In Homework, Geoff Dyer crafts a vivid portrait of boyhood in 1960s and ’70s England, chronicling the milestones of his upbringing with sharp observation and dry wit. This memoir is a deep exploration of provincial life, filtered through the lens of Dyer’s own experiences as an only child navigating complex family dynamics, hidden economic hardships and the bewildering world of a male-centric childhood.

Dyer skillfully captures how culture seeped into his world, from the influence of rock bands to the allure of foreign media, resulting in him eventually moving to the US. As he reflects on these moments, he evokes a strong sense of time and place, offering readers both personal anecdotes and broader cultural commentary.

The book is, could be seen as Dyer himself describes, “an autobiography of a minor British painter or forgotten jazz man”— introspective, and steeped in the particularities of its setting. While beautifully written, Homework can feel alienating at times for readers unfamiliar with England or the cultural touchstones of the era. Still, its charm lies in the authenticity of Dyer’s voice and the specificity of his memories.

Overall, Homework is a thoughtful and atmospheric memoir, best suited for readers interested in the nuances of English life and coming-of-age stories rooted in a distinct time and place.

Dyer’s memoir is a thoughtful and thought-provoking recreation of growing up in the provinces of England in the 1960s and ‘70s where wartime values of make do and mend were still the norm. Grammar schools gave everyone a route to university when a university education could still give you almost guaranteed access to a professional career. But for me, the value of this memoir is as a record of a certain type of quiet life, the sort lived by everyone I knew, before the cutthroat pressure to achieve and make money of the 1980s, before computers and materialism skewed values and ambitions. I enjoyed the nostalgia of being reminded of childhood pastimes and playground crazes, of the freedom to roam that today’s children are denied. Though Dyer is older than me, so his memories of collecting cards and becoming obsessed with prog rock are before my time, I recognise similar pastimes and attitudes. This is an ode to his parents’ simple, no frills life of unthinking duty and repetition. Secondhand, seconds rather than first rate, reconditioned, mended.

My thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read a free digital ARC. The opinions in my review are true and unbiased.

Much of this book seems self indulgent, unless you see it as a necessary documentation of the normal. What elevates it above this is the final episode; perhaps the initiating impulse for writing this memoir of early home life: his mother. She appears regularly throughout his memoir, but almost always as a minor player. At the end, Dyer reveals why she was so quiet and subservient; why she had never followed her dream of becoming a seamstress but had only repaired clothes. Earlier in the book, I felt that Dyer felt that she ought to have tried harder and been less timid. Finally he reveals the secret she tried so hard to keep that utterly sapped her self confidence. This is poignant and entirely understandable.

Throughout his life, Dyer clashed with his parents, particularly his stubborn and selectively principled father. Often embarrassed and frustrated by his father’s penny pinching ways, his father has the last posthumous laugh as his hoarding things ‘in case they come in useful’ ends up costing Dyer a small fortune after his death.

Dyer’s experiences mirror mine remarkably well. Like us, he had a house heated by coal fires (his smoky, ours smokeless anthracite in enclosed stoves). We also had no telephone, though he already had a television (I was ten, I think) and we had no car. The parallels with my own family sometimes reach improbable heights. We too had a pools winner by marriage. I recognise the gas fire with the wooden shelves either side; my grandmother had the same model.

The thing that strikes me is that Geoff Dyer’s childhood world was overwhelmingly male, whereas mine was virtually boy-free after primary school. I have one sister, the girl over the road had siblings who were verging on adulthood and my other early best friend also only had a sister. So I did jigsaw puzzles and handicrafts instead of building Airfix kits; instead of trying to throw a tennis ball down a chimney, I spent hours and hours playing ‘two balls’ (using up to three tennis balls) against my neighbour’s garage wall. I had no idea there were so many different sets of plastic figures for boys to detach and presumably paint. I’m very glad that my equivalent of this was my father’s collection of trains, which only once made it out of the cupboard for a couple of weeks, until my mother got fed up with the layout taking up space. Nothing permanent, though; my fiddly painting experience is limited to painting by numbers. And while Dyer’s father made barracks for his Action Men and his mother made them clothes, our father made my sister and I a predictably modernist dolls’ house that was much admired but little played with, and our mother made psychedelic clothes for our Tressy dolls.

The only thing I didn’t appreciate in Dyer’s memoir were the blow by blow accounts of his early sexual encounters. TMI, as they say. He also assumed a little too much familiarity with certain prog rock bands whose names I only know because my son is a prog rock aficionado. However, for anyone of his generation and interest profile, this memoir is a celebration of a specific period in time and is valuable as a social history of the attitudes and expectations of the time.

