British novelist David Nicholls, whose latest book, 'You Are Here', is a midlife romance set on the Coast to Coast walking trail across northern England.
One Day’s David Nicholls doesn’t believe in happy endings. For his latest book, he walked 300km across England to try to find one.
Sixteen years after David Nicholls published his stratospheric bestseller One Day, the world is still reeling from its devastating ending.
For those not already scarred by the novel or the 2011 film starring Anne Hathaway, last year’s massively popular Netflix adaptation would have left them completely undone.
Pitched as a romantic drama, One Day became the most-watched series globally in the week after it premiered, with almost 10 million views.
Nicholls was executive producer on the show and wrote the penultimate episode. Yes, the one where everything goes wrong for Emma and Dex just as they’ve finally coupled up, after more than a decade skirting around their true feelings for each other.
No wonder one UK newspaper called him “the man who made a nation cry”.
It’s 6.30am in North London when Nicholls dials in to our Zoom call from his home in Highbury. Behind him, a windowbox filled with white snowdrops is bathed in spring sunshine.
A chronic insomniac, he’s unperturbed by the early hour. To avoid the domestic distractions of life at home with two teenage children, he has a secluded office space that he cycles to nearby. Most mornings, he’s at his desk by 8am.
Time is a precious commodity for the 58-year-old, who’s on deadline for several screenwriting projects he can’t officially talk about yet (although he does let slip that one is the adaptation of a “comic masterpiece”).
On top of that, he still had some prep to do for his first appearance at the Auckland Writers Festival next week.
His heavy load includes a solo session on his latest novel, You Are Here, a panel discussion with Irish writer Colm Toibin and Auē‘s Becky Manawatu, and a gala night on May 15 alongside seven other festival headliners.
Among them will be British actor Dame Harriet Walter, whom he knows from his Royal National Theatre days in the early 90s, before realising he lacked the talent and charisma for acting. “Harriet was on stage,” he says. “I was understudying.”
Years later, his failed career led to a “bitterly funny” novel, The Understudy, which was recently revived as a radio play starring Stephen Fry.
He and Walter also crossed paths when she appeared alongside Benedict Cumberbatch and Hugo Weaving in Nicholls’ Bafta-winning TV drama adaptation of Patrick Melrose – a harrowing story of child abuse and drug addiction based on Edward St Aubyn’s semi-biographical novels.
It was, Nicholls later joked, a bit like signing up Richard Curtis to make The Handmaid‘s Tale.
“I was definitely miscast in that respect,” he says. “But I loved the books, and often the darkest material doesn’t mean the worst time. It was a very creatively happy project.”
Once described as a “poet of the mundane”, Nicholls is a thoughtful and engaging conversationalist. Several times during our call, he leaps up to adjust the window shutters in a fruitless attempt to stop flares of sunlight from obscuring my view.
His slightly awkward, self-deprecating manner seems quintessentially English – but don’t be fooled. He is, in fact, an absolute monster. The dark turn One Day takes from fairytale romance to tragedy is something he admits to having planned right from the start.
“Several times in my 20s and 30s, there were those sudden and terrible twists of fate, and it felt worthwhile to write about that without any kind of foreshadowing; to acknowledge that those things happen out of the blue,” he says.
“I thought it was interesting that there is this day we don’t know – this hidden anniversary. It was always what the story was about.”
Of course, I haven’t called to talk to him about One Day, although he’s enough of a gentleman to repress any sighs of exasperation.
He enjoyed being involved in the Netflix series and still gets messages almost daily on social media from people who tell him they were deeply touched by the novel.
“It would be really churlish to be anything other than grateful for that. But it is a younger man’s book.”
His follow-up to One Day was another bittersweet story, Us, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014 and adapted for television.
Like all his novels, there’s warmth and humour shot through with melancholy as two essentially decent but emotionally bruised people try to regather the frayed threads of their marriage.
