‘I’ve always struggled with sex scenes’
David Nicholls has written a new novel about love in midlife. He talks class, insomnia and life,
David Nicholls is used to fielding questions about One Day. The latest adaptation of his 2009 bestseller hit Netflix in February and not only revived the novel in spectacular fashion, but also the debate it sparked about its main characters, Dexter and Emma.
They meet on their last day of university in 1988 and the story checks in on them every St Swithin’s Day, July 15, for the next 20 years, as they repeatedly fail to get together. It still resonates, with 15.2 million viewers revelling in its nostalgic look at the nineties and the way it captures the feeling of being in your
20s with a dead-end job and a hopeless crush on someone who is out of your league.
I ask him about the two burning questions raised among my friends. How did Emma resist sleeping with Dexter the night they met, and is she just a bit annoying (which also came up when she was played by Anne Hathaway in the less universally loved 2011 film)? He has diplomatic answers, telling me: “It’s good to have complicated responses to characters.
I don't know what a faultless character looks like.’’
The author, who is 57, does have one regret. “One Day should have had a sex scene, but I chickened out,’’ he says (although the adaptation made up for that). “It’s bad, isn’t it? I’ve always struggled and got a little bashful writing them. It feels to me like an extreme change of gear.’’
But he’s working on it. As well as executive producing One Day, he’s written a new book, and it is ‘‘probably the closest I’m going to get to an erotic novel. It’s not exactly great erotic writing, but they make out”.
You Are Here, Nicholls’ sixth novel, follows Marnie, a 38-year-old divorced copy editor from London who is resigned to a life of nights in playing online Scrabble, and Michael, 42, a geography teacher from York who goes on solo walking trips to distract himself from the pain of his marriage not working out.
They end up the last two people left on a walking holiday organised by a friend. It has already been described as ‘‘One Day for midlife’’ with all Nicholls’ usual warmth, light comic touch and eye for detail.
Nicholls doesn't mind the comparison. “In some ways, it is a sequel to One Day in that it’s about early middle age and starting again after a relationship ends and a life that hasn’t turned out quite as you expected.
“I’m ticking off the time zones – Sweet Sorrow was about being 16, the book before, Us, was about a 58-year-old.’’
And the sex scene? It doesn’t feel like the change of gear Nicholls fears at all. It’s as funny and honest as the rest of the novel, finding romance in an awkward encounter in ‘‘the lavender suite’’ of a B&B in Cumbria.
Marnie wonders if she should make a joke, but is enjoying the kissing too much (“Hello, desire! God, I missed you,’’ she thinks) and isn’t sure if she’s feeling Michael’s erection brushing up against her or his GPS device. It started as a non-fiction book, ‘‘a Bill Brysony comic account’’ of the walk Nicholls has done every year by himself for the past 10 years, but it evolved after the pandemic. ‘‘I felt after Covid that I’d lost social ease. Lockdown made us self-conscious, we threw effort into giving ourselves treats, and the outside world became daunting. I combined writing about the landscape with what it’s like to rediscover company.’’
Don't worry: It’s not a Covid novel. ‘‘I just wanted to write a nice, big, emotional, love story that was warm and funny and hopeful and this was the result,’’ he says.
He might not have won a host of literary prizes (although Us was Booker-longlisted), but he writes books people want to read.
Why is he so drawn to love stories? ‘‘I started writing in my late 20s and at that stage those feelings are overwhelming, so it seemed like a compelling subject.’’
After One Day, he tried to write a novel that wasn’t romantic, but threw it away. “It was about fathers and sons and was very mean and unpleasant.’’
He grew up in Eastleigh, a suburb of Southampton, which ‘‘even its biggest fan wouldn’t say is particularly beautiful’’. His father worked in the Mr Kipling cake factory as a maintenance engineer and his mother was a dinner lady.
‘‘It was not a bookish household. But I was very nerdy. I got the maximum amount of books out of the library each week and read in front of the TV. I was meant to be doing science – my dad loved taking things apart,’’ he mimes unscrewing cogs, ‘‘and it was his hope that I’d go into science or engineering.’’
Instead, Nicholls, who says he was a ‘‘posturing, pretentious kid, who liked the idea of a soulful walk’’, studied English and drama at the University of Bristol, which made his parents proud but slightly concerned about his career prospects.
He was the first person in his family to go to university and says it was ‘‘an immense culture shock’’ that has informed the way he writes about class in his novels, from Emma in One Day feeling like posh-boy Dexter has it easy to Brian in Starter for Ten being bowled over by middle-class Alice.
What did his parents make of his novels? ‘‘My father read all of them, but we never talked about them. My mother is still alive; they didn’t lead to any discussions. You’re not writing for your family. My kids haven't read them either and I’m happy with that.’’
The father/son relationship in Us, where they struggle to express their feelings, is influenced by his father.
‘‘It was meant to be a different kind of novel and then my dad died and that inevitably found itself on the page, and there were definitely moments where I thought it had gone too far.’’
Nicholls lives in north London and has two children, Max, 18, and Romy, 16, with his partner, Hanna, an art historian. But he won’t be drawn on what she makes of him writing love stories; they don't discuss work. Nicholls’ friends encouraged him to write, and he began with screenplays. Until then he was pursuing a career as an actor and ‘‘would have felt silly writing fiction’’. The only things he wrote were letters. ‘‘I had one intention with them, to make a certain person, someone I cared about, laugh. So they were written with discipline and devotion.’’ He's glad he waited before starting to write novels. “It gave me something to write about – I had nothing to say when I was 21.’’ He is gentler with the characters than when he started out.
‘‘I was more delighted by the comedy of embarrassment in Starter for Ten than I am now. If something terrible happens I want to give it weight.’’
Overthinking is something he admits to and is generally resigned to, apart from when it leads to ‘‘terrible’’ insomnia. ‘‘As soon as I wake up there will be a little hook that gets into my brain and drags me into consciousness and I wish there was an answer.’’
Anxiety is not necessarily a bad thing, he believes. ‘‘I worry about the work being good. I used to worry about how it would be received, but there’s nothing you can do about that once the work is complete.’’