Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, was originally called “A Happening.” There would have been something of a joke to this discarded title; from one point of view, nothing much happens in the book. There’s an indelible ordinariness to this coming-of-age story, which, with a few detours, follows Dyer’s early life until he reaches the age of eighteen, in the world of working-class Gloucestershire of the sixties and seventies. Any readers hoping for shocking revelations about the author’s childhood will not find much to titillate them. But of course from another point of view, everything happens. Dyer—has written many books, including Out of Sheer Rage, Jeff in Venice, and most recently The Last Days of Roger Federer—describes in great detail the period in which he became himself, in all the erudition, playfulness, and creativity we might already be familiar with. (Out of Sheer Rage, nominally a book about trying to write a book about D. H. Lawrence, is essential reading for any writer of nonfiction: a funny, moving account of the creative process in its frustrations and joys.) In Homework, Dyer turns his attention to his early life, down even to the accessories his Action Man figurine wore: “the plastic lace patterns on Action’s boots; the khaki elastic strap of his carbine; the little buckle on the helmet strap and the plastic niche into which it was anchored; the genetic logo embossed on his back: Made in England by Palitoy under Licence from Hasbro © 1964.”

Even more impressive is Dyer’s ability to give narrative life to this archive of detail, half a century later. His mother and father are sharply drawn characters, along with the rest of the family. “It was said of Joe that if you filled a bath with beer he’d drink it,” Dyer writes about an uncle. “(I heard this said many times. In Shrewsbury few things were said only once. Everything was repeated over and over.)” Anecdotes are recycled, gaining a kind of mythic status, like “little Audrey Stanley” who used to work with his mother in the school canteen. With these repeated sayings and formulations and anecdotes Dyer conjures something deeper than detail: the lost world of his childhood, but also the lost world of the particular time, place, and class he inhabited. (“Class itself is not a thing, it is a happening,” E. P. Thompson writes, a quote Dyer includes as a postscript to the book, for indeed, it is something that happened to him.) Dyer’s Art of Nonfiction interview appeared in the Paris Review in 2013. We caught up on the phone a few weeks ago about Homework—and about how he managed to render childhood without being boring.

INTERVIEWER

This is a highly detailed, specific memoir about your early life, but also one that describes a bygone era in a particular time and place. How did you balance those two threads, of the personal and social history?

GEOFF DYER

One of the earliest impulses I had was to do something like Annie Ernaux’s The Years, a kind of generational autobiography. I thought it would be cool to do a Gloucestershire, English version of that French book. It ended up being quite different, but the key thing is that there’s nothing interesting about my story. It’s not like I’m a celebrity whose life people are interested in. Also, there are no great revelations. I haven’t discovered I have an illegitimate brother. There’s no abuse. It’s just my story, which is pretty uneventful. But it contains a larger social history of England and a particular phase of English life which I believe is worth preserving. It was my wife who kept saying that I should write this book for that reason, not just out of self-indulgence. The paradox, and it’s a well worn one, is that I could write this larger social history only by telling my own story. When I was discussing this with my American editor, he said, “Should you have an introduction that makes it clear that this is really a book about class?” And I said no, because every detail in the book is so steeped in class. However microscopically, if you look at the evidence, it’s all there.

INTERVIEWER

How did you go about the process of remembering, in such a high degree of detail?

DYER

Obviously I am the world’s leading authority on the subject matter of this book, which is my childhood and adolescence. But with any kind of writing, it’s always about the detail. There were scenes and details that, for whatever reason, often no reason at all, have remained very vivid in my memory. I don’t know why—they weren’t special moments, but they lodged in my mind. In their mysterious way they were my “spots of time,” as Wordsworth calls them in The Prelude. But whereas he offers an explanation of their significance—you know, “This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks …”—I’ve not been able to determine their significance beyond the fact of their tenacity and, on that basis, I happily submitted to their insistence, their quiet lobbying, on the right to be admitted. Also, when I was about seventeen or eighteen and, through reading, became interested in trying to write, I had nothing to write about but my adolescent and family life, and I kept those pages. The writing was of zero literary value, of course, but it comprised a wonderful archive of details I could use.

INTERVIEWER

Were there other kinds of research or self-research involved?

DYER

I never think of anything I do as involving research. It always feels to me like having a hobby. I know a great deal about Bob Dylan, for example, because I’m interested in Bob Dylan, but I don’t do research on Dylan. The other thing is that it has never been easier to write an autobiography or to write about recent history—pictures of every little thing you’ve ever owned are on the internet. I’m an inept user of the internet, but I was amazed at the amount of data about the clutter of my life—of my g-g-generation, as the Who put it—preserved in Cyberia. Now, what none of this can do—this virtual prop cupboard—is give us narrative. That’s provided by people and by the emergence of an individual consciousness at a particular moment of history—moment in, this instance, in the extended sense of the period from 1958 to 1977.

INTERVIEWER

There’s quite a bit in the book on your collecting of objects as a child and a teenager—Action Men, model airplanes, bubblegum cards, records. How did you think about these objects, as tools for memory but also as things that might be put literally in the book?

DYER

The objects are part of a larger universal specificity, as it were. It was related to Ernaux’s project in The Years, where there’s a lot of information about various gadgets that became available at defining moments for her generation. The mistake some memoirists make is to write “We would go down to the shops,” or “We would go for walks.” It’s all generalized. But the continuity has to be particularized, and the objects in this book are all tied to particular moments. It’s about substantiating a time and place. In The Age of Innocence, for example, you hear all about the furnishings of a room, but something is always happening in that room, and the stuff happening is complex human and economic interaction. What’s happening in my book—in my rooms—is more self-centered, but I am the locus of social and economic forces. Sticking with toys for a moment, my fondness for inventory is such that my American editor Alex Starr said, “I’ve had enough of all these toys, can’t we move on to the human relationships?” And I said, No, you don’t understand, because you have brothers and sisters. But if you’re an only child, it’s things that you have relationships with. There’s a line in Billy Collins’s poem “Autobiography” in his book Water, Water—he’s an only child, too—where he writes of an ironic ambition to compile “a catalogue raisonné of my toys.” In this book, I surrendered to the same urge. To make a piece of writing interesting, obviously, the catalogue needs to be imbued with narrative potential. In my case that potential lies in the way toys and cards and the solace they bring to the only child is replaced by books and the discovery of reading in my mid-teens, which whooshes into the vacuum left by my having grown out of a kid’s toyhood. And reading and school lead to Oxford and to an eventual understanding—which came to me only in the period after the book ends—that the process I had been through was actually one defined by class, by social and economic forces which had been at work on everything in the book—the stuff, the things, the people, the culture, the history, that had formed me. This is made explicit by the quote from E. P. Thompson which appears at the very end, as a kind of closing epigraph, because I only understood this process retrospectively, in my mid-twenties, beyond the completed timeframe of the main part of the book.

INTERVIEWER

Childhood can often be a boring subject. How did you think about making it interesting?

DYER

It wasn’t boring to me, but then of course when you meet bores in real life, they’re not bored by what they’re saying at all, even as they’re boring the pants off anybody who is obliged to listen. But yes, I’m in full agreement—when I read biographies, I always skim through the childhood stuff. It’s not until we get to adolescence that it becomes interesting. And of course all the stuff about grandparents is even more boring. I can’t make any progress with Proust, all that childhood stuff is so boring—I just find myself thinking, Go kick around a ball or something. I’ve never had any interest in having children, and in fact have never had any interaction with other people’s children. So on the one hand childhood bores the crap out of me, but I’m interested in the idea of the formation of the self. What makes that interesting to the reader? It depends on the quality of writing and perception—which, I suppose, is what people say when they’re banging on about Proust!

INTERVIEWER

How did you approach structuring this book?

DYER

Originally, I had the idea of it being an extended version of this map of Cheltenham I had made for an anthology. That map, which appears in a box set called Where Are You, is a version of the Ordnance Survey maps of my part of the world. But instead of a symbol where the post office would be, in my map I had a symbol like a fist, in the place where I got punched in the face. Or there were lips to show where I’d had a romantic episode. I liked the idea of the memoir being arranged spatially like that, but unlike with the anthology version, the explanation of those sites—the so-called legend—was going to be much longer, and the words would have taken over. It would have been a very unconventional way of doing a memoir. I wrote a lot—I always think that’s the important thing, to amass a lot of material—and I kept coming up against this structural premise. Instead of being enabling, that structure started to feel like an impediment to arrangement. So I ended up defaulting to the most old-fashioned way of all—proceeding chronologically from my birth, and ending up where it ends, at the age of eighteen. There’s a Roy Fuller poem called “The Ides of March,” which includes the lines “And now I am about / To cease being a fellow traveller, about / To select from several complex panaceas, / Like a shy man confronted with a box / Of chocolates, the plainest after all.” So, after having found a complex panacea, I ended up with the plainest after all.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about coming to the ending. The final section includes a long passage on your mother’s birthmark, which was a source of great shame to her in her youth, and which she always kept covered. You describe it to someone as “the most important thing in her life,” and writing about it as a kind of betrayal. How did it feel to write about it?

DYER

I knew always that the end was going to involve my mother’s birthmark. It was very upsetting to write about. The element of betrayal to it was because of the completeness of my parents’ privacy and because it so defined my mum’s entire life. I would never have written about it while she was alive. The only thing I would say to justify it is that writing is a private thing for me. I’m always writing my books for me. I want them to end up being published, obviously, but I never write in public, never write in cafés, and I never do a proposal. I often feel while writing that it’s just about articulating to myself something which is important. But I’m conscious, as I’ve started doing public events for the book, that I’m not able to talk about my mother’s birthmark, partly because I know I’ll become upset about it, and because when you’re doing a public event you’re there to entertain the troops. So that would be inappropriate.

INTERVIEWER

Will you write another memoir, picking up at the age of eighteen after you’ve gone to Oxford?

DYER

Absolutely not. Alan Hollinghurst is a great writer, of course, but I think the Oxford scenes in Our Evenings prove that a scene of punting in Oxford is really undoable. It’s often a good idea to stop at some point with autobiography. When celebrities write memoirs, it’s best if they stop when they make it. After that, as Steve Martin said, it all becomes “And then I met …”

INTERVIEWER

Are there memoirs of childhood you love?

DYER

Yes. Martin Amis’s Experience, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life … It’s not a genre that I’ve turned to that often, really. In general, I go to memoir for a literary experience, not to find out about a life. Another, which I would almost call a first-person biography, is An American Childhood by Annie Dillard. That both is and isn’t an impersonal memoir. I reread it recently with my students because I was teaching a whole course devoted to Annie Dillard, and it’s really a remarkable and at times inscrutable book.

INTERVIEWER

Was there any change in how you saw your younger self by the time you finished writing the book?

DYER

I feel very close now to my fourteen-year-old self, but that’s a path that my writing had been taking anyway. The humor in my later books is sometimes very adolescent, which strikes me as a good sign—immaturing with age.

Sophie Haigney is the web editor at The Paris Review.

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