Writer Nick Hornby spoke to an engaged audience and answered questions during the most recent ‘West Hartford Reads’ event.

Members of the audience speak with Nick Hornby and get books signed during a West Hartford Reads event. Photo credit: Harlan Levy

By Harlan Levy

Acclaimed British writer Nick Hornby – author of High Fidelity, About A Boy, How to Be Good, and many other best-selling novels – spoke at King Philip Middle School last Thursday night, Oct. 12, entertaining a crowd of about 400.

Equally known for his screenplays of award-winning films, including Fever Pitch, About A Boy, An Education, Wild, and Brooklyn, Hornby, 66, later took time to answer questions from enthusiastic fans and to sign books, including his newest release, Dickens and Prince.

A large crowd came to hear Nick Hornby on Oct. 12 for a “West Hartford Reads” event. Photo credit: Harlan Levy

In this latest installment of the West Hartford Public Library’s “West Hartford Reads” program, Hornby, often drawing laughter from the audience, told moderator Julia Pistell that his novels usually take place within a few miles of where he lives and involve “modern” characters. “I try to write about people we’d all recognize,” he said, and “about the lives we are living now.”

His protagonists “tend to be in a bit of a mess, trying to navigate their way through whatever it is that’s gone wrong for them,” Hornby noted. “I’ve always thought that most people don’t have the lives that they want.”

He tries not to rub readers’ noses in this notion, however, because “a lot of people do know that life is difficult. And I think there’s a way of doing it without being stupid about it.”

The issues with which his characters grapple are universal, Hornby added, rather than being related to any particular culture or nationality.

When High Fidelity – in which a record store owner obsessed with pop culture recounts his last five break-ups – was first published in 1995, “No one ever said to me, ‘Oh this is what it’s like to be English.’ They always said, ‘My brother’s like this, I’m like this, my sister’s like that,’” Hornby said. “I think the more particular you are about your own community, the broader the appeal of a book. If you try to write something that’s for everyone all over the world, it’s meaningless.”

A reader had recently asked if he was going to write a sequel to that book. No, he said, “because I could never imagine what that guy had been doing since the mid-90s. He expressed surprise that the book had remained so popular for over a quarter-century. “It’s amazing to me that people have not been put off by the density of the pop-cultural references.”

Nick Hornby on stage at King Philip Middle School with moderator Julia Pistell during a “West Hartford Reads” event. Photo credit: Harlan Levy

Following the 90-minute talk, Hornby took questions from more than a dozen members of the audience, on everything from how he chooses his themes to his advice for aspiring writers. The key was to write, he replied about the latter, going on to observe that if you could put down 500 words a day, within a year you would have a completed draft (although his books, he admitted, always took much longer).

He was also commended on doing such a fabulous job recreating a woman’s voice in books such as How to Be Good (about a woman seeking a divorce), and Just Like You (about a white woman in her 40s having an affair with a black man in his 20s). How had he captured the opposite sex so convincingly?

“I think I did a marvelous job, and you think I did a marvelous job,” he replied. “So, I don’t care what anyone else thinks,” he said, laughing along with the audience. Yet he acknowledged two factors in his own life that had greatly eased this effort.

“One is that my father left when I was quite young, and I grew up with a sister, a mother, and a grandmother in the house … and I married more than one woman,” he quipped, eliciting another audience laugh. “So, the only voices I had for most of my domestic life were women’s. And if you’ve learned nothing from this experience, what have you been doing the whole time?”

His screenplays featuring women in key roles also had given him confidence. “I got Best Actress nominations three times straight for those women,” he said, referring to Carey Mulligan in An Education, Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn, and Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern in Wild, “and I’m as proud of that as anything.”

Even so, he admitted to seeking feedback from female readers prior to publication. About this, he offered some advice. “Never give a book to a woman and say, ‘This is about women. Did I get it right?’, because there’s no such thing as ‘women.’ There’s a zillion individual women.”

For example, in How to Be Good, the narrator Katie makes a joke about JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald. The first woman he gave it to said, ” ‘Women aren’t interested in politics.’” This led him to fear that he was just going to get similar comments over and over again. “Women don’t eat carrots.” “Women don’t like this on television.” In the end, he realized, “You have to create a character that you feel is true and just hope for the best.”

After the talk, Hornby spent a few minutes chatting. Asked if his novels were often autobiographical, he responded, “Not anymore. They were, but I’ve gone too far out now.”

Does he think of a plot or a character first? “It’s been different with each book pretty much every time,” he answered. “It’s either a fragment of narrative that sits there, and sometimes it collides with another fragment of narrative from another idea I’ve had, or it’s a person, either way that gets me into the book.”

As to what he’s working on now, he said he had a couple of screenplays at various stages and was trying to adapt a book about Rin Tin Tin, the movie dog. No novels? “Yeah, I’ve got a novel in the gate.” As for what it might be about, “Too early to say.”

Members of the audience speak with Nick Hornby and get books signed during a West Hartford Reads event. Photo credit: Harlan Levy

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