Picture of modesty

I came to One Day a little late. It was published in 2009, but I did not read it until some time early in 2010. I knew a little about its author, David Nicholls, of course: I had seen the films When Did You Last See Your Father? and Starter for 10, whose screenplays he had written, and his heavenly adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles on television. But I had not read either of his other novels.

Then, one day, a girlfriend whose literary taste I have never had cause to doubt, told me to try it. And 435 pages later, I, too, had become another evangelist for it. The book was everywhere (if you haven't read it, it tells the story of Emma and Dexter, who meet at university on St Swithin's Day, 1988; it then revisits them on the same day for the next 20 years). Its traffic-cone jacket flashed at me from Tube and train and bus. I grasped that it was a word-of-mouth hit, and a big one at that.

Paranoid about success

Nicholls and I meet in a restaurant near his home in north London and sure enough, about halfway through our conversation, a woman appears at our table and tells him that, only last night, she had finished his novel. "It was beautiful," she says. Nicholls thanks her. "That's very kind," he says. Unlike certain authors, however, who accept praise in much the same way the Queen accepts flowers (graciously, but without any hint of surprise), you can tell that Nicholls means it. He is, he says, still so very grateful. "I'm grateful that I found a job I could do, and that I love, and I'm grateful for the success of the book, and I suppose I think that because I've been so lucky, there's an obligation to try to be sensible and decent about the whole thing." He emits the tiniest sigh. "But it's so stupid. Because, of course, [success] also makes me anxious, paranoid, guilty ... all of those things."

Why? "Well, it's so hard for books to take off. You give years of your life to something that probably won't happen, so when it does, it feels a little ... unjust." Is he worried his success will come to a sudden stop? "Not a stop, no, but the idea of keeping going for another 20 years makes me a little panicky, and [then there is] the prospect of a backlash, or the next book not being so good or doing so well. None of this is a complaint. As a novelist, I'm incredibly lucky to make a living, but that doesn't mean I don't lie awake at 4 o'clock in the morning, worrying."

The long-awaited film of One Day has recently been released. It was directed by Lone Scherfig, Nicholls wrote the screenplay and it stars Anne Hathaway as Emma and Jim Sturgess as Dexter. He likes the finished film a lot: Some bits look exactly as they did in his head. Were Emma, so sardonic and yet so soft-hearted, and Dexter, such a dreadful show-off until life bites him on the back, based on real people? (Emma is first a waitress, then a teacher, and finally a writer; Dexter works in television, and later in "artisan foods".) "Dexter less so. When I was an actor, I worked with lots of men who had a bit of success early on, who were very good-looking, who suddenly made a bit of money and who felt no embarrassment — and nor should they have done — about having a good time. I think there are probably bits of them in Dexter. In Emma, there are bits of me, and my friends, and bits of fictional characters: Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment, Katharine Hepburn, Beatrice in Much Ado, a bit of Annie Hall ... characters I love. I loved writing her."

What is wonderful about One Day 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) managed to stay so in touch with what that feels like? Nicholls smiles. Or perhaps it is 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 twenties — 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."

From acting to writing

After college, having won a scholarship to study acting in New York, he returned to London to pursue a career on stage and screen. Except the work arrived only sporadically. What made him finally pack it in? "A couple of jobs I didn't enjoy. I'd been an understudy in Arcadia [by Tom Stoppard] and as Konstantin in The Seagull, and I loved both of those, but then I had a couple of jobs where I was miscast and I was bad, and I was aware of being bad. By this time, I was reading scripts freelance, and I realised that what I liked about acting was the writing. Then again, I thought it was arrogant and presumptuous to ask people to perform something you'd written. Why would they want to do that? In the end, I was forced into it by friends."

The question now, I suppose, is: novels or screenplays? Nicholls wants to continue doing both. He hasn't started the next novel yet, but he has written the screenplay for a new film of Great Expectations and you can almost feel his excitement about it. But this is not to say we should get carried away. "A thing that makes me ache is a script I've written for Tender is the Night [by Scott Fitzgerald]. It's always looking for a director, and someone to play Dick. I'm obsessed with that book— it's so heart-breaking, and bittersweet and lyrical." Nicholls is determined to tell it to me like it is. "That's the thing about a film script. It doesn't matter how much of your heart and soul you put into it, it's still an instruction manual, and if someone doesn't make it, it doesn't have a purpose."