Book Response: One Day by David Nicholls

I want to call it a love story, but I might be more accurate if I take the words from Emma, one of the main characters, and say that this is a novel about two people who grow up together. 

Emma and Dexter. Dexter and Emma. These two hook up at a graduation party on July 15, 1988. The book narrates their lives, together and separately, on July 15th each year after that for nearly twenty years.  We see and hear about only those things that they think and do on July 15. This structure could be odd, forcing the author to provide a great deal of back story for each year, but Nicholls deploys the structural trope so cleverly. I never felt like I was being force-fed information.  I occasionally wished I could see more of their lives because I loved the characters so much, but bits and pieces of their experiences emerged through the natural progression of living and remembering. In this novel as in life, often we don’t understand the significance of an event until much later in the story. 

Emma and Dexter are friends. We know that each one loves the other, but their friendship is filled with near-misses so tantalizing that we’re almost satisfied. We see how they are both brought together and pulled apart by their action and inaction.  Dexter is a pretty boy from a privileged background. He is sexually very promiscuous and a career alcoholic. Emma comes from humble origins, is politically liberal and vocal, and works hard for everything in her life. Nicholls paints their weaknesses—Dexter’s drink and personal uncertainty is a louder version of Emma’s self-limiting lack of confidence and self-knowledge—with honesty so that we love them both in spite of the stupid things they (ok, mostly Dex) sometimes do.

They have so little in common. We don’t know exactly why they make good friends, but they do. They reserve for one another an honesty and a humor that is absent in their other relationships.  When that—often snarky—honesty breaks down, so does their friendship. But it comes back. The things that we think most likely to drive them apart are often what bring them closer together.

The writing is beautiful.  The one day structure could be clumsy, but Nicholls carries it off with grace. That one day tends to become slightly loaded, perhaps overloaded, with significance for Dexter and Emma, but there’s an implicit argument that each person has days like that on the calendar. Days that for one reason or another attract significance on top of significance.

You will laugh at the dialogue sometimes. Emma and Dexter are so funny with each other. If you are like me, you will also weep. No, you will sob.  Great, body-wracking sobs of grief and anger and surprise and disappointment.  I can’t recall a book in recent memory that has elicited such a profound emotional reaction from me. Don’t quit the book when Nicholls punches you in the gut though. Stay with the story. The final chapters give you what you’ve been hoping for the whole book. They surprise you with what Emma and Dexter have had all along, since that very first July 15.

A stunningly beautiful book that I recommend to anyone wanting to enjoy or write rich characters living in honest realism.