In Conversation: Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer has just returned home from giving a reading in Belfast from his just released memoir, titled Homework, which documents the first eighteen years of his life in working-class Cheltenham. He’s a little hungover. He’d been out after drinking Guinness. “As you get older, the things you like take so much longer to recover from,” he says, “even the simplest things, like drinking or drug-taking or playing tennis.” We’re in Geoff’s study, which is stacked floor to ceiling with books on just about everything. He’s often got three or four volumes on the go at a time, he says, and his west London home is strewn with proof: there are books, waiting, on tables, chairs, mantelpieces, sofas, by the door, on the terrace. 

Earlier this year, he moved back to London after a long decade in America. Steadily heading West: first New York, then Iowa, Texas, Los Angeles, settling, eventually, down by the ocean in Venice Beach to teach at USC. He left just after the fires ripped through much of the city in early 2025. His possessions finally arrived, via container, a few weeks ago. “Los Angeles is quite a boring place to live,” he says, “punctuated occasionally by the terror and excitement of great disaster.” He’s enjoying being back in London though, with its specific rhythms, he’s busy cycling around town and going to gigs at Cafe Oto. 

“Los Angeles is quite a boring place to live, punctuated occasionally by the terror and excitement of great disaster.”

For anyone who’s engaged with Geoff’s work you might be surprised to find out that he’s recently fallen out of love with tennis, both watching and playing. He loved Roger Federer too much, and since he retired it’s not been the same. “It was just so wonderful watching Roger play, nothing will ever come close to that for me. There was something so beautiful about that one-handed backhand. But then also it's nice in life when things change. I spent so much of my life obsessed with tennis, and now I’ve lost interest in it. It’s freed up a lot of time to watch videos on Instagram,” he laughs, although a framed picture of Roger, from L’Equipe, at the moment of his retirement, still rests, pride of place, above the cistern on his toilet.   

Geoff’s written over twenty books in a forty-year-long career. Both novels and non-fiction, although he doesn’t really see much distinction between the two, preferring instead just to think of it all as writing, or language, or recording what he thinks and sees and looks at and listens to. These books have covered just about everything: jazz, DH Lawrence, tennis, Bob Dylan, Where Eagles Dare, John Berger, Paris, south London, yoga, Tarkovsky, photography, dole-queue Bohemianism, Beethoven. He was, for a moment, a writer-in-residence on an aircraft carrier, the USS George H. W. Bush. His books are often very funny and very clever and very interesting, and he’s won many prizes for them.   

He’s going to do a reading from Homework later this evening in Fitzrovia, which Drake’s is sponsoring. Then he’s back to his hometown of Cheltenham for the literary festival. “They’re going to give me the freedom of the city,” he laughs. “I’ll be presented with a giant key. There'll be bunting everywhere.”  

For all the playful unconventionality that defines his work, Homework is quite straight-forward in structure, although it began as a spatial rather than chronological biography, growing out of an earlier project in which he drafted a psychogeographical Ordnance Survey-style map of Cheltenham, with places marked for where he’d got into fights or kissed girls. He tried to expand this idea but couldn’t work out how to turn it into a full-length book.  

“I spent so much of my life obsessed with tennis, and now I’ve lost interest in it. It’s freed up a lot of time to watch videos on Instagram.”

“I kept hitting these obstacles with it. It was just always a problem. I’d fix one thing and that correction would then cause something else to break. I found that all of that went away if I just arranged it temporally, rather than spatially, historically, rather than geographically. It was a very easy book to write once I resigned myself to writing a very conventional book.”  

And so rather conventionally, Homework traces the formative first eighteen years of his life, a time before he was a writer, or at least when he was in the process of becoming one. Homework is a reflection on his working-class upbringing, but it’s also the story of a moment in time when society, briefly, felt malleable; when the 11+ and grammar schools allowed people to transcend, to an extent, where they were from. Homework tracks these larger changes in British culture, which, at the time of his birth in 1958 was marked by deprivation and still-warm memories of the war, and by the time he heads to Oxford, has been transformed by an explosion in popular culture and consumerism.  

