{"id":171073,"date":"2025-06-17T10:52:30","date_gmt":"2025-06-17T14:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=171073"},"modified":"2025-06-26T09:35:36","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T13:35:36","slug":"catching-up-with-geoff-dyer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/06\/17\/catching-up-with-geoff-dyer\/","title":{"rendered":"Catching up with Geoff Dyer"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Young Geoff Dyer and a lawnmower. Photograph courtesy of Geoff Dyer.<\/p><\/div>\n

Geoff Dyer\u2019s new memoir, <\/em>Homework, was originally called \u201cA Happening.\u201d There would have been something of a joke to this discarded title; from one point of view, nothing much happens in the book. There\u2019s an indelible ordinariness to this coming-of-age story, which, with a few detours, follows Dyer\u2019s 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\u2019s childhood will not find much to titillate them. But of course from another point of view, everything happens. Dyer\u2014has written many books, including <\/em>Out of Sheer Rage, <\/em>Jeff in Venice, and most recently <\/em>The Last Days of Roger Federer\u2014describes in great detail the period in which he became himself, in all the erudition, playfulness, and creativity we might already be familiar with. (<\/em>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 <\/em>Homework, Dyer turns his attention to his early life, down even to the accessories his Action Man figurine wore: \u201cthe plastic lace patterns on Action\u2019s 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 \u00a9 1964.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Even more impressive is Dyer\u2019s 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. \u201cIt was said of Joe that if you filled a bath with beer he\u2019d drink it,\u201d Dyer writes about an uncle. \u201c(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. (\u201cClass itself is not a thing, it is a happening,\u201d 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<\/a> interview appeared in <\/em>The Paris Review in 2013. We caught up on the phone a few weeks ago about <\/em>Homework\u2014and about how he managed to render childhood without being boring.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

GEOFF DYER<\/p>\n

One of the earliest impulses I had was to do something like Annie Ernaux\u2019s The Years<\/em>, 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\u2019s nothing interesting about my story. It\u2019s not like I\u2019m a celebrity whose life people are interested in. Also, there are no great revelations. I haven\u2019t discovered I have an illegitimate brother. There\u2019s no abuse. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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, \u201cShould you have an introduction that makes it clear that this is really a book about class?\u201d And I said no, because every detail in the book is so steeped in class. However microscopically, if you look at the evidence, it\u2019s all there.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How did you go about the process of remembering, in such a high degree of detail?<\/p>\n

DYER<\/p>\n

Obviously I am the world\u2019s leading authority on the subject matter of this book, which is my childhood and adolescence. But with any kind of writing, it\u2019s always about the detail. There were scenes and details that, for whatever reason, often no reason at all, have remained very vivid in my memory. I don\u2019t know why\u2014they weren\u2019t special moments, but they lodged in my mind. In their mysterious way they were my \u201cspots of time,\u201d as Wordsworth calls them in The Prelude<\/em>. But whereas he offers an explanation of their significance\u2014you know, \u201cThis efficacious spirit chiefly lurks \u2026\u201d\u2014I\u2019ve not been able to determine their significance beyond the fact of their tenacity and, on that basis, I happily submitted to their insistence, their quiet lobbying, on the right to be admitted. Also, when I was about seventeen or eighteen and, through reading, became interested in trying to write, I had nothing to write about but my adolescent and family life, and I kept those pages. The writing was of zero literary value, of course, but it comprised a wonderful archive of details I could use.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Were there other kinds of research or self-research involved?<\/p>\n

