As Harry Silver approaches his thirtieth birthday, his marriage
and career seem to be going great. But a one-night stand with a coworker puts
everything into turnaround, and soon an unemployed Harry is trying to
figure out how to raise a four-year-old on his own (comparing his efforts to
his own parents' accomplishments) while his wife literally leaves for the
opposite end of the earth. That's the setup for Tony Parson's Man and
Boy, a million-plus bestseller in Parson's native England. Parsons has been
writing for decades--he first rose to fame as a music journalist at NME
during the new wave and punk explosion--but this is his first foray into
fiction, and it's a winner. Harry tells his story with just the right combination
of humor and heartfeltness, and admits his fuckups as easily as he vents his
frustrations. I met Tony Parsons in New York on the last day of his North
American book tour.
RH: What inspired you to write a novel?
TP: I got to a stage where I could understand the cycle of my life for the
first time and see the big picture. When you're a teenager or in your early
twenties, you can't imagine life without your parents, you can't imagine a
world where you'll get old--it just feels like your life will go on forever. It's a
bit like being a kid and starting your summer vacation; in your imagination, it
never ends. The first day of vacation just seemed so long to me, it felt like I'd
never have to go back to school.
As you get older, and get a better sense of time, and realize what a short
journey life is, you realize how fleeting relationships are. My mum died a
month before the book came out in the UK, and my dad's been dead since 1987.
And I could see my son growing up, turning into a teenager...When he was
two, three, five, even eleven, it felt like he would be a little child forever. It
really did. I couldn't imagine him grown up, as a young man.
But I got to that point where I realized that the world I lived in was going to
look different soon, that it'd be considerably different. A world where I didn't
have any parents, where my son was grown up. And that's really where the
initial inspiration comes from--a not-so-young-anymore guy getting the big
picture for the first time.
RH: This isn't so much a problem for you in America, where you
aren't famous yet, but when Man and Boy came out in
England, because of your status as a public figure and the way
your first marriage ended, some people thought that they knew
the "story behind the story," but that's not really the case.
TP: I come up with a lot of baggage in the UK. People have grown up
with me; they've watched me grow up. Not everybody--a lot of journalists
writing about me don't remember my career as a music journalist because
they were all one year old in 1976. But a lot of people are very familiar with
me--it's like all the middle-aged geezers who went to see Almost Famous
who remember reading Cameron Crowe's articles in Rolling Stone.
It's refreshing to be away from all that here. Not that it's perfect--now I'm up
against the "Tony who?" factor. But they come to the book fresh, not with any
memories of me or images of me from the late night TV show I did for six years.
Johnny Carson used to come over to Wimbledon every year, and he could walk
through the crowds and nobody would pay him any attention at all. He was just
another old American tourist as far as they were concerned. I saw an
interview where he described it, saying, "It's nice to be anonymous." I
wouldn't go that far, because it's a bit of a problem when you're trying to sell
a book.
RH: And the book's success isn't attributable to it being "the
Tony Parsons story."
TP: The book's sold nearly a million copies in the UK now, and the
reason that it's done so well is that it's not just straight autobiography.
Nothing's got the power of a true story, nothing's got that kind of impact. But I
tried to make Man and Boy not my story, but everybody's story. I think if
I had focused on just my story, it would have really narrowed the appeal.
People bring their own lives to the book. They see reflections of their own
relationships to their fathers, to their children, to their families. And that's
why it's done well. If you sell a million copies of your book, and people are
coming up to you every day, they don't talk about your life. They don't say,
"Hey, Tony, I was really moved by that fictional portrayal of a guy's father
dying." They tell you it made them pick up the phone and call their wives, that
it made them remember their dads. They talk about their own lives.
RH: Were you surprised by the intensity of the response in
England?
TP: I would have been paralyzed with fear if I thought I was writing a book for
that many people. You can always make books better--you can keep editing
stuff until the cows come home. But there comes a point when you have to let it
go, and I wouldn't have had the courage to even put pen to paper if I thought
I'd face that amount of scrutiny, that kind of attention.
It's humbling more than anything. There's a degree of luck involved. It's not
necessarily the greatest book that has the greatest sales figures, it's the book
that has something that connects with people. It's like a song that people hear
and think, "That sounds like it's about me. That's about what I'm going
through." Maybe not the sort of bestseller Tom Clancy writes, but the kind that
I write--people see it as a mirror of their families and their lives.
RH: Often, the "kind of bestseller" that you write tends to be by
women about women.
TP: But it works with men! Men can feel just as much tenderness for
their children as women, they can be just as romantic as women. I'm
interested in men, in what men think. Nick Hornby's just written a book with
a narrator who's a woman, and I don't think I'd ever attempt that. I don't
think I could pull it off. But I know about men. I know how men and boys
think. And there's enough to explore there.
You don't have to go through what Harry goes through in the book to identify
with him. Your dad doesn't have to die. Your wife doesn't have to leave you.
You don't have to become a single parent. You can just get all those
things.
What's surprised me is how many women have bought the book. I thought it
would too male for a female readership, that Harry was too much of a real man.
Not "real man" in a hairy-chested, Bruce Springsteen way, just that he's the
way men are like, especially in the way men accept opportunities for sex. For a
lot of men, it's not about morality; if the opportunity presents itself, they'll
take it, and very easily, too. Even if you have a wife that you really love. And I
thought women would be turned off by that. Harry's got all the reasons in the
world not to have sex with another woman. He's got a lovely wife who's done
nothing wrong to him. But he does it anyway. I think women readers forgive
him because he does penance through his relationship with his son.
RH: With everything that's happened, do you feel the pressure
for the second book?
TP: I've got a book coming out in the UK next month called One For My
Baby. There's an enormous pressure, not for any career-oriented reasons,
but you don't want to disappoint people. When people are on your side, and you
know they like what you've done, you don't want to let them down. You don't
want to hear them say it's not as good as Man and Boy. It's inevitable that
you'll disappoint some people; it would be incredibly arrogant of me to think
that I could top Man and Boy. It got great reviews, sold really well, got a
movie deal...for me to say that I could top that would be hubris of the highest
order. But I'd like to do a worthy successor, and I think One For My Baby
is one, even though it's probably not as likable a book. The main character
isn't as lovable. People seem to like it, and I feel an enormous relief at that, but
in my heart of hearts, I don't think it's as lovable as Man and Boy, and
you need that lovable quality to be a huge bestseller like that.
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