One Day; a love letter to the book, the series, and not the film.
One Day has been one of my favourite books since I picked it up as a 23 year old in 2010. The premise of the book is simple; a couple of students - Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew - spend their University graduation night together on 15 July 1988, knowing they must go their separate ways the next day. The novel then visits their lives on 15 July - St Swithins Day - every year for the next 20 years. It’s a simple story, in many ways; there are no epic adventures, no grand sweeping romantic gestures, no flights of fancy; it’s a very human book. Author David Nicholls recalls that as a student, he read a passage in Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles in which Tess realises that as well as birthdays and anniversaries "there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death...a day which lay sly and unseen and among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound." This gave him the idea for a novel in which the date of a major character's death would form the basis for vignettes of the characters' lives, without the more standard clichéd events of the other 364 days - such as Christmas, New Years Eve, birthdays, Valentines Day - clouding the plot line or making things too obvious.
From the first few pages, I was hooked. I laughed, I cried, I related heavily; so heavily.
I was, at that point, a very lost soul. I’d just finished a year of teaching in an inner city school in a very deprived area in North East Scotland; a job that, over the course of my four year University teaching degree, I had come to fear that I actually wasn’t well-suited for. My fears were realised when I came to the end of my contract and realised that I really, really didn’t want another teaching job. I loved the children, and using my imagination to conjure up exciting lessons and experiences for them; but I couldn’t separate work and home life. I would cry every day about the situations that some of the children lived in. I was buying them breakfast on my meagre newly qualified teacher’s salary. I was struggling to get over a bout of pneumonia which had leached into my body during the harsh Aberdeen winter, in my damp little flat. I was coming to the end of a relationship that I’d been in throughout my University years and beyond; he had moved to London and was in a high flying job - my idea of hell- and long-distance wasn't working for us. We had outgrown each other, but neither of us wanted to admit it. I was miserable. I hadn’t envisaged this, the first few years of graduate adult life, to be quite so grey and flat. I wanted to do more, be more, feel more. And, like Emma Morley, I wanted to be a writer.
So, when I picked up One Day, which I’d bought from WHSmith on a whim, I immediately found myself in Em; the book-obsessed young teacher with big dreams and high hopes, who has little confidence but a strong core of integrity. She was me, and I was her. And yes, shortly afterwards, I found my Dexter; of sorts. I say of sorts because I am not married to him and I am not in love with him. I am married to and have procreated with the love of my life, who came along much later and caused me much less grief. But I did find that Dex-esque man, that friend, the person who knew the real me, who I’d go running to on tough evenings, and who would come running to me for sanctuary, who could shed his bullshit exterior with me if he had had enough to drink or was feeling particularly raw. He was confident, loud, sought-after and brash; a wealthy city boy. I was none of those things - the quiet creative from the countryside - but we clicked. DexLite, as we shall call him, was often totally insufferable; sometimes he acted like a child, was possessive, was angry, was a liability to himself and others. He hated my partner at the time (quite rightly, actually, as he turned out to be awful) and made it known, he left a trail of broken hearts in his midst, and I often swept up the pieces on his behalf. He was also intelligent, kind, funny and grappling with significant personal problems. He professed his love for me, it made our friendship weird, he got angry, I got sad, and we didn’t speak for months. Only now, with both of us in happy relationships / marriages, do we get on as Just Good Friends. Did my tolerance for this man come from the crash course I was given from Emma and Dexter? Possibly.
Opinions on Dexter tend to fall into two camps; the ‘He’s a Tortured Soul and So Handsome Leave Him Alone’ camp, and the ‘He is a Petulant Child and Emma Could Do Better’ camp. I abide somewhere in the middle; of all the male characters I’ve read over the years, he is my favourite. That doesn’t mean I would want to be eternally bound to him - I really wouldn’t. He is my favourite because he is so real to me. Not just because I’ve had a DexLite in my life for well over a decade now, but because the author - a man, himself, which I suspect helps - writes the upper class, old money, English male ego with such stark, unflinching clarity. His endless need to prove himself, seeking that approval in all the wrong places, through oysters and champagne and drugs and women, is so familiar to any of us who have spent any kind of time in London. The loudmouth exterior and the childlike, vulnerable reality, which breaks our hearts several times throughout the book and the series, is spot on; most if not all of us will have met such a man in our lives. Casting Leo Woodall was a touch of genius; his ability to portray vacuous alongside deep is awe-inspiring and he has rightly been highly praised alongside Ambika Mod for his performance. They are the epitome of Emma and Dex, for me, unlike the film…
Actually… let’s have that chat and get it out of the way, shall we?
