Homework
A Memoir
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
‘Moving, atmospheric, truthful, perceptive and hilariously funny’ Tessa Hadley
‘An irresistible writer’ Richard Ford
Born in 1958, the only child of a dinner lady and a sheet-metal worker, Geoff Dyer grew up in a world shaped by memories of shortages and the Second World War. But far from being a story of hardship overcome, Homework is a celebration of opportunities afforded by the post-war settlement.
It captures his time at primary school - discovering the tactile delights of Airfix, the combative seasons of conkers and plagues of verrucas at the local swimming baths. Then, at eleven, comes the crux, the exam that decided the future of generations of British school kids: splitting them between secondary modern and grammar schools. One of the lucky winners, Dyer goes to Cheltenham Grammar School to face the tribulations of teenage life - sport, gig-going, romantic fumblings, fights (well, getting punched in the face) - and other misadventures a place where he develops a love of literature (and beer and prog rock). At the threshold of university, Dyer gets his first intimations that a short geographical journey - just forty miles up the A40 - might drastically change the trajectory of his life.
Recalling an eroded but strangely resilient England, Homework traces roots that extend into the deep foundations of class society. dyer carries us back, with characteristic comic affection, to the joys and lingering questions of every childhood, and asks what it means to live through an era of intense transformation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this raucous coming-of-age memoir, novelist and journalist Dyer (The Last Days of Roger Federer) recalls growing up in the 1960s and '70s in the English town of Cheltenham. Dyer's industrious parents shared in Britain's new working-class prosperity by buying the previously unimaginable luxuries of a house and car. Meanwhile, Dyer's academic chops catapulted him into a toney grammar school, then to Oxford. Much of the book is a deep dive into the period's boy culture and its obsessions with trading bubblegum cards and building models of WWII warplanes. Along the way, Dyer's rich portraits of his parents reveal how they were at odds with the new Britain: his mother's disfiguring birthmarks made her feel inferior to her newly glamorous surroundings, and his father was a tightwad, suspicious of consumerism but endlessly trustful of government authority. Dyer's reminiscences brim with irony and black humor about an era that trumpeted progress, but was suffused with postimperial decline—in the family garden, Dyer's father "aimed to grow all the carrots, peas, potatoes and other vegetables that we would need to live on in the event of a catastrophic collapse." The result is an arresting and evocatively detailed take on family and society. Photos.