'Homework' by Geoff Dyer is a memoir reflecting on Geoff's experiences growing up in a working class household. This novel works great as a reflective, time-capsule piece of non-fiction. There seems to be no prominent through-line for this memoir and instead is almost a memory bank of all the events, physical items and people that were prominent in Dyer's life at the time. I found that not being born in the decades he speaks about a hindrance as I could not relate or be fully absorbed into the things he was describing.

I thought the writing style was very accessible. Dyer strings in a sense of humour that is engaging and enjoyable. Additionally, he makes every effort to paint the scene as accurately as possible.

Thank you to #netgalley for this DRC of #homework.

Dyer is a talented writer who shared his experiences as a young man. I thought this was a good read, fun experiences, and there was good humor in this book. 3.5 stars rounded up.

Geoff Dyer's formative years are very enjoyable even though his childhood is incredibly normal and nothing really happens.
That's the beauty of it.
I especially loved and recognised Geoff Dyer's descriptions of his father's cheapness and willingness to argue over money.

An evocative and colourful memoir of growing up in provincial England in the 1960s and 70s. The account is full of detail and incident but I found the narrative tended to drag towards the middle and only picked up towards the end. Perhaps it could do with more editing or the use of themes rather going strictly chronologically?

I picked up this book because I enjoy coming-of-age stories, memoirs, and I wanted to get a feel for a time period I haven’t personally experienced. Growing up in Britain, I thought that despite being born in the early 2000s, there might be some common ground. However, I ultimately struggled to connect with this book and decided to DNF at 80 pages. While there were moments of brilliance sprinkled throughout, I found the pacing far too slow, with many of the details feeling unnecessary or overly long-winded.

The author clearly has an impressive eye for detail, but passages like the one about toy soldier collections or old television shows were so long that they felt like tangents. For instance, multiple pages devoted to describing Action Man outfits or bath-time submarines didn’t add much to the overall story—for me, at least. Nonetheless, I can imagine these details being nostalgic for some, particularly readers who grew up in the same time period.

That said, the writing style itself is enjoyable. There were moments of humour, insight, and brilliance that I genuinely appreciated. I would absolutely read more from this author in the future, as I suspect this particular book simply wasn’t the right fit for me.

I greatly appreciate the opportunity to read this advance copy, and while I regret not finishing, I hope my feedback proves constructive.

Homework by Geoff Dyer

Dyer has painted a picture of a young English boy (himself) growing up in England in the 60’s and 70’s. Some of his descriptions will ring true for any person who experienced child hood in England at that time. The references to games with “conkers” (horse chestnut wars), outside toilets, front rooms that were never used, threepenny pieces and shillings and half crowns, salmon sandwiches and mince pies, are just a few notes of nostalgia. There will be some adventures and hobbies that overlap with American boyhood in those days, card collections, model airplane building, ferocious boyish games, to name a few.
However, for some readers the details of the card collections, the beer drinking from an early age, the memories of English school and university exams may hold little interest and provide no common ground.
Homework will be of interest and pleasure for a selective audience of people of a certain age and with similar backgrounds to Mr. Dyer.

‘Homework’ is a beautifully written memoir of the author’s experiences of growing up in the sixties and seventies. The ‘shiver of silent excitement’ that Geoff Dyer experienced as a book loving teenager was felt by me on the many occasions when his recollections mirrored my own childhood recollections. I laughed aloud at some of his anecdotes, but was particularly moved by his descriptions of his parents and his retrospective appreciation of the same qualities that had brought him into conflict with them as an adolescent.
‘Homework’ has a ring of authenticity about it and is thoroughly recommended.

I've read quite a few Geoff Dyer books, so I was interested to read his memoir, which is primarily the story of his childhood and early adulthood in Cheltenham, England in the 1960s and 70s. There's a lot to love here for those readers nostalgic for this era--Dyer's passion for collecting cards in albums, for putting together model airplanes, and for playing conkers with schoolyard friends feels refreshingly analog in our own iPhone age--but this nostalgia comes with Dyer's wry spin: "Writing this,...I am struck by how much rust there was in my childhood; was it, more generally, a rustier epoch or has it only become rustier in retrospect, part of the active corrosion of memory?". Dyer's eye for the piquant details of his remembered youth kept me turning the pages (even if I could have done with less detailed memories of his early sexual escapades) and the book as a whole reminded me a bit of "Little Heathens" by Mildred Armstrong Kalish (which I also recommend) in its ability to paint a clear image of a particular time, place and era of society using only the brushstrokes of one person's childhood.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

Interesting memoir of growing up in post-war UK. The author captures the time well in this memoir. It will definitely appeal to Anglophiles and those looking for a coming of age memoir.