I will start by saying I love Anne Hathaway, and I love Jim Sturgess. I really, really love both of them. Sturgess’ Across the Universe is one of my favourite films, and Love and Other Drugs is up there too - not to mention Hathaway’s incredible performances in literally everything else she's over done. But she is just not Emma Morley, and Jim is not Dexter. The film is fine; mostly good acting, ok script writing, it’s fine, but compared to the dynamic in the book and the series, the Emma x Dexter chemistry is notable in its absence. Dexter is loathsome without retaining his appeal, Emma is a bit twee, it’s all a bit blah. Casting Ambika Mod as Emma was the single best thing the Netflix team could have done; her effortless charm, wit, dryness, her pared back yet burning passion, it’s absolutely the Emma we know and love from the novel (and her accent is spot on, unlike Hathaway’s attempt). Ambika has spoken openly of her initial reluctance to take on the role of Emma as she didn’t see herself as a desirable leading lady; and it’s that humility, perhaps lack of self belief or confidence, that makes her a natural Emma Morley; because Emma Morley is a national treasure. She, like Ambika, is beautiful, kind, passionate, talented, and loyal. Woodall’s Dexter is heart wrenchingly vulnerable but annoyingly charming, and when we see them both bare their souls on screen, it is pure magic. The series is funny (“you didn’t even ask if she was there, Moriarty!” is one line that reduces me to a fit of mirth whether it’s in writing or on screen, every single time) it’s heart breaking, it is swoon worthy, and it feels so, so real. I just didn’t feel like the film captured that magic; because the book, and the new series, are just that in their starkly ‘normal’ nature; pure, unadulterated, human magic. Take the infamous fancy restaurant scene, for example. In the film, Dexter is nothing but loathsome in that moment - he really intentionally antagonises Emma in a way that feels like pure aggression. In the series, Leo Woodall says the same line (“Those who can, do. Those who can’t…. teach” and even typing that has made me cringe because good grief, what a tense moment) but he says it from a palpable place of frustration, embarrassment, and the need to assert himself; he is a desperate man. Emma’s reaction in the film is pure rage, whereas in the series, Mod portrays the full spectrum grief, shame, anger and desperation of her own as she storms out of the restaurant and they confront each other on the street. It’s a masterful, raw performance, and - like every second chapter of the book - it broke my heart.
The fact that we we aren’t permitted to read/see what happens in the 364 days of the year between the annual St Swithin’s Day leaves much to the imagination; and, for me, it makes me all the more entangled in Emma and Dex’s story. To portray an ever-evolving bond between two people without obviously and obtusely spelling out what has happened year on year is incredibly tough, but author David Nicholls made it seem effortless. We are used to reading or seeing a story in its entirety; a carefully portioned tale where we have insight into the evolution of the plot and the characters throughout. Our forced absence from the lives of Emma and Dex for the vast majority of each year provoked a pining in me; a need to check in with them, to know what has come before, to read into every turn of phrase, every expression, every interaction and piece together what has transpired. I delve more into how the omission of key information can add to a story in this piece, if you’re into that kind of thing.
As the days and years swirl past in the lead up to The Worst Day, there’s a sense of the runaway train nature of time casually and elegantly spun into the joyous fabric of the couple’s daily lives. It got me to thinking, as these things do, about how writers and scriptwriters can use time as a particularly captivating storytelling tool. You may not know that Tandem Collective’s first ever Readalong (and therefore, the first ever Readalong in general) was of a book called Fierce Kingdom (later renamed Fierce) by Gin Philips. In a stark contrast to One Day, where we are forced away from the characters and the plot for an entire year at a time throughout the book, Gin Philips keeps us trapped with her characters for every second of their ordeal. The book starts at 4:55 p.m. and ends just after 8:05 p.m., and it’s possible to read almost in real-time as we follow the life-or-death battle for survival of a mother and son who are trapped in a zoo amid a mass shooting. It’s a similar setup to Three Hours, also based on a shooting situation, where we spend every minute in that three hour period with alternating characters involved in a school hostage situation. Both these books keep us captive amid the horror and the fear, the hope and the desperation, privy to every thought, decision and action taken. We are right there with the characters, throughout; the polar opposite of One Day’s premise, but equally gripping.
Thankfully, I went on to move to Edinburgh, meet the love of my life, and live happily ever after (so far, anyway) and the filming locations around Auld Reekie - from Arthurs Seat to the endless steps, winding cobbled alleys and University campus - all hold special memories for me that made reading and watching One Day all the more bittersweet this time around. Those final pages spent with Em and Dex, and then just Dex, are among the saddest things I’ve ever read; I went through (and, thanks to the series, am now currently reliving) genuine grief. I miss them; I feel like I’ll eternally be waiting for the next St Swithin’s Day, and it’s not going to come.