S8 Ep. 38: Geoff Dyer on His New Memoir, Homework

Writer Geoff Dyer joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his new memoir Homework, which covers Dyer’s working-class youth in England during the 1960s and ’70s. He recollects his early passion for reading and film and reflects on writing about his parents, as well as the intensity of childhood play and collecting in the wake of the Second World War. He also explains what it meant for him to pass the 11-plus exam, a test given to British 11-year-olds to determine if they could go to grammar school—and the peculiar role that grammar schools played in the British educational system. Dyer talks about how this opportunity made his eventual admission at Oxford possible. He reads from Homework.

This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, Hunter Murray, and Janet Reed.

Selected Readings:

Geoff Dyer

• Homework: A Memoir

• The Last Days of Roger Federer 

• See/Saw: Looking at Photographs

• "The Secret of Who She Was" |Harper's Magazine

• "Best seat in the house: writer Geoff Dyer on why sitting in a corner is so satisfying” | The Guardian 

Others

• Lord of the Flies by William Golding

• An American Childhood by Annie Dillard

  My Sky Blue Trades by Sven Birkerts

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