Nick Hornby attracts more than his share of envy. Perhaps this is inevitable for such a successful author, but there is also something about the artless, plain style of both the writer and his work that makes people think, "I wish I'd thought of that: I could have done that." The idea that someone might have a popular literary career founded on a memoir of being a football fan seems almost a provocation. And yet how many people would wish for his life if they knew how much it revolves around the needs of his autistic son Danny? If they had any idea of what life with an autistic child is like?
Hornby is just completing his third novel, but he has only ever written one brief newspaper article about Danny and autism. This week sees the publication of Speaking With the Angel, a collection of new short stories edited by Hornby. The line-up is stellar (Roddy Doyle, Helen Fielding, Robert Harris, Irvine Welsh, Zadie Smith . . .); the common theme that the stories are all first-person narratives. But the object of the collection is to raise money (£1 on every copy sold) for TreeHouse, the special school that Hornby and his ex-wife Virginia Bovell co-founded with several other parents of autistic children.
Besides contributing a story, Hornby has written an introduction which explains with eloquently suppressed anger why there is a need for schools like TreeHouse - because there is so little appropriate educational provision for the UK's 76,000 autistic children, or support for their families. And he describes in brief but telling detail a day in the life of not necessarily his own, but a typical family with an autistic kid:
"He sleeps five or six hours every night, in fact, which means that if he can be kept awake until, say, nine, then he will wake up at two or three. He is upset and frustrated, so he screams, and his parents, who have maybe slept three or four hours, feel a mixture of exhaustion and depression and panic - they live in a small flat, and the walls are thin, and they know that they are not the only ones who are disturbed on a nightly basis . . . It is six hours until one of them starts work (the other would like to work, but in the absence of any suitable school place for the child, it is not possible), by which time the child will have attempted to hurt himself by hitting himself hard and repeatedly on the head, and maybe thrown some food around, and refused to use the toilet and ended up soiling a carpet, and demanded in the only language he has at his disposal (one word, repeated with increasing force and volume) to go out to the park, even though it's pitch black outside . . ." It goes on. Hornby, you know, has been there.
We meet at a Turkish restaurant in Highbury, not far from his beloved Arsenal ground. He orders egg and chips and a mineral water, and lights up a Silk Cut.
"It seems to me a song about disability," he says, explaining how he borrowed the book's title from a track by Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith. "It's almost an autistic trait - lots of staring up into the sky and off into the distance. There does seem to be a sort of communion with something that you can't see."
Danny was born in 1993. He was diagnosed with autism nearly five years ago, which is actually very young: the average age of diagnosis is nearer the age he is now, seven. This fact in itself means that many parents suffer an agony of anxiety and uncertainty about their child's developmental and behavioural problems before they even hear an official pronouncement of "autism".
"His birth was extremely difficult," Hornby says, "so I think we both suspect that his condition is in some way connected to that. Danny got stuck, and there was an emergency Caesarean. It was a scary night.
"When he was born he had a left-sided weakness. His head was down on one side, and he's got a droopy eye. Something seems to be affected down his left side, although most of the physical symptoms have been corrected except for the eye. I would imagine it would have been some sort of brain damage. And that the part of his brain that was affected would be the part that would result in autistic symptoms.
"Lots of parents whose kids are autistic suspect nothing until their kids are 15-18 months old. Because of Danny's birth difficulties, there had always been some slight worries about his development, but when he was 18 months he lost the language that he'd acquired more or less completely. He became almost catatonic. He didn't want to go out very much, and would not make eye-contact with anyone who wasn't me or his mum. There are phrases, little words that he had then which have still not come back.
So when did he and Virginia realise Danny was autistic?
"I think the word autism was floating about somewhere. I still remember it was something of a shock going for the first meeting in that we had a really bad time. We went to the health centre locally where there was a paediatric specialist. He was quite flustered. He looked at Danny - and at this stage we were still very tentative about what the problem was - and he suddenly said: 'Global development delay . . . don't really know . . . the hardest time is when he's five or six; he'll be much further behind the other kids . . .'
"It was all a million words a second and devastating information. That was the real shock day. But then it was a year after that that Danny was finally diagnosed autistic. By then it was no surprise: we had come to our own conclusions. It seemed fairly certain to us."
Autism is, as Hornby says, "a very, very wide term" - a spectrum condition: "It can be anything from not being able to recognise your own parents to being a bit funny when you're studying Maths at Oxford." Danny is probably somewhere towards the more severe end of that continuum, but each autistic child has particular characteristics, their own specific deficits of language acquisition and socialisation.
The common feature of autists is that they do not copy and therefore cannot learn as normal children do. Locked in their own private world, they are very sensitive about their personal space and ignore or actively repel attempts to engage with them. And, left to their own devices, autistic children often resort to extremely repetitive behaviour. TreeHouse's approach is a constant effort to break down the barriers autists erect around themselves, to socialise them seemingly despite themselves.
