A MATTER OF TIME
Ten years after his bestseller One Day hit bookshelves, British author David Nicholls reminisces about writing his breakout novel and explains how the passing of time continues to shape his work. By Danielle Gay.
DAVID NICHOLLS REMEMBERS the moment he knew he’d written a hit. “There’s a soap opera over here – I don’t know how world-famous it is – Coronation Street. One of the characters was reading the book and talking about it, and I thought: ‘Well, that’s something.’” His novel, One Day, had been published nine months prior. It was his third release and had enjoyed good reviews, but then things started to build. “You could feel that word was starting to spread,” he recalls. “There were a lot of people on the tube reading it. Then there was a picture in The Daily Mail of Geri from the Spice Girls reading it on a sun lounge.” As they say, three’s a trend and sure enough One Day started topping bestseller lists.
A decade on from its 2009 release, One Day has sold four million copies globally. It tells the story of two friends, Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, and how their lives evolve over the course of 20 years, with each chapter revisiting them on the same day – July 15 – each year. Looking back, Nicholls says he was surprised by the response. “I knew that it was a good idea. I remember writing it and thinking: ‘I hope noone else comes up with this idea,’ but I certainly didn’t ever think that it would take off in the way that it did,” he says.
The book took on an even larger form two years later when the film version, starring Anne Hathaway, was released. Nicholls adapted the screenplay himself, a task he’d already started before the fanfare around the novel developed. “It was really exciting, but at the same time, quite stressful and terrifying,” he says. “We were no longer making the film as a little-known cultish book, we were making the film of this big bestseller.”
By the time the interest surrounding One Day had subsided, the publicity schedule had taken up more than two years of Nicholls’s life. “I was constantly heading off to places and talking about Emma and Dexter and Dexter and Emma. It was really exciting but it stopped me being awriter. I regretted not being able to go straight into the next book.”
Nicholls is now aged 52, and timing has remained crucial to his work. Where he has been at different stages remains rich inspiration. “I couldn’t write any of the books I’ve written at any other time in my life. If I were to sit down and try and write One Day now, I don’t think I could do it.” He sees his novels as a kind of diary. “It means that when you look back at them, sometimes you feel a little unsure of what you were thinking at the time,” he admits. “The person who wrote it becomes a stranger.”
In his new novel, Sweet Sorrow, his first since 2014, Nicholls was inspired by his own nostalgia. “I wanted to go straight back to the beginning and to write about first love, and explore that sensation and the kind of madness and comedy and intensity of that,” he shares. “I suppose it’s partly a reaction to getting older myself. I have kids of my own and seeing them grow tends to spark a lot of memories.”
In Sweet Sorrow, the lead character, Charlie Lewis, enrols in a theatre company in order to get closer to his crush, Fran Fisher, who is starring in a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The story is told from Charlie’s perspective as he reminisces about his first love decades later, as well as family and friendships. “I tend to write in two modes,” says Nicholls. “One is a kind of wish fulfilment, a writing of things that I would have liked to have happened and didn’t – grand love affairs, intense passions and friendships. The other mode is a sort of disaster movie view of the past, of things gone terribly wrong, and catastrophes and tragedies. Sweet Sorrow is somewhere in between the two.”
As for his own past, Nicholls knows One Day is firmly entrenched in it, but he’s more than fine with that. “I know that until the day I die, I’ll be introduced to people as the writer of One Day,” he says, laughing.“It will be on my tombstone. I’ve done a lot in the 10 years since, but I know it’ll always be there. And that’s fine, because I’m proud of it.”
Sweet Sorrow (Hachette Australia, $32.99) is out now.
“I know that until the day I die, I’ll be introduced to people as the writer of One Day … and that’s fine, because I’m proud of it”