What do you think?
Rate this book
The Way to Hornsey Rise
This autobiographical novelexplores how Jeremy, a privately educated schoolboy, comes to reject his comfortable rural Surrey background to end up in the squats, drugs and hippy scene of 1970s Hornsey Rise.
The central theme of the book is Jeremy’s need to escape from the intense relationship with his alcoholic, charismatic and mentally unstable mother, her lovers, his ageing, ailing father, and about his romantic relationships.
Of particular interest is the way this memoir explores how a 1968-style vision of the world collapsed in the 1970s, and its implications for Jeremy and many of his generation. Their visionary countercultural world is not going to happen.
A journey about discovering what really matters in life. The Way to Hornsey Rise is a moving and very personal story, laced with intriguing observations about society, which all adds to its universal appeal.
‘Jeremy Worman’s memoir is a compulsive read. The memoir rips away the veneer of the British upper-middle classes, showing them to be venal, despairing, corrupt.’ – Francis Gilbert
The central theme of the book is Jeremy’s need to escape from the intense relationship with his alcoholic, charismatic and mentally unstable mother, her lovers, his ageing, ailing father, and about his romantic relationships.
Of particular interest is the way this memoir explores how a 1968-style vision of the world collapsed in the 1970s, and its implications for Jeremy and many of his generation. Their visionary countercultural world is not going to happen.
A journey about discovering what really matters in life. The Way to Hornsey Rise is a moving and very personal story, laced with intriguing observations about society, which all adds to its universal appeal.
‘Jeremy Worman’s memoir is a compulsive read. The memoir rips away the veneer of the British upper-middle classes, showing them to be venal, despairing, corrupt.’ – Francis Gilbert
264 pages, Paperback
Published March 23, 2023
12 people want to read
About the author
Jeremy Worman
4 books5 followers Jeremy has lived as a hippy in Wales and squatted in London. He also participated in performance-art events with sculptor Paul David Wright. At Birkbeck, University of London, he gained a First Class degree in English and was twice awarded the biennial ‘John Hay Lobban Prize for the Most Promising Student of English Literature’. He has an MA in Creative and Life Writing (Distinction) from Goldsmith, an M.Litt from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in creative writing from Goldsmiths. His supervisor was Blake Morrison; his examiners were Francis Spufford and Sir Jonathan Bate.
He has reviewed for The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, the Spectator and many other publications. He won the Waterstones / BBC Radio Manchester short story prize (2002) and the story was broadcast on BBC Radio Manchester; he won the 2009 Cinnamon Press Short Story Competition. His second collection, Swimming with Diana Dors and Other Stories was published by Cinnamon in June 2014. Jeremy taught English Literature to American BA students at Birkbeck for over twenty-five years.
www.jeremyworman.com
http://www.facebook.com/jeremy.worman...
He has reviewed for The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, the Spectator and many other publications. He won the Waterstones / BBC Radio Manchester short story prize (2002) and the story was broadcast on BBC Radio Manchester; he won the 2009 Cinnamon Press Short Story Competition. His second collection, Swimming with Diana Dors and Other Stories was published by Cinnamon in June 2014. Jeremy taught English Literature to American BA students at Birkbeck for over twenty-five years.
www.jeremyworman.com
http://www.facebook.com/jeremy.worman...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 15, 2023
This is a tender story of a boy growing up and trying to find his place in a complicated world. With a home life falling apart, he is left to get on and figure it out on his own, with much trying and failing and trying again. This isn’t a story of heroes and epic deeds but the rich detail of people and places in a particular time make this a very enjoyable read.
July 16, 2023
A trip back in time to a London that no longer exists; the 1970s, when there was a "dropping out" mood and all kinds of young people found themselves as members of a disorganised community living in squalid circumstances with little or no money and a lot of drugs hard and soft; directionless, alienated, trying to live in an alternative way. Worman's book is not the great literature that period produced (I think, for instance, of Karl Ove Knausgård) but it is well written as a lucid sociological study of how a well-heeled boy with drunken parents made his way through a series of expensive schools for the privileged, but who never accepted what had been put on his plate.
He has a very good grasp of white Home Counties English middle class dialogue, and the descriptions of his parents' house make it come alive: the rooms, the curtains, the tables, the endless bottles of wines and whisky, the absolute impossibility of expressing one's feelings and the deprecation of anyone who does. That is what the English public school system teaches, and it affected Worman deeply in his incoherent efforts to resist.
