Young Geoff Dyer and a lawnmower. Photograph courtesy of Geoff Dyer.

Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, was originally called “A Happening.” There would have been something of a joke to this discarded title; from one point of view, nothing much happens in the book. There’s an indelible ordinariness to this coming-of-age story, which, with a few detours, follows Dyer’s early life until he reaches the age of eighteen, in the world of working-class Gloucestershire of the sixties and seventies. Any readers hoping for shocking revelations about the author’s childhood will not find much to titillate them. But of course from another point of view, everything happens. Dyer—has written many books, including Out of Sheer Rage, Jeff in Venice, and most recently The Last Days of Roger Federer—describes in great detail the period in which he became himself, in all the erudition, playfulness, and creativity we might already be familiar with. (Out of Sheer Rage, nominally a book about trying to write a book about D. H. Lawrence, is essential reading for any writer of nonfiction: a funny, moving account of the creative process in its frustrations and joys.) In Homework, Dyer turns his attention to his early life, down even to the accessories his Action Man figurine wore: “the plastic lace patterns on Action’s boots; the khaki elastic strap of his carbine; the little buckle on the helmet strap and the plastic niche into which it was anchored; the genetic logo embossed on his back: Made in England by Palitoy under Licence from Hasbro © 1964.”

Even more impressive is Dyer’s ability to give narrative life to this archive of detail, half a century later. His mother and father are sharply drawn characters, along with the rest of the family. “It was said of Joe that if you filled a bath with beer he’d drink it,” Dyer writes about an uncle. “(I heard this said many times. In Shrewsbury few things were said only once. Everything was repeated over and over.)” Anecdotes are recycled, gaining a kind of mythic status, like “little Audrey Stanley” who used to work with his mother in the school canteen. With these repeated sayings and formulations and anecdotes Dyer conjures something deeper than detail: the lost world of his childhood, but also the lost world of the particular time, place, and class he inhabited. (“Class itself is not a thing, it is a happening,” E. P. Thompson writes, a quote Dyer includes as a postscript to the book, for indeed, it is something that happened to him.) Dyer’s Art of Nonfiction interview appeared in The Paris Review in 2013. We caught up on the phone a few weeks ago about Homework—and about how he managed to render childhood without being boring.

INTERVIEWER

This is a highly detailed, specific memoir about your early life, but also one that describes a bygone era in a particular time and place. How did you balance those two threads, of the personal and social history?

GEOFF DYER

One of the earliest impulses I had was to do something like Annie Ernaux’s The Years, a kind of generational autobiography. I thought it would be cool to do a Gloucestershire, English version of that French book. It ended up being quite different, but the key thing is that there’s nothing interesting about my story. It’s not like I’m a celebrity whose life people are interested in. Also, there are no great revelations. I haven’t discovered I have an illegitimate brother. There’s no abuse. It’s just my story, which is pretty uneventful. But it contains a larger social history of England and a particular phase of English life which I believe is worth preserving. It was my wife who kept saying that I should write this book for that reason, not just out of self-indulgence. The paradox, and it’s a well worn one, is that I could write this larger social history only by telling my own story. When I was discussing this with my American editor, he said, “Should you have an introduction that makes it clear that this is really a book about class?” And I said no, because every detail in the book is so steeped in class. However microscopically, if you look at the evidence, it’s all there. Read More