I think you're bound to think about these things if you are exposed in that way, it wouldn't be very easy to say "No, I'm not going to get more involved with autism, I'm not going to try and raise money for the school, I'm not going to help out any other parents". You're exposed to a kind of need and concern in a way that I think a lot of other parents aren't. Well, certainly not in such a dramatic way.

P: Would it be fair to say that the book juxtaposes two kinds of ways of dealing with how to be good?
NH: I think what I wanted to write about was how the wife had always previously been the moral conscience in the relationship. Katie is a good person in the way that most of us are, or have the potential to be. She does something socially useful, she worries about things in a way that we all do. But David takes things up to a whole new level that might actually accomplish something.

I didn't ever want to rubbish him or his Guru side-kick, DJ GoodNews. I wanted them to ask proper questions that have no answers and for her to be put on the back foot morally. So Katie goes from having been the moral conscience, to somebody who is struggling to answer questions all the way through.

I think that's the bargain we all seem to have made. We have a moral duty to our nearest and dearest and if there's anything left over we'll put a few bob in a tin somewhere. I read somewhere that there had been a lot of research done, on 'activists' and good people, with a capital G, capital P, and they always found the same thing. The immediate family was in complete chaos; I mean what must it have been like to have been a child of Gandhi?

P: The portrait of David when he's grumpy is some of the funniest stuff in the book.
NH: David has a sort of job writing a newspaper column for a local paper, called 'The Angriest Man in Holloway'. He is an exaggerated truth of an awful lot of people I know, and particularly men. There's a scene in the book where David goes to this dinner party and I had been thinking about what it would be like if one took cynicism and extracted it almost surgically from conversation, so you weren't allowed to say anything bad about anyone. I think ordinary social discourse in Britain would completely grind to a halt. You know, you're not even allowed to say anything bad about Jeffrey Archer, who is an accepted whipping boy; David doesn't even like judgement of somebody like that. I just thought it was a quite a funny idea, if we weren't allowed to bad mouth people we wouldn't know what to say.

P: The book doesn't come to any resolutions, because I suppose these things are not resolved in anybody's life and it is after all a novel. It is quite an ambiguous ending.
NH: Somebody interviewed me in Germany a couple of weeks ago about the book and she said, "It reads like an advert for the nuclear family". I thought blimey, if an advertising agency had made that I'm not sure I'd pay them at the end of it, if that's what I had wanted them to do. I suppose the most important question for Katie is "can you be a good person and get divorced and leave your family?", which is what she is very tempted to do.

She's clearly not very happy within the relationship and yet she doesn't want to leave it. Her husband's put her in such a moral fever, she thinks divorce isn't really an option. It's so clearly a big sacrifice to her and a huge compromise to think, 'OK, for the next however many years I'm going to stay here'.

P: Don't you think a lot of people would think 'why the hell doesn't she just get out?'
NH: I think an awful lot of people are both troubled by their relationships and troubled by the thought of leaving them. People say, "well I'm going to stay here until my children are 18 or 19". There is an acknowledgement of unhappiness and imperfection, which can be corrected perhaps at some stage, but in the meantime involves an awful lot of sacrifice. I suppose I am sufficiently old-fashioned to believe that the notion of having children should at least involve some kind of self-sacrifice.

P: Did anything about the process of writing and reading come into conjunction with thoughts of how to be good?
NH: The book comes up with no answers, and cannot. I think it's really the first time that I've been aware that it's not necessary to try and answer the questions that you pose. As long they are posed with some complexity, and they make people think, it's simpleminded, really, to try and answer everything that you raise yourself.

P: The narrator of How to be Good is having an affair. She could of course have been swept off her feet and had a grand sexual passion, but the sex in the book is pretty downbeat.
NH: Katie has sex, but in terms of the affair Stephen is a rather hopeless character. He came in at a stage of her life where she was flattered by the attention, but, yes, I think the sex in the book is comic and flat.

P: Is that because you don't believe that sex can be a grand and overpowering passion that can change people's lives, or because you're dramatizing a particular character in this case?
NH: I think dramatizing particular characters in this case, but I think that it would give the book a different tone if the sex had completely swept her off her feet. I don't particularly enjoy writing about sex. I think it's really hard to write about sex in a way that's interesting or meaningful. I can't think of a passage about sex in a book that has made an awful lot of sense to me. I think it's a private thing and its joys are almost inexpressible on the page, and within the confines of the comic novel I think it can be particularly difficult.

