Juliet, Naked was published by Viking in 2009, adapted into a 2018 film starring Ethan Hawke and Rose Byrne. The novel returns to Hornby’s career-long obsession with male fandom — the devotion of men to cultural objects (records, football teams, musicians) that substitutes for emotional engagement with real life — but this time examines it from the perspective of the woman left out.
Annie lives in Gooleness (a fictional seaside town based on places like Bridlington — remote, declining, culturally dead) with Duncan, an academic who runs the world’s foremost fan website devoted to Tucker Crowe — an American singer-songwriter who released one masterpiece (Juliet) in 1986 and then disappeared. Duncan’s devotion to Crowe has consumed their fifteen-year relationship: he talks about Tucker more than he talks to Annie, his emotional energy goes into the website rather than their life, and the relationship has become a shell maintained by inertia.
Then an acoustic demo version of the album (Juliet, Naked) is released, and Annie posts a review on Duncan’s site suggesting it’s inferior to the original. Tucker Crowe himself reads it, emails her to say she’s right, and a correspondence begins that gradually becomes intimate — an aging, failed musician and a woman wasted by proximity to a man who loves music more than people.
Hornby’s achievement is to make Tucker Crowe — the idol — as human and flawed as his fans are obsessive and deluded. Tucker has not been living in tortured artistic silence; he has been failing at relationships, fathering children he can’t support, and living in New Jersey.
Collecting Juliet, Naked
First edition (Viking, London, 2009): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $8–$15
- Signed first edition: $20–$50