Nick Hornby walks in from the hotel courtyard after a cigarette break between interviews.
Soft-spoken and unassuming, he's the walking/talking embodiment of his literary image, down to the faint air of an outsider – someone who looks prone to ruminating over lists of favourite songs or most memorable Arsenal football games, as his heroes do in books like High Fidelity and Fever Pitch.
Slumping in the hotel restaurant chair, his head resting in his hands, he inevitably steers the conversation toward music and British pop culture. Then comes the surprise: This purveyor of a particular kind of “lad lit” mentions how strong and immediate his affinity was for a short memoir, a schoolgirl confession, really, by British journalist Lynn Barber.
In Barber's article, written for the literary journal Granta in 2003, she writes about how an older man tricked her into having an affair when she was a restless teenager studying for her A-levels in Twickenham in the early 1960s. The relationship was all based on a lie, perpetuated by the hush-hush of insular, middle-class manners.
Hornby latched on to the article. He mentioned it to his girlfriend, now wife, film producer Amanda Posey, who purchased the film rights. And after many drafts and many years getting the project into production, Hornby's adaptation of the original piece has just been released as An Education , starring Peter Sarsgaard as the lecher and Carey Mulligan as Barber, who is renamed Jenny in the film. (Meanwhile, Barber's article has become a full autobiography.)
The story is deeply embedded in postwar English teenage life, a quiet desperation (to crib a classic-rock line for Hornby) that resonated for him.
“I understood the character because of that sense of being a suburban teenager who's frightened of missing out. I suppose after I finished [the script], I began to see that that's the story of a lot of popular culture, in fact. A suburban teenager who's frightened of missing out: It's pretty much the story of any white English rock band, for a start!” Hornby says with a quick laugh, as if acknowledging how he can't help bringing the topic back to music.
“Look at the way that the Beatles and the Stones looked across the Atlantic. They came from these little parts [of England]: The Stones from 30, 40 miles outside London and wanting to be in the middle of Chicago, effectively, with the music they made.”
Of course Hornby is generalizing about how suburbanites Mick and Keith formed the Rolling Stones with Brian Jones. But his point is clear – his story, the Stones' and Barber's all spring from the same core desires.
“I know it's an odd thing to say, but in my first book, Fever Pitch , [Barber's story] was my story too. It was football instead of all the cultural stuff,” Hornby says.
In the original article, the turning-17-year-old Barber is more conniving, less wide-eyed than Hornby's reinterpretation of her as Jenny in the film.
As Barber writes caustically: “Asking questions showed that you were naive and bourgeois; not asking questions showed that you were sophisticated and French. I badly wanted to be sophisticated. And, as it happened, this suited Simon [the other half of the affair] fine. My role in the relationship was to be the schoolgirl ice maiden, implacable, ungrateful, unresponsive to everything he said or did. To ask questions would have shown that I was interested in him, even that I cared, and neither of us really wanted that.”
In the film, Jenny cares more. Her motives are less vague. She is overawed by the world of London nightclubs and art auctions opened up to her by her mysterious paramour. The story is simplified.