P: It does seem that Katie has a particular guilt which perhaps women suffer from more than men do - juggling an important job at the same time as bringing up the children. Do you think that's still a major thing in women's lives?
NH: I think it's increasingly becoming an issue. The particular situation with Katie and David is that Katie is the breadwinner, and her work is more important than David's. But she is also a mother and I think to most families the crucial relationship is between mother and children, and yet the mother in this case is absent more often. I do think that that places women in a very difficult situation, and a lot of them do feel slightly stricken about it and haven't really managed to sort it out in their heads, even if they've sorted it out very well in their day-to-day lives.

P: I think the children are really interesting. The book seems to touch on emotions that are not often dealt with in books - that it is possible for parents to feel that their children are not completely wonderful 100% of the time.
NH: It's interesting because there were many debates in the editorial process about whether a woman would ever say she does not like her children. In fact I remember reading Alison Lurie's The War Between The Tates, and there's very clearly a sense in there that this woman's children are a great disappointment to her in their teenage years - they are an older Molly and Tom. There's an endless circular argument about whether, as a male author, I have made a mistake in projecting these feelings onto a mother. I mean we all know enough about parenting now to be able to confess that sometimes we'd rather not have to do it.

P: I suppose there comes a time in a parent's life when you realise that this child is becoming something separate and possibly, entirely different from you. It's quite a shock of recognition and if you're honest about it, there may well be things you don't like in that different person.
NH: I think if you look at any family, or anyone you know, there are certain family relationships that just don't work. I know lots of people who are not very close to their siblings - they were very close when they were younger but they've grown up into different people. There is a terrible pressure of guilt that makes us feel that we must love and like our parents, our children, and our brothers and sisters, and of course there is no real logic behind that. The idea that you must automatically empathise with a close blood relative I think is preposterous.

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P: What were the circumstances surrounding the writing of Fever Pitch?
NH: There was literate fan journalism about football and I felt that Fever Pitch reflected that culture. When I was talking to publishers and agents about it they told me no chance, trying to sell a football book. I think the view at the time was that as fans didn't even buy the hopeless, ghosted, football autobiographies, they couldn't understand what chance they would have with another sort of book. But I think they were looking at things the wrong way round. There was a market and an appetite for a better book about football, but there was still resistance within publishing.

P: What were your hopes or ambitions for Fever Pitch as you wrote it?
NH: I hoped it would chime with people who followed a team seriously. I suspect that anyone who writes a book has two levels of ambition - the modest and the grandiose. I saw no reason why the book shouldn't appeal to lots of people, of different ages and genders and class. But of course you never seriously think that they're actually going to buy it!

P: In the book you do talk a bit about how football has been a kind of glue with people. Tell us something about your teaching experience and the way you related to the kids through popular culture.
NH: I have always listened to a lot of pop music and I have always watched football, so you think, how hard can this be? But of course kids just presume that you know nothing about what they're interested in, and even if you do know something you start to feel kind of phoney. I can remember when I was on teaching practice, saying to this kid "I'm an Arsenal fan", and he just looked at me with complete contempt, as if my job automatically ruled me out from being able to go.

P: I suppose kids do want to feel that there is territory that is theirs, and they just don't want adults coming into it.
NH: There was a clear generation gap between me and my parents, and really in the last twenty or thirty years there are two or three generations that have grown up completely within popular culture. So you're listening to the same stuff as your kids, which I think must be quite uncomfortable for them.

P: There are quite a lot of class issues in Fever Pitch that are both buried but also rather explicitly dealt with.
NH: There's been this thing, probably ever since Fever Pitch, about how the middle classes have colonised football and that this is a completely new phenomenon. I think if you were middle class you were certainly aware of it in football stadiums in the seventies, but I can remember talking to Tony Parsons about it, and he said "Who do they think has been sitting up in those seats for the last sixty years?" I think that the media tries to re-invent problems every 5 or 6 years and I think they've probably always been within football. But I think the class issue was important to address in Fever Pitch in a way that it wasn't in High Fidelity.

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P: In High Fidelity one of the issues I suppose is whether music, that kind of thing, enables one to live life better or whether it's actually a retreat.
NH: One of the reasons I wanted to write High Fidelity was that I wanted to write from the point of view of a narrator who didn't have any of the hindsight that I was able to have in Fever Pitch. There seems to be more drama in somebody who is trying to make up his mind all the time and failing, and there's more potential for comedy.

In About a Boy, I think it is quite clear that Will is 'retarded' by popular culture. The kind of things he listens to and the kind of stuff he does is trivial. Whereas I think Rob in High Fidelity has got some soul, and his relationship with the music is quite soulful, but his relationship with other people is all over the place.