Author David Nicholls: ‘I don’t think of myself as romantic’
Ten years on from his best-seller One Day, author David Nicholls talks to Grazia’s Hattie Crisell about the pressure of success, toxic masculinity and falling in love himself…
when it comes to self-deprecating, bashful charm, the writer David Nicholls would give Four Weddings- era Hugh Grant a run for his money.
His CV is quite something. Nicholls, 52, was the man behind the 2009 novel One Day, which has sold over five million copies worldwide and was for a long time visible in every train carriage and on every beach holiday. He’s also written for TV and film, including scripts for Cold Feet, a movie adaptation of One Day starring Anne Hathaway, and last year’s Benedict Cumberbatch mini-series Patrick Melrose.
He is currently adapting his last book, the 2014 Man Booker Prize-longlisted Us,
into a BBC series – and when I meet him, he’s just won a BAFTA for Patrick Melrose,
and is preparing to publish his fifth novel, Sweet Sorrow. If I hadn’t already known all this, though, he’d definitely be too embarrassed to mention it.
In the room where we sit down to talk about the new book, the publisher has laid out a plate of biscuits, which he encourages me to tuck into: ‘I look like I’ve demanded deluxe Marks & Spencer’s thick-coated chocolate biscuits,’ he says with an awkward smile. ‘Please help yourself, and just unselfconsciously work your way through them.’
Sweet Sorrow is brimming with awkwardness, focusing as it does on a 16-year-old boy (Charlie) in the summer after his GCSES. He’s certain that he’s failed, which is unsurprising considering his family life has imploded; his father is unemployed and depressed, while his mother and sister have moved out and are living with a man called Jonathan. Now Charlie divides his time between working at a petrol station (from which he is stealing) and hanging out with his mates, a group of lads who give each other nicknames like ‘Minge’ and ‘Council’. That’s until he stumbles into an amateur Shakespeare production and meets Fran, who will become his first love.
It’s a sympathetically observed portrait of someone in the limbo between adolescence and adulthood, which manages to be both very funny and heart-wrenchingly tender. ‘I knew I wanted it to be quite lyrical, I suppose, and to have that feeling that you get at the end of summer – a feeling of regret, and a sense of other possibilities that have slipped away,’ says Nicholls.
While it’s set in 1997, long before the term entered our lingo, you could say that one of its strands is a study of toxic masculinity; its cast of men and boys find it near impossible to communicate or show vulnerability. Charlie and his dad shuffle around each other in silence, and when he’s around his mates, he’s in constant defensive mode: ‘ We always succumbed to the tyranny of banter.’
Nicholls says that rough, merciless version of male friendship is taken directly from his own teenage experience. ‘My son is just starting secondary school, and I’m aware of how much things have changed, in terms of the way boys talk to each other – but also of how fearful I am of that for him, of bullying and aggression and that kind of relentless cruelty,’ he says. ‘ Thinking about my own adolescence, it is sadly my abiding memory. If anything, it’s toned down in the book. When I was a kid I used to dread having my hair cut, because it didn’t matter how great a haircut it was, you knew that the next day, because something had changed – you had made an effort – you were going to get torn to pieces.’
Younger generations are getting better, he thinks. ‘From my kids’ experience at school, I think there are modes of behaviour that aren’t acceptable now, even within groups of boys. I feel like they’re aware of the right way to talk to each other in a way that we weren’t – it was completely no holds barred, really.’
At the heart of the book, though, is the theme of first love, as Charlie falls head over heels for Fran and evolves into a young man in the process. It seems obvious to me that Nicholls is a romantic, although he looks surprised at this. ‘Not in any way in my everyday life, which is very prosaic and domestic and boring,’ he says, and then stops to think. ‘How can I put this? To me it seems the business of relationships and falling in love is frequently a central event in people’s lives, and I’ve always wanted to write about it. But I’m pleased that I write as much about family now as
I do about falling in love. I don’t think of myself as romantic, but I am quite sentimental about parenthood, about relationships, about friendship.’
One Day may be 10 years old, but it was such a phenomenon that he’ll be asked about it for the rest of his life. ‘I’m very grateful – I’ve never felt resentful of it and I was thrilled by its success,’ he says. ‘But it wasn’t a particularly joyous time. You don’t just walk around feeling pleased with yourself. It was quite a worrying time, because it became very hard to write. I think you always have this voice in your head saying, “Well, you’re never going to work again, this is the end of it.”’
He thought about it again when he read Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel Normal People.
‘ When I heard about that, I thought there was a certain overlap with One Day
– you know, about two friends over a number of years. And when I read it I was really blown away by it. I thought it was an amazing book, that was much more difficult and meatier and franker about things that are skipped over in One Day, like sex, and very incisive about how we communicate with each other and technology. One Day
was set in 2007, which feels to me like the last pre-internet year. If you picked up Emma and Dexter and put them even five years later, you’d have to write a very different novel.’
Making the movie of One Day (which was not so well-received) was a very difficult experience, he says, because the book was still at the peak of its success. ‘So rather than going into a meeting thinking, “How can we make this film work?”, you’re going into a meeting thinking, “How can we not annoy or disappoint people?”’ he recalls. ‘I think if we’d waited five years we’d have probably done it on television, and found a way to let it breathe a little bit.’
Sweet Sorrow’s vision of first love, as vivid as it is, never happened for Nicholls as a teenager. ‘ That summer for me was spent in a factory making coffee percolators. What I do remember is how desperately I wanted this kind of thing to happen; I just didn’t meet anyone.’ Until later, I say. ‘Until much later,’ he agrees. ‘Fourteen years later.’
He has been with Hannah, the mother of his children, since his early thirties. She used to be a script editor and hers is one of the opinions he values the most when he’s writing. But: ‘She doesn’t read the first draft, because I don’t want her to think badly of me. She reads it when it’s not entirely embarrassing for me – when it’s slightly embarrassing, but not entirely embarrassing.’
‘ Sweet Sorrow’ by David Nicholls (£20, Hodder & Stoughton) is out on 11 July. For details of book events, visit davidnichollsbooks.co.uk
Boys are aware of the right way to talk to each other now in a way we weren’t