One Day
David Nicholls
Book notes
Although Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew aren’t complete opposites, they are sufficiently mismatched to make the prospect of a lasting affair seem unlikely. She is a working-class girl from Leeds, academically gifted, politically aware, self-deprecating and always ready with a sharp one-liner. He is a middle-class boy from Oxfordshire, good-looking, charming, predatory and rather superficial. So when they wake up next to each other on their last day at university after a boozy graduation party, there is no reason to imagine that it will be anything more than a one-night stand. But there is an attraction between the two of them which develops from that one day - 15 July, 1988 - into a tangled, lifelong relationship, and over the following two decades we catch up with them each year on the anniversary of their first meeting. Sometimes they are together, sometimes apart - both physically and emotionally - but they are always in each other’s thoughts. As Emma struggles through dead-end jobs and unsatisfactory lovers, Dexter appears to lead a gilded life as a TV presenter, with the easy money and easy sex that it brings. But as they grow older their fortunes gradually change, and with it the dynamic of their friendship. Although there is a ‘will they, won’t they’ undercurrent throughout the book, this is not a traditional romance, but a sad and funny story of two flawed people muddling their way through towards some kind of happiness. Among exuberant praise from the critics, The Times called it ‘a wonderful, wonderful book’.
About the author
David Nicholls, one of the UK’s most successful screenwriters, with Cold Feet and adaptations of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Much Ado About Nothing among his credits, left Bristol University intending to be an actor. He spent a year studying at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, but after several years of playing walk-on roles – clerks, guards and peasants – he decided it was time to try something else. A script he co-wrote got him noticed in the States and he found himself working on Simpatico, a feature film staring Jeff Bridges and Sharon Stone. On returning to the UK, he began writing for the BBC and Granada, where he worked on the third series of Cold Feet. His 2004 debut novel, Starter for Ten, became a bestseller and was made into a film starring James McAvoy. He continues to write for film and television as well as writing books. One Day is his third novel. He is 42 and lives in London.
Discussion points
1. What attracts two such different people as Emma and Dexter?
2. Is it an equal relationship, or does one do more than the other to keep things going? How does the balance of power shift over the years?
3. How does the relationship affect the rest of their lives?
4. What signposts are there in the book to the way in which Britain has changed over the past two decades?
5. Dexter peaks early in his career, Emma achieves success later. Is it just luck, or does something else determine the paths they take?
6. Do the two of them miss chances to get together? Could they have been happy earlier?
7. Who is the more insecure, Emma or Dexter?
8. At one point Emma says she loves Dexter, but no longer likes him. Is it possible to love someone you don’t like?
9. What do you think of the various affairs each of them has, and their choice of lovers?
10. Emma says she doesn’t want to be a consolation prize. Is she?
Author's view
When people ask me where the idea for One Day came from, I usually refuse to tell them. This is not some high-minded, literary pretension on my part, it’s simply because I don’t want to give too much away. The inspiration for the story is quoted in the novel – you’ll find it somewhere near the end. I hope this doesn’t make the book sound too mysterious. It is, after all, a comedy, for the most part at least. There’s an old cliché from movie posters, ‘You’ll laugh, you’ll cry’, and this was the effect I wanted to have on the reader, to mix laugh-out-loud set-pieces with more dramatic moments, to write an old-fashioned, will they/won’t they romantic comedy that turns into something else, quite unexpectedly.
I also wanted to write something on a large scale, an epic love story that took in the last 20 years of changing British culture. Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew meet properly for the first time on the day of their graduation from Edinburgh University in 1988. After one too many drinks, they end up in bed together, awkward and unsure, and as the sun rises and the drink wears off they speculate on their possible futures. The novel follows the ups and downs of their relationship over the next 20 years, but instead of showing the usual landmarks, the engagements and marriages and births, the novel shows events on that one perfectly ordinary day, 15 July, at yearly intervals, right up until 2007.
It’s a mistake to make easy connections between a writer’s life and work, but I think it’s fair to say that I couldn’t have written this book ten years ago. I turned 40 while writing, and also started a family, and both events inevitably lead to some introspection. How do people change between their twenties and their forties? What happened to all those old friends? How does becoming a parent change your attitude to life? The book, if it works, should be like looking through a photo album, watching people get older in a series of tiny, barely noticeable changes, so that at the end you feel as if you really know these characters, have seen them grow up, grow together and apart.
Publishing a book is always nerve-wracking – all those years of work for something that might be forgotten in six months, if it’s ever read at all. But I’ve been delighted by the response to One Day. People seem to have identified with Em and Dex and the journeys they take, and at the time of writing we’re working on the movie version, which we hope to make this summer. Whatever happens with the film, I’m told by readers that the book makes them laugh as well as cry, which is what I intended, and the most a writer can hope for.