One Day Study Guide

David Nicholls was born in Hampshire, England, and is the second of three children. He initially set out to be an actor, studying drama and English literature at Barton Percival College. He graduated with bachelor’s degrees in those subjects from the University of Bristol in 1988. He went on to act for several years under the stage name David Holdaway, but he struggled with acting and eventually decided to focus on writing instead. Nicholls began working as a screenwriter in the early 2000s, and shortly afterward, his first novels, Start for Ten and The Understudy, saw some success. In 2009, his novel One Day became a global bestseller, and it would eventually be adapted into a film and a limited series. Since then, Nicholls has continued to work in film and television, and he has published several other novels that also deal with themes of contemporary romance and aging, including Us, Sweet Sorrow, and You Are Here. He lives in northern London with his partner Hannah Weaver, a script editor.

One Day takes place over several years in the past and occasionally references real-life events from history that overlap with this period. In many cases, the fictional events of the novel seem to parallel these real events, with one of the most notable examples being Dexter having a relapse into drinking just a week after a prominent subway bombing in London in 2005. Another important real-world event is the passage of the Broadcasting Act 1990 in Britain. The act removed the existing regulatory bodies for British television and instituted new standards that came with looser standards on media content. While this led to an increase in available types of programming, it also allowed private media moguls like Rupert Murdoch to consolidate power—notably, Murdoch’s scandal-prone tabloid empire was an inspiration for the hit show Succession. The television shows that Dexter acts as a presenter on represent the more hedonistic, youth-focused nature of the shows that arrived in the wake of this law. These shows also represent the growing influence of the United States’ MTV, an influential TV channel that began as a music-video station but later pivoted toward youth culture shows, on other countries around the world. 

David Nicholls has said that the inspiration for One Day was a quote by the 19th-century author Thomas Hardy, who is also quoted in two different epigraphs within the novel—one from his novel Far from the Madding Crowd and one from Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Hardy wrote about contemporary British life in a naturalistic style, and his wife, writer and suffragist Emma Gifford, partially inspired the name of One Day co-protagonist Emma Morley. Nicholls’s work also draws inspiration from British author Nick Hornby, whose novels (which include High Fidelity and About a Boy) also deal with contemporary romance, coming of age, and pop culture. Like Nicholls’s novels, Hornby’s works have also been adapted for the screen. One Day is often compared to the work of Irish writer Sally Rooney, in particular Normal People, which also follows several years in the life of a potential couple whose circumstances keep their romance at bay. Rooney’s novel is also influenced by 19th-century British novels. Rooney’s novel came out after Nicholls’ novel but was adapted for television first, influencing the limited series adaptation of One Day. Finally, Nicholls writes in the Acknowledgments that the musician Billy Bragg’s song “St. Swithin’s Day” helped inspire the date of the titular One Day.