DYER<\/p>\n

I never think of anything I do as involving research. It always feels to me like having a hobby. I know a great deal about Bob Dylan, for example, because I’m interested in Bob Dylan, but I don\u2019t do research <\/em>on Dylan. The other thing is that it has never been easier to write an autobiography or to write about recent history\u2014pictures of every little thing you\u2019ve ever owned are on the internet. I’m an inept user of the internet, but I was amazed at the amount of data about the clutter of my life\u2014of my g-g-generation, as the Who put it\u2014preserved in Cyberia. Now, what none of this can do\u2014this virtual prop cupboard\u2014is give us narrative. That\u2019s provided by people and by the emergence of an individual consciousness at a particular moment of history\u2014moment in, this instance, in the extended sense of the period from 1958 to 1977.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There\u2019s quite a bit in the book on your collecting of objects as a child and a teenager\u2014Action Men, model airplanes, bubblegum cards, records. How did you think about these objects, as tools for memory but also as things that might be put literally in the book?<\/p>\n

DYER<\/p>\n

The objects are part of a larger universal specificity, as it were. It was related to Ernaux\u2019s project in The Years<\/em>, where there\u2019s a lot of information about various gadgets that became available at defining moments for her generation. The mistake some memoirists make is to write \u201cWe would go down to the shops,\u201d or \u201cWe would go for walks.\u201d It\u2019s all generalized. But the continuity has to be particularized, and the objects in this book are all tied to particular moments. It\u2019s about substantiating a time and place. In The Age of Innocence<\/em>, for example, you hear all about the furnishings of a room, but something is always happening<\/em> in that room, and the stuff happening is complex human and economic interaction. What\u2019s happening in my book\u2014in my rooms\u2014is more self-centered, but I am the locus of social and economic forces. Sticking with toys for a moment, my fondness for inventory is such that my American editor Alex Star said, \u201cI\u2019ve had enough of all these toys, can\u2019t we move on to the human relationships?\u201d And I said, No, you don\u2019t understand, because you have brothers and sisters. But if you\u2019re an only child, it\u2019s things<\/em> that you have relationships with. There\u2019s a line in Billy Collins\u2019s poem \u201cAutobiography\u201d in his book Water, Water<\/em>\u2014he\u2019s an only child, too\u2014where he writes of an ironic ambition to compile \u201ca catalogue raisonn\u00e9 of my toys.\u201d In this book, I surrendered to the same urge. To make a piece of writing interesting, obviously, the catalogue needs to be imbued with narrative potential. In my case that potential lies in the way toys and cards and the solace they bring to the only child is replaced by books and the discovery of reading in my mid-teens, which whooshes into the vacuum left by my having grown out of a kid\u2019s toyhood. And reading and school lead to Oxford and to an eventual understanding\u2014which came to me only in the period after the book ends\u2014that the process I had been through was actually one defined by class, by social and economic forces which had been at work on everything in the book\u2014the stuff, the things, the people, the culture, the history, <\/em>that had formed me. This is made explicit by the quote from E. P. Thompson which appears at the very end, as a kind of closing epigraph, because I only understood this process retrospectively, in my mid-twenties, beyond the completed timeframe of the main part of the book.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Childhood can often be a boring subject. How did you think about making it interesting?<\/p>\n

DYER<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t boring to me, but then of course when you meet bores in real life, they\u2019re not bored by what they\u2019re saying at all, even as they\u2019re boring the pants off anybody who is obliged to listen. But yes, I\u2019m in full agreement\u2014when I read biographies, I always skim through the childhood stuff. It\u2019s not until we get to adolescence that it becomes interesting. And of course all the stuff about grandparents is even more boring. I can\u2019t make any progress with Proust, all that childhood stuff is so boring\u2014I just find myself thinking, Go kick around a ball or something. I’ve never had any interest in having children, and in fact have never had any interaction with other people\u2019s children. So on the one hand childhood bores the crap out of me, but I\u2019m interested in the idea of the formation of the self. What makes that interesting to the reader? It depends on the quality of writing and perception\u2014which, I suppose, is what people say when they\u2019re banging on about Proust!<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How did you approach structuring this book?<\/p>\n

