As the global bestseller One Day reduces a new generation to tears, it’s fair to say that no other author captures the bittersweet highs and lows of falling in love better than David Nicholls. He talks about nostalgia, self-confidence and the rewards of solitude
This is the year of David Nicholls. Which has come as a bit of a shock, it turns out, to David Nicholls. He had not planned to release his sixth (and, he thinks, his best) novel You Are Here at the same time that the adaptation of his literary phenomenon One Day hit Netflix, or as a musical of his 2003 novel Starter for Ten opened in Bristol. “In one way, it’s very exciting. But in another way, it’s a bit…” he says, searching for a word that is kind, “overwhelming.”
The year of David Nicholls means this is a year of the bittersweet. Of love as a matter of life and death and the path from friendship to romance, and all the tiny, exquisite, effortless banalities of modern life that have seen his work, which has encompassed film, telly (including Patrick Melrose, the Emmy-nominated adaptation of Edward St Aubyn’s novels) and particularly his novels, reframe what the truest story of true love could be. Rather than romcom, one reviewer described his work as “rom-trag”.
