What is wonderful about One Day – this, surely, is the reason people love it so much – is the way it takes the reader so vividly back to being young: the supreme hopefulness of it, but also its inherent humiliations. How, I wonder, has he, a 44-year-old man with a mortgage (or maybe not, these days; he tells me later, very sweetly, that he is still “formulating a gracious way” to talk about money) managed to stay so in touch with what that feels like? Nicholls smiles. Or perhaps it’s a wince. “That post-university time, I found very difficult. I loved university so much: I’d found my vocation, and that was being a student. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to grow up. But I didn’t feel able to do all the things my parents had done in their 20s: buy a house, settle down to a career, have a family. It was a restless, anxious period and it went on for a long time. Adulthood came quite late to me, so that part of my life was extended. I didn’t work full-time as a writer until I was 33. When I started this book, I didn’t have kids. When I first met my partner, Hannah, I was still living in a basement flat in Stockwell.
- 7th August
2011 - 07