No one could accuse Nicholls of being a cynical man, but he’s not a frothy writer and he doesn’t believe in happy endings – keep the story rolling and there’s always something else to come. You Are Here, which was published last year, almost needed to come with a content warning, too.
“I did have to give myself a talking to come up with something that doesn’t sour at the last minute,” he admits. “But I wanted to write something uplifting with a sense of optimism – even if there’s still potential for disaster or for things to fade away.”
A love story about loneliness, You Are Here plays out during a traverse of northern England‘s 300km Coast to Coast walking trail, as a tentative connection forms between Marnie, a 38-year-old London copywriter, and Michael, a 42-year-old geography teacher from York.
Some reviewers have erroneously described them as middle-aged– a stage of life the Cambridge Dictionary more appropriately defines as between 45 and 65.
The author himself positions them in “midlife”, the years he remembers as a strange kind of no-man’s-land between youth and middle age.
Adrift and fearful of change, Marnie and Michael are also cautiously emerging from a time of imposed social isolation during the Covid pandemic.
A somewhat anxious and fretful person by nature, Nicholls, too, was reluctant to venture out when restrictions were lifted. The world suddenly seemed a daunting and perilous place.
“I could feel myself becoming a bit reclusive and it was quite hard to break out of those patterns.
“I found it very hard to see even people I really love and adore and cherish. I found it rather intimidating. I didn’t know what my face was doing in conversation. I didn’t know what to say.
“I remember — goodness, how naive we were — all this talk about when we go back out there, maybe the world will be more considerate or there’ll be a kind of artistic awakening or a revolution addressing the injustices that we’d all recognised during Covid.
“And the opposite has happened. The world has spun off into an incredibly mean-spirited, chaotic state of violence and rage. I definitely think of [Covid] as one of those before-and-after events. The world did seem rather different in 2019.”
While on home detention, he found himself desperately missing the countryside. A passionate solo hiker, he’d begun taking long walks in 2013 after his father died, to shake off the strangeness of that time and exhaust himself enough so that he could sleep.
The Coast to Coast Walk, devised by British fell walker Alfred Wainwright, begins at St Bees in Cumbria and passes through the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors, finishing at Robin Hood’s Bay.
Nicholls already had the novel in mind when he tackled the crossing in three separate stages. Warding off attempts by other hikers to intrude on his solitude, he gradually felt the story take shape.
Some of the locations are fictional, but much of You Are Here draws from his own experiences on the trail: a brush with mortality, the hellish torrential rain, an aborted attempt at “wild swimming” in the icy waters of Angle Tarn, one of the loveliest spots on the walk.
“I’m very puny and a bad swimmer at the best of times in a heated swimming pool. I don’t know what I was thinking,” he says, ruefully.
“Hiking is a weird cultural phenomenon in the UK, as I’m sure it is in New Zealand. People are very passionate about it and always want to talk about the weather and the routes and how far they’ve walked that day and where they’re staying.
“I did have lots of conversations that fed into the novel in little ways. But for me, to sit by myself in a pub somewhere a long way from home and read a book, that’s a kind of bliss.”
All Nicholls’ books explore the delicate line between loneliness and solitude. The latter is a state he not only values but finds completely necessary in his work as a writer.
Loneliness, however, can feel “immensely frightening and debilitating”, he says, making us doubt ourselves and our worth.
“I did want to write honestly and frankly about that, at the same time without necessarily demonising the experience of living alone or outside of the kind of relationship society expects people to have at that stage – to acknowledge the pleasure and the control you can have over your own life, living as Marnie does.”
Already, there’s talk of a screen adaptation, although the logistics of filming outdoors in wayward weather would be tricky.
Busy with his various screenwriting projects, Nicholls hasn’t written a word of fiction since he finished the first draft of You Are Here three years ago.
“Scripts are a strange creature. There are an awful lot of meetings and an awful lot of emails flying around and an awful lot of very practical questions about running time and budget. So it’s not as immersive.
“When I’m writing fiction, I really do lock all the doors, turn off the internet and sit in complete silence. That’s a very happy time.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.
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