Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer best known for the football memoir Fever Pitch and novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, all adapted into successful films.
On the island
Eight records
Kitty's BackFavourite
I've been doing a lot of book tours over the last few years and I think one of the things I need from music, probably at all times but especially on book tours, is energy. And this is one of the most energizing records I know.
I can never hear without thinking of my school days and we were all big Rod Stewart fans at school.
I love it. I if I was on a desert island I would like some harmony in my music and it really reminds me of university as well.
I used to go to a club in Kentish Town every single Friday night, and partly this club was an inspiration for things in high fidelity, and this is another energy record as well.
This is Fatu Yo by Tore Kunda, which is one of my son Danny's favourite records.
It's a fairly, I think, obscure Joni Mitchell song, but my second son, Lowell, happened to be born during this song.
My Heart Is the Bums on the Street
This is a band I've discovered relatively recently, a band called Marat. The first time that there was a New Yorker festival I was contributing to The New Yorker, I we got a New Yorker car to drive us from the middle of Manhattan to Aspury Park, New Jersey. ... we went to basically went to a club to see this band and this particular song reminds me of that night especially.
If I Was on a desert island I'd want some volume, um I'd want something very, very loud. And this is Going Back to Cali by L. L. Cooljay, and it's very loud.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:39How did the idea [for Fever Pitch] come to you?
Well, there were two things. One was that I'd been reading a lot of American memoirs. ... But the other really crucial thing was that I had therapy and ... we actually started to talk about it then. And it had never occurred to me that my obsession with football at the time had any relevance to anything at all. ... But when she did get me to talk, I ended up talking a lot about my childhood and my father, and it was more fruitful than anything else we'd tried.
Presenter asks
5:00When did you really think I want to be a writer? Was there a specific moment?
probably at university. ... But there was a specific moment later on when I was teaching where I had an idea for a play or a story that I thought was so kind of compellingly good that I knew I finally I would have to try and write it.
Presenter asks
6:14Does [writing] get tougher as you get older and more successful because essentially what you've done is become less of an ordinary bloke?
I think that one can still recognize what is going to matter to people at various stages of the world. ... what one is capable of looking at what's happening to oneself and thinking versions of this are happening to other people. I mean, maybe not exactly the same thing, but versions of it.
The keepsakes
The book
Charles Dickens
because I haven't read it and I want to read all Dickens and Barnaby Rudge seems to be the one that people put off till last.
The luxury
An iPod is uh uh an MP three player. It's probably doesn't help you much. No. But um it contains four thousand songs. Well in fact now I think the new one is seven and a half thousand songs. So
Presenter asks
15:13Would you go as far as to say if you hadn't gone into therapy you'd never have written Fever Pitch?
Yes, I think I would. I don't think I'd have made that connection, or maybe not made it at the right time.
Presenter asks
22:33How much did the pressure that a disabled child puts on a marriage have to do with your divorce?
the pressure that a disabled child puts on a marriage means that Fault lines that might not otherwise have been revealed become revealed. quite quickly and maybe without A child with a disability, you could kind of never have to examine the problem. But when you do have that kind of situation, then You start to learn things about it, yeah.
“The way the book ended up working, and of course I couldn't know this, was that women read it as an explanation and men read it as a kind of vindication.”
“I suppose it's trying to imagine this this conversation that you're having with a reader, and and for me my writing is conversational, and it's really trying to find a way of getting the rhythms of conversation into prose.”
“no sooner had it started to come in than Danny was diagnosed and and you did think, Oh, I see, I see what that's for.”