergies?” he asks. Hornby confirms that he has none.

Again I feel we are characters in one of his books comically failing to rise to the occasion and are ludicrously defeated by the most banal of tasks.

With the menus taken away, I tell him how much I enjoyed Juliet, Naked. “Oh”, he says, “thank you!” He says it nicely and his brown eyes shine with pleasure. I then tell him that I’d discussed it with a friend, who’d declared it must have been a doddle to write as it was a concoction of old themes – obsession, pop music, articulate wasters and so on. I’d replied that such effortless writing was anything but effortless.

“I write slowly,” says Hornby. “I can’t move on until I’ve got a paragraph right. I had a weird period back in January last year when I started another book that I was hating. I’d never done that before. It was calledFinsbury Park. And it was going to be set in summer 2005 with [the July 7] bombers and the Olympics [bid] ... It was a solid idea, but for some reason I couldn’t write any more. So I gave it up and spent the whole month playing on my computer.”

My spirits soar at the idea that we both must have been playing computer card games on opposite sides of an anonymous Highbury street.

“I couldn’t write,” he went on. “I read nothing. I didn’t listen to music. I’d drop the kids off at school and then go to my office and play solitaire. Sometimes I got it together to go to the gym for an hour. But then I’d go back to solitaire.”

I ask if he understood why it had happened. He shrugged. “I do have bursts of little depressive attacks.”

Did he know at the time that it would pass? “No!” he says emphatically. But then laughs. It is a heh-heh-heh laugh. It might be self-mocking, or despairing. It’s hard to say.

The waiter brings some tomato paste on toast and a plate of small shrivelled green peppers. “After you,” says Hornby, eyeing the peppers with suspicion. I eat one, declare it to be OK, and he follows. “Bitter,” he says, making a face.

He tells me that the depression lifted quite suddenly one day when he was browsing in a bookshop and saw a book about radio comedies in the 1950s.

“It was the first thing I’d read for a couple of months. I e-mailed my friend Giles Smith and said, ‘Do you want to write a radio comedy?’ Giles was sitting at home playing FreeCell so we met up the next day.”

Once unblocked, Hornby’s work started to rain down. The idea for Juliet, Naked started to grow. At the same time work was progressing on a film, An Education, which opens next month. It is based on Lynn Barber’s memoir about her teenage affair with a man 20 years older and produced by Hornby’s second wife, Amanda Posey. And in the middle of all this, the US singer Ben Folds e-mailed to ask him if he’d like to write some lyrics for an album.

As he talks, the dishes rain down, too, and all sorts of little plates are laid in front of us. Hornby helps himself to a potato croquette and cuts a small slice of Spanish omelette.

I try to get him to sing me one of the songs. He laughs and refuses. So I ask him to recite the lyrics. At first he refuses. He says it was quite hard writing the songs as he knew he had to write something meaty. “I couldn’t just write about my wife: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you, you’re lovely.’”

Instead he chose to write about Levi Johnston, who had his 15 minutes of fame last year when he got Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter pregnant and declared himself on MySpace to be a “f***ing redneck”. Hornby clears his throat and recites so sheepishly that I have to get him to repeat it:

“I woke up this morning, what do I see?/3,000 cameras pointing at me./ They say: ‘Levi.’ I say: ‘Yeah that’s me, sir,’/ ‘You just knocked up the VP nominee’s daughter.’”

“Hopefully, it’s sympathetic” he says. “It’s the tension between his bravado and the panic he must have felt.”

This is the thing about Hornby. He fixes on people who don’t get, and possibly don’t even deserve, much sympathy and then he sympathises with them. This is where much of the genius in his writing lies: to be funny and nasty is easy; to be funny and nice is much harder.

In Juliet, Naked, both of the male protagonists are indulgent, lazy wasters. Duncan has let his obsession with the pop star spoil his relationship with his girlfriend. The pop star has ruined the lives of a string of women, fathered many children in an alcoholic daze and is now doing nothing.

Why is Hornby so nice about these people? “Because we are all God’s children,” he says. For a minute I wonder if he has become religious, but then he says: “I don’t want to spend a year with people unless they amuse me. Even if they are tossers, I still really care about them. I’ve never met anyone who is seriously bad.”

The hopeless Duncan is given my favourite line in the book: “If would have been perfectly legitimate to ... to rummage around in Shakespeare’s sock drawer. In the interests of history and literature.” And throughout the lunch I’ve been aware that I’ve been trying to rummage around in Hornby’s sock drawer, and so I ask him if he, too, thinks that’s perfectly legitimate.

“There are so many layers of privacy. I can tell you that I’m divorced, remarried and have three children. I can tell you their names and where they go to school and that one of them is autistic, but still you know nothing.”

He tells me about once when he was doing a live chat show on US television. “The host said, ‘You’ve got a teenage son, so he must be into skateboarding, football?’ I said, ‘No, he’s actually severely autistic.’ You could hear someone getting fired for not doing their homework.”

Christ, I say. What did the host say?

“Oh”, says Hornby, “he recovered well. He said, ‘Tell me what autism means, I’m not sure I entirely know.’” I think this is a pathetic recovery, but keep my unkind thoughts to myself.

“The private stuff is buried much deeper,” he goes on. “I think the things that are most intimate are nameless and shapeless.”

What sort of thing does he mean, I ask, hoping to find a sock with a hole in it. “So, you are asking me to tell you the private stuff right now? Clever.” He gives another of his heh-heh-heh laughs.

But then he looks more serious and goes on: “There are all my failings as a human.” Which are?

“As I said – many and shapeless.”

There is still some fish and half a Spanish omelette that neither of us has eaten. Hornby says suddenly: “Would you come upstairs with me?”

What? I say.

He repeats it and I look at him uncomprehendingly. And then he says: “Outside.”

And belatedly I understand what he wants and follow him out into the drizzle, him clutching a fag and me holding a tiny tape recorder. I want to know about another thing that comes up again and again in his books: the way his characters all waste their lives.

“I wasted the 1980s,” he said. “I wasted every minute at Cambridge talking to people who knew more about music than I did. And even now I waste much of every day. I could have written more. I could have read more.”

I say I think this Protestant work ethic is odd in one who has made money selling himself as a waster. He agrees. “I’ve turned my time-wasting into profit and enjoyment,” he says. Which makes it strange that it still bothers him so much.

We go back inside and order coffee.

“I’ve thought of a better answer for your friend,” he says suddenly. “Was Juliet, Naked easy for me? It wasn’t. But if it had been, so what?”

This, he says, is the very point of the book and the realisation he has come to in writing it. Tucker’s album, Juliet, came so easily to him that he didn’t rate it. But that didn’t detract from how much it mattered to others.

“I know that the books mean an awful lot to certain people. When they tell me that, I used to think, ‘You must be dim.’ But now I don’t. I accept it.”

But does this mean that he now believes in his talent? He shrugs. “Well, it’s always the same. You always obsess about the one bad review and ignore the rest.”

I ask what the worst thing is that people have said about Juliet, Naked. “I don’t read the reviews. I get someone to tell me if its OK. They divide it into good, poor-to-middling and stinkers.”

He won’t be reading this interview either, but he has checked the paper to see what sort of thing “Lunch with the FT” is.

“It’s lots of words. A bit scary. I never think I’ve got enough to say.”

As I cycle off I realise that his blog entry was all wrong. He has plenty to say. And it isn’t the journalists who are nice or patient. It is Nick Hornby.

Lucy Kellaway is an FT columnist