David Nicholls: ‘Could I write a book that had no love story? I don’t know if I’d want to’
One Day made his name – and the nation cry. Now Nicholls is back with Sweet Sorrow, set over the summer of 1997. He talks about his Bafta win and why he’ll never tire of romance
With the neat timing of one his books, David Nicholls’s new novel Sweet Sorrow is published exactly 10 years after One Day, the blockbuster romantic comedy that made his name and the rest of us weep. For a long time, the orange book jacket was the brightest thing on the morning commute and an obligatory stripe on the bookshelves of anyone under 40. Set on St Swithin’s day over the course of 20 years, it was a genuine word-of-mouth success; a film starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess as will-they-won’t-they friends Emma and Dexter came out in 2011. Since then Nicholls has written two big-screen adaptations (Great Expectations and Far from the Madding Crowd), and his fourth novel, Us, which was longlisted for the Booker prize in 2014. In May he was awarded a Bafta for his TV screenplay of Patrick Melrose, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch. He’s currently getting up at six in the morning to deliver scripts for the TV dramatisation of Us, which begins filming later this year. Not that he’s complaining – “I am so lucky,” he marvels several times during our conversation.
Despite all the accolades, not to mention dizzying sales figures, he is as self-deprecating as in his earliest interviews. Now 52, he seems as genuine and gently witty as you’d expect from his fiction. In his Bafta acceptance speech, he thanked the producers for “miscasting” him as a writer for Patrick Melrose. Although Edward St Aubyn’s blistering autobiographical series, a bleak history of abuse as a child and later drug addiction, had been his “dream project as a scriptwriter” for many years – he first encountered it when working in a bookshop in Notting Hill back in the 90s – he wasn’t, he says now, “an obvious choice” for the job, a bit like signing up Richard Curtis to make The Handmaid’s Tale.