A balance achieved

With his grey cap, his grey T-shirt, his frizz of grey hair and his shapeless black jacket, Nick Hornby hardly looks like a bestselling author. But anyone harbouring doubts need only glance at his sales figures — his nine books have sold more than five million copies worldwide. And now there is a 10th, a new novel called Juliet, Naked, which is why we are having lunch in Islington, not far away from the office where he writes.

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. He always gets nervous before publication, he says. Have the nerves got any better as you have 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 had 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.”

Getting over old habits

In one sense, Juliet, Naked marks a significant departure for Hornby. It is not set in north London for a start but in Gooleness, a 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.

Hornby is writing about musical obsessives. Once he 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 any more, though.” 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.

In A Long Way Down, Hornby wrote about a group of suicidal depressives. 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 has had his moment of fulfilment, except now the spark has died. Hornby says that he has never worried that much about running out of creative steam.

Increased readership
As Hornby has grown older so have his readers — although they have been supplemented by a steady stream of younger ones. 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. 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, 6, and Jesse, 4.

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, he 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.’ 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 paradise’.’’

Outside, Hornby puts on his grey cap and walks with me to the Tube. On the way we talk about rock concerts that we have 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 is already gone, swallowed up in the crowd.