And nobody had written a book like it – it was completely original.
It’s also a bit of a social history of England from the 1960s through to the 1980s. And he describes how he uses supporting Arsenal to escape his parents’ divorce, problems with women, the question of what to do with his life, and lots of things like that. Nick Hornby doesn’t revel in, ‘Oh I’m such a football geek, isn’t that funny?’ He treats it as something suspect. It was just when memoirs were coming into fashion, about the same time as Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? And you could say that Fever Pitch really launched the genre of serious football books.
Because when Pete Davies’s book did well, publishers realised there was a literate football fan audience out there, and then Nick Hornby came and proved it with a vengeance in 1992. That came out in 1990, and has been called the John the Baptist to Nick Hornby’s Jesus. Actually, the book that started it all off was Pete Davies’s All Played Out. It’s not depressing! It’s very funny and was also almost the book that started this all off. It’s about an obsessive Arsenal fan…isn’t it a bit depressing? You’ve selected the best football books in English, and top of your list is Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby.
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