TreeHouse, which now looks after 20 children daily for an extended school year, uses a system imported from the US called Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA). Hornby takes me to see it. In the newest class, one teacher seeks to get a child who cries and constantly turns away from him to follow a simple drill. Compliance is encouraged by lots of praise, rewards, cuddles and tickles. To witness the therapy you might think it utterly thankless and pointless; but the results are also evident. In an older class, the children are sitting around having a picture-book story read to them. In the context, astonishing progress.
"The process has gone far enough with Danny that he is beginning to spark a bit now," says Hornby. "He is discovering more toys. He does become bored more easily. We are definitely seeing the benefits." Danny even has a friend at TreeHouse: Toby. Until lately, this was inconceivable.
Another two schools, one in Wandsworth and another in Surrey, have just opened using the same system. Like TreeHouse, they have been voluntarily founded and are voluntarily funded. Five London boroughs now pay for children to attend TreeHouse, but before that few made much provision for autistic children. Hornby prefers not to be specific about the extent of his personal investment in the school, but he has signed a film deal for About a Boy and big publishing contract with Penguin "and TreeHouse has got a reasonable chunk of both of those".
TreeHouse, which is now housed in borrowed premises in Bloomsbury, began in a room in a library at Swiss Cottage in north London. Hornby quips: "It could almost be a figure of speech like 'a bull in a china shop': 'an autistic kid in a library'." Humour, the kind of deadpan black humour that Hornby likes, seems to be a survival strategy he has developed.
"There is a lot about autism that is very funny, and you'd have to be the parent of an autistic child to appreciate it," Hornby explains.
"Yesterday when I picked him up from school and we'd got back to the house, he had to come out again because we hadn't rung the doorbell. I don't know where that's come from. It's clearly something new that's just started, but it's done with such a neutral face that it's actually very funny."
Danny is doing well at school but, while there is no prognosis for autism, Hornby knows he has to be realistic about Danny's progress and his future: "Autism, more than any other condition, leaves the parents with the sense that there might suddenly one day be a breakthrough," he says. But he feels it is "unhealthy" to hold out too much hope of improvement, especially since autists seem to resist change.
"There are weird things like almost a constant need to be misunderstood," Hornby observes, "so that the language he has acquired, which is in itself obscure, he then changes subtly - as if you're understanding too much, which is an odd thing.
"'Tata' is his word for bread and peanut butter, but just about three or four weeks ago it's become 'Shasha', for no reason that I can fathom.
"There is a great temptation every now and then to say: 'Cut this out, Danny. You know and I know . . . The joke's over.' Really!"
The TreeHouse curriculum includes drama and PE: "I don't know what they do in drama," Hornby chuckles with rueful irony. "It always says on his report at the end of the day, 'Danny did very well in drama today.'"
But there hasn't been a school production yet? "Not as such. Nor indeed a school football team."
He jokes, but this must be a very real loss to him. "The only real way to survive is not to dwell on what isn't going to happen," he responds. "It is about living day to day with the pleasures I get from being with Dan.
"I think what kicks in is a sense of loyalty to him. In the same way that you'd be appalled by a parent obsessed with having a boy who wasn't really interested in having a girl. I think that sense of who he is takes over very quickly, and you think: 'OK, I've got a kid who doesn't want to play football, doesn't want to read, and that's my kid and I love my kid.' It would seem like a great act of disloyalty to him to wish he was some other way."
Yet the strain of bringing up an autistic child has exacted a price. Although he speaks to and sees Virginia every day because of Danny, the couple are now divorced. The pressure of looking after Danny was, Hornby concedes, "a huge part" of why the marriage broke down.
"Obviously there are other things as well, but you never know whether they would have actually counted for anything, had we not had this," he elaborates. "It's like a barium meal. It exposes immediately whatever flaws there are. You can imagine a lot of couples who stay married with the same flaws but they kind of rub along fine, and maybe they have another child, and there's not even the time to examine.
"Having Danny is like the stress of having a newborn permanently - that kind of disruption with a newborn's first weeks, and there's no change to that."
How happy is Hornby now? A pause. "Not thinking too far ahead is one trick," he says carefully. "Basically, each stage of Danny's life seems just about cope-able with if you've got the right systems in place . . . For anyone who has any kind of crisis to deal with of a permanent nature, then eventually things fall around it. And, yes, writing is a solace and an escape. But I think it ends up informing your work."
For all the struggle, anxiety and depression, I wonder, are there things that Hornby could be grateful for in the whole experience?
"Absolutely. I think in a way it makes you more intelligent about things, because you're faced with harder choices and more complicated problems. You end up thinking about what constitutes love, what constitutes being human, what makes someone happy - what makes Danny happy. There is much more sense of thinking about what you want your life to be."