Excerpt from Funny Girl by Nick Hornby, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I'm not blind," said George flatly. "Look."

He turned around and widened his eyes at anyone showing any interest.

"Dad, you've got to stop doing that," said Barbara. "It frightens people, a blind man goggling away."

"You . . ." Her father pointed rudely at a woman wearing a green mac. "You've got a green mac on."

The old lady in the next deck chair along began to clap, uncertainly, as if George had just that second been cured of a lifelong aff liction, or was performing some kind of clever magic trick.

"How would I know that, if I was blind?"

Barbara could see that he was beginning to enjoy him- self. Very occasionally he could be persuaded to play the straight man in a double act, and he might have gone on describing what he could see forever, if the mayor hadn't stepped up to the microphone and cleared his throat.


Barbara knew she didn't want to be queen for a day, or even for a year. She didn't want to be a queen at all. She just wanted to go on television and make people laugh. Queens were never funny, not the ones in Blackpool any- way, or the ones in Buckingham Palace either. She'd gone along with Auntie Marie's scheme, though, because Doro- thy Lamour had been Miss New Orleans and Sophia Loren had been a Miss Italy runner-up. (Barbara had always wanted to see a photograph of the girl who had beaten Sophia Loren.) And she'd gone along with it because she was bursting to get on with her life, and she needed some-thing, anything, to happen. She knew she was going to break her father's heart, but first she wanted to show him that she'd at least tried to be happy in the place she'd lived all her life. She'd done what she could. She'd auditioned for school plays, and had been given tiny parts, and watched from the wings while the talentless girls that the teachers loved forgot their lines and turned the ones they remembered into nonsense. She'd been in the chorus line at the Winter Gardens, and she'd gone to talk to a man at the local amateur dramatic society who'd told her that their next production was The Cherry Orchard, which "probably wouldn't be her cup of tea." He asked whether she'd like to start off selling tickets and making posters. None of it was what she wanted. She wanted to be given a funny script so that she could make it funnier.

Reprinted from Funny Girl by Nick Hornby by arrangement with Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, Copyright © 2015 by Nick Hornby.