As his formerly successful businessman father's health deterioriated and his mother's vicious alcohol-fuelled attacks intensified, young Jeremy moved further and further away from the lifestyle that might have been expected of him, and eventually ended up as part of a squat (illegal tenancy) in north London, where he became part of a post-Summer of Love ex-hippy community that was already descending into hard drugs and destructiveness; Worman's arrival into the counter-culture came at its ending, and he didn't stay long.
This part of the book is a somewhat melancholic but evocative description of a period that has now been forgotten. The squalid rooming houses have been upgraded and are now bought and sold for millions; the young people who once inhabited them, coming from all social classes and all walks of life, are long gone but have formed a new liberal-minded antiauthoritarian class in England that has been very influential in the years that have passed.
Whilst Britain produced a very significant "kitchen sink" literature in the 1950s and 1960s, English fiction writing in the 1970s seems much more heterogeneous; here we have a novel written in 2010s that looks back to those previous decades and recalls what people were like then, coming together hapazardly, subversively, from the diverse backgrounds of a class-ridden society that was intended to keep them apart. Upper-class kids like Worman found themselves coexisting with working-class thieves and bikers, in a kind of sociological mix-up that attempted to organise by forming communes and sharing resources, always on the edge of settled society but unable to establish itself properly.
Hard drugs like heroin and amphetamines came to replace the softer cannabis and LSD, and people began to die of their addictions. Things fell apart; but it was a moment that very few writers have dwelled on. Because Worman's account of the period is so inward-looking and personal (and he always has an escape route back to Mother in suburbia) 1970s hippy London is more of a backdrop for him and in the end, he reverts to type (settled middle class Guardian reading home-owning comfort).
This is very frustrating because there seem to be no other accounts of that period. Hopefully Worman, or someone else, will go on to write more about it.
He has a very good grasp of white Home Counties English middle class dialogue, and the descriptions of his parents' house make it come alive: the rooms, the curtains, the tables, the endless bottles of wines and whisky, the absolute impossibility of expressing one's feelings and the deprecation of anyone who does. That is what the English public school system teaches, and it affected Worman deeply in his incoherent efforts to resist.
As his formerly successful businessman father's health deterioriated and his mother's vicious alcohol-fuelled attacks intensified, young Jeremy moved further and further away from the lifestyle that might have been expected of him, and eventually ended up as part of a squat (illegal tenancy) in north London, where he became part of a post-Summer of Love ex-hippy community that was already descending into hard drugs and destructiveness; Worman's arrival into the counter-culture came at its ending, and he didn't stay long.
This part of the book is a somewhat melancholic but evocative description of a period that has now been forgotten. The squalid rooming houses have been upgraded and are now bought and sold for millions; the young people who once inhabited them, coming from all social classes and all walks of life, are long gone but have formed a new liberal-minded antiauthoritarian class in England that has been very influential in the years that have passed.
Whilst Britain produced a very significant "kitchen sink" literature in the 1950s and 1960s, English fiction writing in the 1970s seems much more heterogeneous; here we have a novel written in 2010s that looks back to those previous decades and recalls what people were like then, coming together hapazardly, subversively, from the diverse backgrounds of a class-ridden society that was intended to keep them apart. Upper-class kids like Worman found themselves coexisting with working-class thieves and bikers, in a kind of sociological mix-up that attempted to organise by forming communes and sharing resources, always on the edge of settled society but unable to establish itself properly.
Hard drugs like heroin and amphetamines came to replace the softer cannabis and LSD, and people began to die of their addictions. Things fell apart; but it was a moment that very few writers have dwelled on. Because Worman's account of the period is so inward-looking and personal (and he always has an escape route back to Mother in suburbia) 1970s hippy London is more of a backdrop for him and in the end, he reverts to type (settled middle class Guardian reading home-owning comfort).
This is very frustrating because there seem to be no other accounts of that period. Hopefully Worman, or someone else, will go on to write more about it.
March 15, 2023
A thought provoking read. Packed with emotions and challenges, you feel invested in this from the off and it carries through. Interesting as it progresses too.
Some surprising scenes, but it feels authentic.
Powerful and moving.
Some surprising scenes, but it feels authentic.
Powerful and moving.
Want to read
April 10, 2023I learned of this book via this post: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2023/...
July 7, 2023
I really liked this - such an evocative book. Funny, tender at times - you really got a feel for the narrator and a visceral sense of the struggles of growing up.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews