One Day

Emma and Dexter have a night together after their graduation. This is the 15th July 1988, and they are in Edinburgh. They decide as they are heading in different directions they should be friends. Life goes on. One day shows you what happens on the 15th July the next year, and the year after that, and that day for the next 20 years of their lives. It sounds like a pathetic love story, it is in fact a wonderful book.

Quite why this book got so under my skin I’m finding hard to pinpoint. Having moved from Edinburgh to London, like Em and Dex, perhaps I found it a bit easier to identify with them. I think it’s more to do with the excellent characterisation. You’re seeing their lives, you understand where they are, how they feel and why they feel it. It’s like having two best friends who you get to catch up with once a year.

The book covers many other aspects of modern life, and I think the book is as much about being alone as being in love. The author, David Nicholls, seems to have a fantastic insight into what makes people tick. Why they make mistakes and what brings them together (or keeps them apart). It’s little moments, like Emma realising that she cant speak to someone she’s known for 15 years, not because they’ve fallen out, but because their partner’s have, and the battle lines have been drawn. Or when Dexter calls girls in the night to try and see them. You know it’s not because of his rampant libido, it’s because he’s lonely, and doesn’t know how to deal with that.

There’s one particularly brilliant section on how weddings happen in your life. The first wave is when you’re at university, and marriage is basically a rebellion against your parents. The second wave is your mid twenties. There’s still a sense of how silly having a wedding is, but people are starting to take it more seriously. The third wave comes in your thirties. By this time, all pretensions have been lost. The wedding becomes this huge planned formal affair, to be taken very seriously. The fourth wave, of course, is the second marriage…

Having wasted an entire paragraph talking about marriage (not to mention last weeks review of Pride and Prejudice), I should probably go ahead and try to salvage some shred of manliness from this review. I shouldn’t admit how much the book affected me. I know too many people who will read this, laugh and think that by never letting me live it down they’ve scored a victory for men everywhere. They would tell me to man up. Well, I probably should man up, but I feel that issue has nothing to do with the horrific mess I was through the closing scenes of One Day. Many people felt that Toy Story 3 was so overpowering because the end of Andy’s childhood was reflected in the viewer. I think One Day has a similar effect on its reader, not because it relates to the end of your childhood, but what happens next.