Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This book is by my brother and is a parody of the hooligan’s memoir, which, as you probably don’t know, is a genre, and there is a quite a big market for hooligans’ memoirs.
Bottle: The Completely True Story of an Ex-Football Hooligan.
This book is by my brother and is a parody of the hooligan’s memoir, which, as you probably don’t know, is a genre and there is a quite a big market for hooligans’ memoirs.
Is there?
Yes. John King wrote The Football Factory, which is a novel out of this genre, the ins and outs of gang warfare and the heady days of the Chelsea Headhunters. They had this image of themselves as soldiers in a war – ‘We’re going to take the west stand’ kind of thing. But these books are always just about how hard the author is – here are my glory days when I broke bottles on people’s faces. On Amazon there are people who haven’t realised my brother’s book is a parody and they’ve read it and written things like: ‘This bloke isn’t hard at all!’
The real ones are all called things like Naughty: The Story of a Football Hooligan Gang. Hang on, I’m just having a look through them now. 30 Years of Hurt: A History of England’s Hooligan Army. Do you know where that comes from – 30 Years of Hurt?
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Writer, comedian and football fan David Baddiel says football writing changed in the 1990s, as men became more openly emotional about the game and about life in general – a sea change epitomised by Paul Gascoigne’s tears at Italia 90 and captured in two iconic British books – Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Pete Davies’s All Played Out. Baddiel and Skinner are doing a series of 2010 World Cup podcasts for Absolute Radio.
