Nick Hornby Trivia

1. The book starts with Marcus asking his mother, "Have you split up now?" With whom had Fiona just split up?

From Quiz About a Boy

Answer: Roger

Marcus' father Clive had left him and Fiona four years earlier, but they had only recently moved from Cambridge to the London suburb of Holloway. The sense of not being settled is established with this opening - Fiona and Roger had some sort of argument that led to him storming out of their lives while the pizzas they had just ordered were on their way. It didn't seem to have been a particularly traumatic event, as their conversation was focused more on what to do with the excess pizza!

From Quiz Nick Hornby: 'Juliet, Naked'

Answer: The men's toilets in a Minneapolis nightclub

The book opens with a scene describing Duncan, who's a Tucker Crowe superfan, and his partner Annie, in the men's toilets of the Pits Club in Minneapolis - "dank, dark, smelly and entirely unremarkable" - having come from England for a holiday pilgrimage of places associated with the disappeared rock star. Duncan's obsessiveness with Tucker Crowe, to Annie's disgust, is captured beautifully by his insistence on her photographing him pretending to have a pee, in front of the urinal he assumes his hero must have used on that fateful night.

From Quiz About a Boy

Answer: Sub-zero

The items he lists as having been ticked to earn him this rating give us a good idea of his lifestyle, in which he devotes most of his energy to finding activities to fill in his days of leisure. Completing questionnaires like this, and being totally honest with himself over them, fill in some hours; television, videos, music and picking up women also help. What he has studiously avoided is getting involved in any kind of serious relationship (which he describes as adding clutter to life).

From Quiz Nick Hornby: 'Juliet, Naked'

Answer: He decided his album was 'a fake bunch of crap'

Tucker Crowe's new album, 'Juliet' - described as one of the great 'break up' albums, rivalling Dylan's 'Blood on the Tracks' and Springsteen's 'Tunnel of Love' - is about the tortured end of his intense relationship with the beautiful Julie Beatty. However, in the Pits Club, Crowe confronts the truth that Julie was actually, as he later says: "an idiot, an airhead, a shallow, vain and uninteresting model who happened to be awfully pretty." Realising that everything he is doing is 'completely phoney', he walks out of the club and his rockband - and disappears. On his way out he goes into the men's toilets simply because he needs to pee - bizarrely this assumes a near-mythical significance for his coterie of fans, who wrongly imagine something momentous happened in the toilets to cause him to disappear.

From Quiz About a Boy

Answer: His father had written a famous song

In 1938, Will's father wrote 'Santa's Super Sleigh', which became an international hit, one that was a must to include in every singer's Christmas album. The royalties have never stopped, and are more than ample to support Will in his chosen lifestyle. However, he is terribly embarrassed by the inanity of the song, which people start singing at him whenever he reveals that his father wrote it. The book includes a small sample of the lyrics, which help us sympathise with him: "So just leave out the mince pies, and a glass of sherry, And Santa will visit you, and leave you feeling merry, Oh, Santa's super sleigh, Santa's super sleigh ..."

From Quiz Nick Hornby: 'Juliet, Naked'

Answer: An original demo version of Crowe's last album

22 years after the release of his album 'Juliet', and purely to make some money, Tucker Crowe - although still in hiding - suddenly agrees to the release of the original unpolished demo version of 'Juliet', stripped down and devoid of backing instruments. Starved of new Crowe material for years, Duncan reviews it for his website, super-praising this 'naked Juliet' and saying it is superior even to the previously released and finished 'dressed' album. Goaded by Duncan's obvious lack of critical faculty about his rock hero's music, Annie writes a counter review. Not only do other 'Crowologists', who are tired of Duncan's sense of superiority, agree with her assessment of the demo, but Tucker Crowe himself - who has been monitoring this website of 'pretty weird people' - emails privately to thank her for her perceptive comments! Tucker and Annie then begin a series of email exchanges.

From Quiz About a Boy

Answer: Marcus throws a baguette at a swimming duck

Will's excuse for the absence of his fantasy son involved a vindictive ex-wife, but Marcus actually sees through this pretense, and realises that there is no Ned (but not immediately - he realises it later as he reflects on the events of this momentous day). Bored by the picnic, Marcus decides to throw his sandwich at a duck in the pond. He actually succeeds in hitting it, but is then appalled to discover that he has killed it. When Will enters into the coverup that avoids any retribution from the park-keeper, Marcus starts to believe that there may be more to Will than meets the eye.

From Quiz Nick Hornby: 'Juliet, Naked'

Answer: Gooleness

Gooleness isn't a 'sophisticated' town: there's no arts cinema, gay community, or even a Waterstone's. When Duncan and Annie moved there separately 15 years earlier, they didn't so much consciously start a relationship as 'fell upon each other with relief'. As the local museum curator, Annie's tasked by local town councillors with preparing a retro exhibition about Gooleness's heyday, 'the summer of 1964' - but the highlight of the exhibits that residents have contributed is the pickled eyeball of a fungally diseased shark that washed up on the beach that year.

From Quiz About a Boy

Answer: Fiona has attempted to commit suicide

The chapter started with a dead duck, and finishes with Marcus finding his mother half-on, half-off the sofa. Marcus doesn't realise immediately that she has attempted suicide, just that she is clearly extremely ill. Once he realises what has happened, he appreciates that his life is going to be completely different, both because he feels a sense of responsibility for causing Fiona's angst, and because he doesn't know how to prevent a recurrence, since he doesn't really understand why it happened in the first place.

From Quiz Nick Hornby: 'Juliet, Naked'

Answer: Northern soul

When Annie pulls the plug on her loveless relationship with Duncan, she recruits her lesbian workmate Ros to help her find a man. Enter Barnesy, from the nearby seaside resort of Scunthorpe, a fan of music by lesser-known Tamla Motown artists, known locally as northern soul - "so called because people from the north of England, especially people in Wigan, liked it." Barnesy is an energetic, flailing dancer: "a heady mix of breakdancer, martial-arts warrior and Cossack." Local councillor Terry Jackson, the main advocate of the 'summer of 1964' exhibition, says that Barnesy and Gav are 'legends' and later gets them to open the exhibition. Not quite so impressed by the 'legend' though is Annie, who turns down Barnesy's optimistic proposal for a one-night stand.

From Quiz Nick Hornby: 'Juliet, Naked'

Answer: Watching TV and drinking

Despite the romanticised and exotic speculation on Duncan's website about what Tucker Crowe may have been doing under an alias for 22 years, the mundane truth is that he's been living quietly in Pennsylvania as a recovering alcoholic, and living off the earnings of his wife Cat. At least she says she's his wife - he wasn't sober enough around that time to remember a marriage ceremony - and now the marriage, like his other relationships, is breaking down. Tucker has five children by four women, and apart from six-year-old Jackson, who he idolises and who idolises him, he's completely failed all of them.

From Quiz About a Boy

Answer: Kurt Cobain

Ellie is constantly in trouble for wearing a sweatshirt with Kurt Cobain's image on it, and the fact that Marcus has no idea who that is (hearing the name as Kirk O'Bane, and thinking he played football, until Will corrects him) helps us see just how out of touch with his peers Marcus is. Her distress when the news of Kurt Cobain's suicide hits the papers places the novel forever in 1993. The Nirvana song 'About a Girl' was the source of the title Nick Hornby used for the book, according to an interview on the BBC Radio 4 series, 'Book Club' in 2001.

From Quiz Nick Hornby: 'Juliet, Naked'

Answer: He has a heart attack

It's a mild heart attack, but 20-year-old Lizzie, who's only recently learned she has three younger brothers and an older sister, uses Tucker's enforced hospitalisation to make arrangements for all his children and their mothers to visit him. Lack of paternal habits die hard with Tucker however, and he gets Annie to travel down from Gooleness to rescue him, bringing him and Jackson home with her. After checking out any health risks for heart attack sufferers, Annie and Tucker sleep together.

From Quiz About a Boy

Answer: Rachel

Will is instantly attracted to Rachel when they meet at a New Year's Eve party, and continues his usual practice of letting fantasy fill the gaps by letting her think Marcus is his son, after he had made a reference to him in conversation. Since she has a son about the same age, this creates a bonds which he plans to develop. Of course, this means that he has to convince Marcus to pretend to be his son and spend some time with Rachel and Ali. The deception is revealed, but it all works out, and Rachel and Ali join Will as part of Marcus's newly-constructed extended family.

From Quiz Nick Hornby: 'Juliet, Naked'

Answer: Like a retired accountant

Duncan simply doesn't believe at first that this neat grey-haired man with spectacles is his long-time American rock hero Tucker Crowe, and he storms angrily off when Tucker introduces himself, thinking it's just her new boyfriend and that Annie is mocking him. The photograph on Duncan's website that is allegedly of Crowe, taken by a stalking fan a few years back, is actually of Crowe's friend and neighbour, the grizzly Farmer John. Of the other answers given, it's Barnesy, the northern soul devotee, who is thought of by Annie as being like a martial arts warrior. Malcolm is the nervous and judgmental therapist that Annie sees for an hour on Saturday mornings, who gets depressed when she tries to end their sessions and drops the cost from £30 to a fiver to keep her.

From Quiz About a Boy

Answer: Both Sides Now

At the start of the book, Will and Fiona regularly sing Joni Mitchell songs together, and he periodically lets the songs that run inside his head turn into singing aloud, even in inappropriate places like a classroom. His mother doesn't see any problem, but his peers certainly do, and he is doomed to be seen as strange from his first day in a London school. When he tells his mother that he now hates Joni Mitchell, Will knows that he is developing a rebellious teenage attitude that will allow him to develop into his own adult self, rather than accepting his mother's values and behaviour unquestioningly. The choice of song can be seen as a comment on the way that Will and Marcus have effectively changed roles by the end of the book, with Will shedding the shell that had kept him emotionally free of others, and Marcus developing enough of a shell to survive. There is an additional suggestion that all three of the central characters have gained perspective, and no longer look at the world from a single point of view.

From Quiz Nick Hornby: 'Juliet, Naked'

Answer: So Where Was I?

Faced with the reality of this comeback from their fifties-something rock hero legend, no long the alcohol-fuelled wild child of rock, Duncan and the other Crowologists disown the new Tucker - although it seems some new fans like the new album! There are no neatly tied endings in Hornby's 'Juliet, Naked' - Annie may be pregnant with Tucker's child, and may have gone to America to be with him, but we don't know either of these things for sure; Tucker may now have a healthier relationship with his children, but that seems unlikely. The truth about life, Tucker finally realised, was that nothing ever ended until you died, "and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you."

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