Juliet, Naked

It's a little strange writing about this book, as it's partly about an obsessive fan of a musician. And I'm an occasional obsessive fan of Nick Hornby. Well, to be honest, I'm far from obsessive, but I have read all of his books and will often cite him as my favorite author. He even partly inspired this blog.

Much like how Duncan in this book eagerly awaits the new release from musician Tucker Crowe, I was eagerly awaiting this new novel from Hornby. I can't help but think that Hornby might be mocking people like me in here. Then again, many of his books are about obsessive fans. And here the twist is that the book is more about the woman who has to live with the obsessive fan and the subject of the obsessive fandom. At times, it's like High Fidelity in reverse.

There's even a part in here in which the obsessive fan writes a review of the new release by Tucker Crowe right after listening to it for the first time, so this entry is beginning to seem very meta.

Here's what for me was the most striking passage:

The truth abut autobiographical songs, he [Tucker] realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning. . . .The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.

Here, Tucker has always hated his most renowned album, because he felt it wasn't authentic. That's sort of how I feel about writing humor columns now, like I'm trying too hard to catalog life in a snappy 750-word column. Many of my old columns all seem vaguely inauthentic to me. I seem to have been striving too hard for an opinion on which I could hang some jokes. When someone would write to me angrily about my opinion, a part of me would always be confused. I didn't mean anything by it. It was just a humor column, and they want to debate me?

It's a little similar to how Tucker feels about his songs. Unless, of course, it's not. On an unrelated note, the obsessive fan later decides that his initial review of the Tucker Crowe album was completely off-base. He's soon a little embarrassed by it, in fact.