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 gradually turns into something else.
I also wanted to write something on a large scale, an epic love story that took in the last twenty 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 twenty years, but instead of showing the usual landmarks, the first kiss, the engagements and marriages, the novel shows events on that one perfectly ordinary day, 15th July, at yearly intervals, right up until 2007.
It's always a mistake to make easy connections between a writer's life and work, but I think its fair to say that I couldn't have written this book ten years ago. I turned forty while writing, and also started a family, and both events inevitably lead to a certain amount of retrospection. 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, 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 and a little amazed by the response to
One Day. Readers 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.
--David Nicholls
