One day author david nicholls6/20/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Twenty set-piece scenes seemed far more manageable and by leaving out the obvious events – the first encounter, first kiss, the wedding days – perhaps the reader might be pulled forward, filling in the other 364 days as they went along. There it was again that ordinary day that turns out not to be ordinary at all. Besides, I was distracted by a dream screenwriting job, adapting Tess of the D’Urbervilles for the BBC. A new parent approaching 40, I was predictably preoccupied with the question, how did we get from there to here? How do we become our adult selves, what changes and what stays the same? I thought I might write an epic love story on the theme, but 20 years of biography seemed unwieldy and intimidating. Twenty-two years later, I was struggling to find an idea for my third novel. ![]() I did well in the exam, less well at parties. Certainly the notion seemed profound enough for me to talk about it at parties. Hidden anniversaries! Days we pass through without knowing their significance! Perhaps I said “wow”. Seventeen was the optimum age for doomed romance, and I still recall reading the passage in which Tess “noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year” and realised that, as well as a birthday, there was “a day which lay sly and unseen … that of her own death … giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it”. ![]() S ometime in the mid-80s I was studying Tess of the D’Urbervilles for A-level. ![]()
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