DYER<\/p>\n

Originally, I had the idea of it being an extended version of this map of Cheltenham I had made for an anthology. That map, which appears in a box set called Where Are You<\/em>, is a version of the Ordnance Survey maps of my part of the world. But instead of a symbol where the post office would be, in my map I had a symbol like a fist, in the place where I got punched in the face. Or there were lips to show where I\u2019d had a romantic episode. I liked the idea of the memoir being arranged spatially like that, but unlike with the anthology version, the explanation of those sites\u2014the so-called legend\u2014was going to be much longer, and the words would have taken over. It would have been a very unconventional way of doing a memoir. I wrote a lot\u2014I always think that\u2019s the important thing, to amass a lot of material\u2014and I kept coming up against this structural premise. Instead of being enabling, that structure started to feel like an impediment to arrangement. So I ended up defaulting to the most old-fashioned way of all\u2014proceeding chronologically from my birth, and ending up where it ends, at the age of eighteen. There\u2019s a Roy Fuller poem called \u201cThe Ides of March,\u201d which includes the lines \u201cAnd now I am about \/ To cease being a fellow traveller, about \/ To select from several complex panaceas, \/ Like a shy man confronted with a box \/ Of chocolates, the plainest after all.\u201d So, after having found a complex panacea, I ended up with the plainest after all.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Tell me about coming to the ending. The final section includes a long passage on your mother\u2019s birthmark, which was a source of great shame to her in her youth, and which she always kept covered. You describe it to someone as \u201cthe most important thing in her life,\u201d and writing about it as a kind of betrayal. How did it feel to write about it?<\/p>\n

DYER<\/p>\n

I knew always that the end was going to involve my mother\u2019s birthmark. It was very upsetting to write about. The element of betrayal to it was because of the completeness of my parents\u2019 privacy and because it so defined my mum\u2019s entire life. I would never have written about it while she was alive. The only thing I would say to justify it is that writing is a private thing for me. I\u2019m always writing my books for me. I want them to end up being published, obviously, but I never write in public, never write in caf\u00e9s, and I never do a proposal. I often feel while writing that it\u2019s just about articulating to myself something which is important. But I\u2019m conscious, as I\u2019ve started doing public events for the book, that I\u2019m not able to talk about my mother\u2019s birthmark, partly because I know I\u2019ll become upset about it, and because when you\u2019re doing a public event you\u2019re there to entertain the troops. So that would be inappropriate.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Will you write another memoir, picking up at the age of eighteen after you\u2019ve gone to Oxford?<\/p>\n

DYER<\/p>\n

Absolutely not. Alan Hollinghurst is a great writer, of course, but I think the Oxford scenes in Our Evenings<\/em> prove that a scene of punting in Oxford is really undoable. It\u2019s often a good idea to stop at some point with autobiography. When celebrities write memoirs, it\u2019s best if they stop when they make it. After that, as Steve Martin said, it all becomes \u201cAnd then I met \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Are there memoirs of childhood you love?<\/p>\n

DYER<\/p>\n

Yes. Martin Amis\u2019s Experience<\/em>, Mary Karr\u2019s The Liars\u2019 Club<\/em>, Mary McCarthy\u2019s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood<\/em>, Tobias Wolff\u2019s This Boy\u2019s Life \u2026 <\/em>It\u2019s not a genre that I\u2019ve turned to that often, really. In general, I go to memoir for a literary experience, not to find out about a life. Another, which I would almost call a first-person biography, is An American Childhood<\/em> by Annie Dillard. That both is and isn\u2019t an impersonal memoir. I reread it recently with my students because I was teaching a whole course devoted to Annie Dillard, and it\u2019s really a remarkable and at times inscrutable book.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Was there any change in how you saw your younger self by the time you finished writing the book?<\/p>\n

DYER<\/p>\n

I feel very close now to my fourteen-year-old self, but that\u2019s a path that my writing had been taking anyway. The humor in my later books is sometimes very adolescent, which strikes me as a good sign\u2014immaturing with age.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sophie Haigney is <\/em>The Paris Review‘s web editor.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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