So as much as it is a conventionally plotted memoir of Geoff’s life, and a story of that era’s changing tastes and aesthetic superficialities, and as beautifully as it summons that world up with Dyer-esque precision and humour, it’s also mainly, or even really, about a system through which a clever working-class boy becomes middle-class, and what effect that has upon someone.   

“After Oxford I ended up living on the dole in a squat in Brixton. What my parents couldn’t understand was that lifestyle was proof, in a weird way, that I had become middle-class. It just wasn’t what they imagined middle-class life looked like.”

It’s a book about “this process I went through, a process a lot of people went through. I’ve been calling it Grammar School Boy Syndrome. It’s a book about these post-war years of social mobility, which was a great thing, but there was also a price to it. Not that I feel sorry for myself at all, but I think a lot of people of my generation underwent this big social experiment. We thought we were just passing exams but really we were part of a larger process, which as I went through it, more and more of my life, especially when I went to Oxford, became incommunicable to my parents. Among all the things I gained, I also lost that.”  

“After Oxford,” Geoff continues, “which my parents thought would lead to something, I ended up living on the dole in a squat in Brixton. What they couldn’t understand was that lifestyle was proof, in a weird way, that I had become middle-class. It just wasn’t what they imagined middle-class life looked like.” That kind of experience has gone now too as London’s changed, the squats have been developed into new blocks of flats, and housing costs increasingly price a counter-cultural tendency out of the city. It’s getting more and more expensive to be poor.   

The memoir was written while he was still in LA, and he was aware of a tendency towards nostalgia and romanticising his past that came from that, but tried to be as honest as possible. Geoff once said there was as much truth in his fiction as made-up things in his non-fiction. A memoir though implies a very specific kind of honesty. Even as it’s modulated by language, and Geoff’s distinctive style, which transforms “what happened” into something to be read and enjoyed. “I really was as truthful as possible,” he says, “Or as far as possible that memory allowed, but I'm offering people not just a record of my life, which people aren't interested in anyway, but a reading and literary experience by a writer with a quite distinct stylistic signature.”  

Geoff is strikingly tall. That evening at the reading, he’s visible across the incredibly busy room, a foot, easily, above everyone else. The reading’s been organised by Tom Willis’s very buzzy Soho Reading Series, which has deftly created hype and excitement around the often stereotypically quite dull idea of listening to writers read out their work. Geoff though, at the microphone, has the panache and presence of a stand-up comic. He reads a section from Homework about the time his dad tried to negotiate a discount for a tennis racket for him in Cheltenham, and a section of his novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, about trying to use a cashpoint in India, before launching into an encore about wanting poetry readings to be over. They are very funny, but also very Dyer-esque, in that they are also about an individual and the world in a state of uneasy friction. He looks resplendent in his olive-coloured cord Drake’s suit. 

“I'm very confident in being a funny writer and I feel I've become a more serious writer as I've got funnier.” 

Homework is a marker in a way, especially coinciding with a return to London, of a new phase in Geoff’s work. The necessary reflection involved in the memoir has allowed him also to think more deeply about the broad contours of his literary life. He’s now 67. Although a very boy-ish 67. Late-period Geoff Dyer looms.  

“I’ve always enjoyed being a writer,” he says, after the event, “and living a writer’s life, especially how your writing changes. If you think of an early novel of mine like The Colour of Memory, there was such an abundance of lyricism there. Same in the jazz book, But Beautiful. I think I’ve really got funnier as I’ve got older, even if my humour is becoming more adolescent, and I like that tension. The lyricism is there flickeringly now,” he says, before heading off into the evening. "I'm very confident in being a funny writer and I feel I've become a more serious writer as I've got funnier.”