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Interview [published May 2001]
Nick Hornby: Gender Trouble
Patrick McGuigan talks with Nick Hornby about the changing roles of
men and women in his new novel How To Be Good
Men stumble through life bewildered by relationships,
terrified of responsibility and unable to articulate their
feelings; or so you would think from the characters
portrayed in Nick Hornby’s novels. Women are only
used to make the men look worse. His new book, How
To Be Good, deliberately sets out to challenge this
stereotype. Hornby’s arrival at such a position has been
a direct result of the success of his first three books,
Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About A Boy.
Hornby writes from a small flat two minutes from
his beloved Highbury. It is equipped with a kitchen,
bathroom and lounge, where framed posters of his
books hang proudly on the walls. He obviously spends
a lot of time here. Hornby is divorced and lives with his
seven-year-old son in a house near to his office flat. He
is friendly, assured, and smokes continually. He looks
tired and his patchy baldness gives him a disconcerting,
ravaged look.
Born in 1957, he graduated from Cambridge with a
2.2 in English Literature. He then worked as a teacher
and a journalist before publishing Fever Pitch in 1992.
It was an honest account of how his obsession with
BUY Nick Hornby books online from and
Arsenal usually took precedence over his emotional
life. His next two books, High Fidelity and About A
Boy, explored similar ideas of how men struggle to
come to terms with modern expectations of sensitivity
and maturity. They are funny, touching and his male
characters ring true.
It is surprising for an author so concerned with masculinity
that he hasn’t written much about fatherhood.
All his main characters are, as he puts it: “childless,
feckless males,” who don’t have strong paternal ties.
About A Boy addressed the issue of fatherhood in a
metaphorical way but he has never dealt with it directly.
Part of the reason for this is that his son, Danny, is
autistic. “My experience of fatherhood is going to take
a long while to filter through to what I write. Being
the father of a disabled child you have a lot to say, but
it’s so unique you want to do it in a way that people
understand.”
His own father left the family home for another woman
when Hornby was a young boy. He then moved abroad
for ten years. Hornby says he has not really thought
about what effect his father has had on his writing, but
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