literature
“High Fidelity”: Nick Hornby turns 65
British author Nick Hornby turns 65. Photo: Facundo Arrizabalaga/epa/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
Football fans or music lovers – millions of readers found themselves in Nick Hornby’s books. In the meantime, the bestselling and screenplay author has also discovered other topics for himself.
Nick Hornby doesn’t care which of his books people remember best. “I’d be happy if one was printed for the rest of my life,” the best-selling author told the Guardian.
“I think “High Fidelity” would have a few funny footnotes if it’s still around in 100 years.” The novel about a record store owner and his failed relationships is one of Nick Hornby’s most famous books, along with “About A Boy” and “Fever Pitch”. On Sunday (April 17) the Briton will be 65 years old.
Hornby published his last novel, Just Like You, two years ago. It is set at the time of the Brexit referendum and is about the love affair of a divorced white teacher and mother of two boys with a black butcher who is 20 years her junior. This was new territory for Hornby, who lives in north London. “I wanted the book to represent my city,” he told The Times. “When I open my door, I’m in a multicultural neighborhood, but I’ve never written about it.”
He wrote mostly, as he says himself, about white men like himself. Often they are obsessed fans. As in “Fever Pitch”, which founded his career as a writer around 30 years ago. By then, Hornby, who was born in the small town of Redhill, Surrey, in 1957, had worked as a teacher and freelance journalist.
The collection of memoirs was published in Germany as “Fever Pitch: Ballfieber – The Story of a Fan”. The book has no chapters, but is loosely structured around reminiscences of matches played at English football club Arsenal, of which Hornby is a fervent supporter.
Three years later «High Fidelity» was released. Its main character is a music obsessive, the book peppered with countless pop culture references – and lovesickness. “Every time I looked back at the book for any reason, I was struck by its melancholy,” Hornby wrote in a column for Rolling Stones magazine. The novel sold millions of copies and was made into a film in 2000, starring John Cusack. A musical followed in 2006 and a short-lived TV series starring Zoë Kravitz in 2020.
“Fever Pitch” was also filmed twice, albeit only loosely based on the book. In 1997 “Ballfieber” with Colin Firth came to the cinema. For the US adaptation in 2005, the football fan became a baseball fan, played by US show host and comedian Jimmy Fallon.
Somehow Hornby finds himself in almost every one of his books, at least to some extent. Also in his poignant novel About A Boy, published in 1998, the protagonist, whom Hugh Grant later played on screen, is an Arsenal fan and music lover. Perpetual bachelor Will Freeman befriends a schoolboy whose mother is suicidal.
After that, Hornby devoted himself more frequently to female protagonists because they had “more problems than white men,” according to Hornby. In 2001, he wrote for the first time from a woman’s perspective in “How To Be Good”. “I had increasingly asked myself whether women are actually more interesting overall than men my age,” he said in an interview with the Irish Times. And also: “You can’t write about yourself forever.”
In “A Long Way Down” two women and two men meet on the roof of a house who originally wanted to take their own lives, but then change their minds. “Juliet, Naked” revolves around Annie, who – typically Hornby – suffers from her boyfriend’s extreme passion for music. “Funny Girl” is about a young woman who wants to be a TV comedian in London in the 1960s.
Hornby has since established himself as a screenwriter for cinema and television. However, he does not like to adapt his own books, “Ballfieber” remained an exception. In 2010 and 2016 he received an Oscar nomination in the category Best Adapted Screenplay for the coming-of-age film “An Education” and the drama “Brooklyn – A Love Between Two Worlds”. The television series State Of The Union, written by him and directed by Stephen Frears, is about to enter its second season.
He often works with film producer Amanda Posey, who is also his second wife. Nick Hornby has a son from his first marriage who was born in 1993 and is autistic. Hornby therefore founded a foundation that supports children and young people with autism or Asperger’s syndrome.
The author has two other sons with Posey, who were born in 2001 and 2004. Both are, of course, ardent Arsenal fans. The family lives in London’s Highbury district – very close to the football stadium.