Nick Hornby
Iwas at an American wedding once and there was a dinner where everybody spoke. They were lovely people and everyone who spoke was smart and funny, but I like to know when things are coming to an end.
When I’d get stuck with work, I’d walk away from my desk and sit down with the Guardian cryptic crossword. But then you develop a situation where you’re stuck on two things, work and the crossword. So a few months ago, I switched to jigsaws. You never get stuck on a jigsaw, you just sort of plod through and it empties your mind. I just did the Sgt
Pepper’s cover. You know those flowers that spell out “Beatles”? None of the pieces are big enough to look like a letter, they’re just red flowers you then have to arrange. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, including writing books.
I’m still in therapy. I’ll always go, I think. I stop and start. This last six months I haven’t been going but I know that I will go back. It comes down to times where I am maddening myself or getting stuck in ways of thinking.
I ran out of things to say about the slightly hopeless blokes I used to write about. One thing I’ve thought in retrospect is that the situation of the slightly hopeless bloke is essentially undramatic, because nobody’s stopping him from doing what he wants to do apart from himself.
The thing about writing parts for young women [Hornby wrote the screenplays for An Education, Wild and Brooklyn], is that there are outside forces preventing them from doing most things. Natural dramatic conflict. It wasn’t like I ever set out to do it; we stumbled across the material for An Education. One of the big realisations for me was that if you write a really good part for a young woman, you get the best young women in the world to be in it. If you write a really good part for a young man, you get loads of responses like, “Yeah, I really like this but I’ve just been offered $40m to put on a superhero suit.”
When it got to Oscar nomination day for An Education, I thought the phone would ring and someone would say, “Are you sitting down?” In fact what happens is you get an email the night before saying, “Please be ready by your phone and you’ll be doing the first press 10 minutes after the nominations.” At this point you haven’t even been nominated. Then you get a nomination and you think, “Thank fuck for that.”
The idea that we all gather around a work of fiction and it represents the country and we all talk about it — that’s going, or gone.
Books, music, TV and films have consumed my life. My connection to them meant that, from quite a young age, I didn’t think I’d be able to live a normal life. The feelings they gave me meant that I wouldn’t be happy trying to sell soap.
When Fever Pitch came out, of course it was great, but it was a memoir about football and I was offered lots of other books about football. That seemed to me like a very bad way to go. All I ever wanted to do was keep it going, and get the chance to do the kind of interesting work that I wanted to do. But the longer your career goes on, the more you realise that it’s actually quite fragile. If you stop thinking that you’re in trouble.
You are really not famous as a writer. But the money’s good and no one bothers you.
Family life has been really complicated. It’s kind of hilarious if you’ve got a child with a disability [Hornby’s eldest son has severe autism] and you split up with your wife. You sort of say, “That’s it, we’re getting divorced — see you at 4 o’clock.” You get through in three weeks what might take other couples three years. I know couples who’ve split up and don’t go in each other’s houses. We literally couldn’t do that. My wife [with whom Hornby has two sons] and my ex-wife see each other all the time. It feels like two families with separate houses.
If you can combine comedy and melancholy, it feels more representative of a life than almost anything else.
NICK HORNBY Continued…
My dad left when I was about nine and went to live in a different country, so there was no regular fatherson relationship. The trouble with that is you can be walking around thinking, “Well, I’m not living in a different country, I’m a great father.” So in terms of fatherhood being done well or done badly, I don’t have that consciousness from my father. I’ve had to make it up.
I don’t think anything prepares you for the particular character of your children and the circumstances they find themselves in. There are some things that are completely maddening, like bloody Arsenal. My two youngest boys get destroyed by bad results. I’m going, “Oh God, it’s only a game”, but they’re 13 and 12. They’ve been into it since they’ve been about five or six. There was a time when I was quite happy not taking them, actually. It was like, “I’m off to the football now”, and suddenly you’re taking two little kids who weep most of the time because it’s so crap.
I didn’t learn to drive until I was over 40. After I got divorced, I needed to pick my son up from school and forced myself to pass my test, first time, despite all instincts. But since he left school I’ve stopped. It made me feel sick with nerves, and when I had two scrapes in a week I decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
I still go to quite a lot of gigs. I try and make sure I see people I want to see. I do like finding new bands. I’m a big Spotify person and I’ll make a Spotify playlist for friends who’ve stopped listening to new music. The one I made recently, it sounds like it was made in 1956. All new music, made this year, people like JD McPherson, the rockabilly guy. Well within my comfort zone.
The last couple of years, I’ve finally got jazz. I know it’s the cliché of my age, but it’s fantastic. I was reading something, and suddenly thought I was fed up of everything I listen to being in 4/4 and sounding more or less the same, I’d like to hear something different. I found the right jazz and that was that.
The best thing about influence: if something goes in right, and comes out right, the other person wouldn’t know that you’ve ripped them off.
I lost my hair when I was in my mid-twenties. I didn’t want to be a TV presenter and I had girlfriends: if either of those things were different, it might have been more problematic. Then, of course, you get older and everyone starts going bald and now I really like getting the clippers out, and that’s it: done.
Writing is a very bad job for feeling at the end of the day that you have done something because most times I haven’t done what I have intended to. One thing that makes me feel OK is if I’ve gone to the gym for an hour and sweated a lot. I come back and feel reasonably calm. It helps to keep fit, but it’s more for the head than the body.
I am so old I have smoked everywhere. Planes. Tubes. Hospitals. First time I had a knee operation, after doing something playing football, I came round in the ward and there was this fug of smoke, these young men who had either come off motorbikes or done their cartilages. Ashtrays by the beds. Now, I vape 3mg of nicotine a day. That’ll do me. Zero I can’t do. But I really like the flavours, they’re fantastic.
I don’t think it’s possible to recreate the intensity that you feel when you don’t know anything about anything. I still get enormous pleasure from discovering new things, but the sense of being lasered by something in your teenage years and early twenties, when you’re a blank sheet of paper and people are writing on you for the first time — it’s hard to recreate that in your fifties.
When I go to a football match with an American, I always feel nervous and think, “Just don’t let it be 0–0.” Unless they are being annoying about it, in which case I want it to be 0–0. I took Michael Chabon and his boys, and I wanted them to see goals. It finished Arsenal 7, Newcastle 3. It was like his boys had had 15 shots of espresso. The youngest one had the retainers on his teeth made red and white.