YOUR AUTOGRAPH PLEASE | February 28th 2008

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Nick Hornby began the trend of the nobody-turned-somebody autobiography. In a culture of blogs, sex diaries and childhood-abuse memoirs, can Jasper Rees hack it with his narrative about the french horn? ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Winter 2007

A few years ago I was working on a biography of Arsène Wenger, the cerebral French coach of Arsenal. One of the people I interviewed was the famous Arsenal fan Nick Hornby. Afterwards I produced a first edition of "Fever Pitch" and asked him to sign it. Signed first editions of the book that made Hornby's name are gold dust. It went on to sell well over a million in the United Kingdom, but initially it had a modest print run. Why wouldn't it? The autobiography of someone who had done precisely nothing to excite the interest of the reading public was an entirely new concept in publishing.

"Of course," said Hornby, turning to the title page. "Would you like me to just sign it, or would you like me to sign it to you?"

This sounded like a trick question.

"There's no way of putting this diplomatically, Jasper. If I just sign it the value of the book will go up. If I sign it to you..." The sentence didn't need finishing. In the NASDAQ of literary value, Hornby was saying as delicately as possible, he was a somebody. I, however, was a nobody. I didn't want to suggest to him that my only motive might be improper, so I did myself out of several hundred pounds and asked him to sign it to me.

But somewhere in the netherworld of my unconscious, was I secretly calculating that one day I too would be a somebody? We all dream of telling our life story. The brilliant conjuring trick of "Fever Pitch" was that in measuring out his life in football fixtures its author told everyone else's life story too. In this country, the book single-handedly minted a brand new genre: the nonentity memoir. Its success flashed a green light at a lurking army of authors all itching to tell the world about the new holy trinity: me, myself and, last but not least, I.

At first it was mostly journalists. Previously they might have thought of funnelling their experiences into fiction, but the new literary market allowed them to stick to the facts. They wrote about their failure as a pop star, failure as a boxing promoter, or, in Toby Young's case, failure to take Manhattan. His "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People" won 250,000 friends worldwide and next autumn it follows "Fever Pitch" into the multiplex--the ultimate affirmation of arrival. Where conventional autobiographies are about the rise to the top, these were tales of bumping along the bottom. Failure was the new rock'n'roll. Which explains why there have been an awful lot of golf memoirs.

None of this happened in a vacuum. Outside the bookshop, popular culture was enfranchising nobodies to share the contents of their navel through talk radio, reality television and-the most emetic, self-promoting medium of all--blogs. The logical outcome, a decade or so in, was to detach celebrity from ability sufficiently for an absolute zero called Chantelle--or to give her her scientific name, Dolly the Celeb--to sprout from the test tube, win "Celebrity Big Brother" and immediately gush forth the ne plus ultra of pointless autobiographies, entitled "Living The Dream".

A culture which entitles "real" people to the limelight was sooner or later going to give birth to the sexual memoir. Naturally the lead came from France. Cathérine Millet's "The Sexual Life of Cathérine M", a catalogue of joyless promiscuity, sold globally in its hundreds of thousands and prompted a gaggle of cliterati fluent in the argot of "Sex and the City" to bare all in titles like "Girl with a One-track Mind: Confessions of the Seductress Next Door". Sex is notoriously difficult to write about with conviction, so when a prostitute trading under the pseudonym of Belle de Jour produced, in "Diary of a Working Girl", a stylish account of her night job which sold over 200,000 copies, she was widely assumed to have made it all up. But she can't have done. It's proper novelists who get erotica wrong, so much so that Britain's Literary Review presents a Bad Sex Award to the year's worst perpetrator in fiction.

Just as sex has set up camp on the three-for-two table, so has death. It started when an HIV-positive journalist, Oscar Moore, kept a diary in the Guardian of his journey to an early grave. Two more journalists, John Diamond and Ruth Picardie, followed suit with moving dispatches from the chemotherapy front-line, posthumously collected into books which unleashed a torrent of cancer-related memoirs. However pure the authors' motives, these books leapt off the shelves for the same reason that people slow down to gawp at car crashes.

In the wake of "Angela's Ashes", Frank McCourt's memoir of a grim Irish childhood that spawned a trilogy and a movie, the publishing industry was quick to latch on to the commercial potential of childhood trauma. The New York Times was moved to describe Dave Pelzer's relentless commodification of his own abuse as "dysfunction for dollars" as authors queued up to retrieve similar memories. The formulaic titles hinted at the corporate cynicism that attended their publication: "Damaged and Punished and Abandoned", "Please, Daddy, No", "Tell Me Why, Mummy", "Don't Tell Mummy", "Don't Ever Tell". In a recent cartoon in the New Yorker a woman brandishes a letter at a man. "Congratulations!" she says. "Your manuscript was the one-millionth personal memoir submitted to us this year."

And so to the million and first--written, I almost blush to admit, by me. Without wishing to put anyone off, there is no sex or death or even illness in my life story. There is, however, a narrative I hope readers can identify with. I was taught at school never to use the word "I" in essays, and in journalism I've more or less stuck to it. Never having entertained the slightest ambition to write about myself, I found the idea stealing up on me on the cusp of my 40th birthday, no doubt a symptom of some sort of midlife rethink, when I decided on a whim to answer the beating of my heart and resume the musical instrument I'd given up on leaving school.

I was emboldened to write about what happened next by meeting many people who had expressed a similar longing. I also met some who thought they were being helpful when they said, "You must read X's personal memoir about pianos" or "Do you know Y's done something similar on the electric guitar?" I've become aware that this isn't the first story of a nobody with a musical theme. But it's my story, and like other memoirs by people you've never heard of, its aim is to tell a tale that is at once familiar and original. In alighting on the common experience of learning an instrument, and describing the nightmare-come-true of performing in front of a paying audience, I hope I've done both. So should I just sign your first edition, or should I sign it to you?

"I Found My Horn" by Jasper Rees was published by Weidenfeld on January 11th, 2008.