One Day, and the Years That Were Hers

Edinburgh, the night of 15 July 1988. Two people who graduated that day sit up in her flat and talk until morning. They do not sleep together. When it is light they climb Arthur’s Seat, the old volcano that rises above the city, and they are on their way back to his flat when his parents turn up. The morning ends there. That is nearly all that happens, and the series spends fourteen episodes coming back to it.

Emma Morley is clever and guarded, a working-class student from Leeds. Dexter Mayhew is handsome, charming and from money. On the same date every year afterwards, St Swithin’s Day, One Day returns to see where they are. Some years the date finds them in the same room, some years in different countries, and one year not speaking at all. Each year gets a day. The rest of it happens off screen.

The first episode’s published synopsis calls that first morning “a morning of missed opportunity”, and it is easy to remember the whole series in the same key: as a story about time two people lost, and about the question it leaves behind, which is what they might have had if either of them had been braver on that first morning.

This essay reads it another way. Watched for Emma, a clever woman who spends years talking herself down, the years between the dates are not only time the two of them lost. They are the years she needed. The series shows one day of each, and on that one day she can look as if she is drifting; but the drifting years are where she learns to set her own terms and to keep them, with him and with herself. The days the series shows belong to the story. The rest of the years were hers.

A note before going further. This essay discusses the whole series, including how it ends. The ending is described in one section only, near the close, and that section says so in its first line. A reader who would rather meet it on screen can stop at the heading “How the series ends”.

One Day is a British series made for Netflix: fourteen episodes, each between about twenty and forty minutes long, all released on 8 February 2024. It adapts David Nicholls’s novel of 2009. The writers’ room was led by Nicole Taylor, with Anna Jordan, Vinay Patel and Bijan Sheibani; Nicholls was an executive producer, and wrote one episode himself, the thirteenth. Ambika Mod plays Emma and Leo Woodall plays Dexter. Essie Davis is Dexter’s mother, Alison, and Tim McInnerny his father, Stephen; Eleanor Tomlinson plays Sylvie, and Jonny Weldon plays Ian.

The novel had been filmed before. In 2011 Lone Scherfig directed a feature from Nicholls’s own screenplay, with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess as Emma and Dexter; it runs a little under two hours. The series has room the film did not have, and most years get an episode of their own. In the week of 12 February 2024, its first full week out, it rose to number one on Netflix’s weekly English TV list, with 9.9 million views. In Japan it streams under its English title, with the katakana beside it.

Three notes. The series was not screened for this essay. Its scenes are described as published synopses, recaps and reviews describe them, and what the characters say is paraphrased, never quoted as exact. The essay is about the series; the novel and the film come in only where the record of them helps. And it discusses the ending in the section headed “How the series ends”, and nowhere before it.

The date carries a story of its own. The fifteenth of July is St Swithin’s Day, and in English weather lore it is a forecast. If it rains on St Swithin’s Day, the old rhyme says, it will rain for forty days; if the day is fine, the forty days will stay fine. The Met Office, Britain’s national weather service, calls this a folklore myth, and notes that since records began it has never rained for so long. The day promises to tell you the rest of the summer. The records do not bear it out.

One Day borrows the date, and something like the promise. Its whole device is to let one day stand for a year. We meet Emma and Dexter on 15 July, and from that day we are asked to infer the other three hundred and sixty-four: where she is living and with whom, how much he is drinking, whether they have spoken since the last time. It is an elegant device and a demanding one, because it offers the viewer the same temptation as the rhyme. It invites you to read a whole stretch of time from a single day, and then to believe the reading.

The way the series reached its audience made the temptation stronger, because all fourteen episodes arrived at once. Writing in Prospect in March 2024, the critic Imogen West-Knights called the series “a perfect marriage of form and content”: people tend to watch on Netflix several episodes at a sitting, and so those who watched probably saw the two of them age far too fast; rushing through the lives of two people you have come to love, she wrote, is a dizzying thing. She meant it as praise, and it is. It is also a description of how easily the years can vanish. Watched over two evenings, the gap between one July and the next lasts about as long as the closing credits.

This essay asks for the opposite habit. It takes each date as one day, no more, and gives the years their length back. That is not a trick of reading. It is where the series keeps the most important thing that happens to Emma.

Begin where they begin, because the series is honest about it. Emma comes from Leeds and from a working-class family. She is clever and quick, and she keeps her guard up. Dexter comes from money. He is good-looking and at ease in any room, and so much has been handed to him that he has stopped noticing the handing.

The first years after Edinburgh show what each starting point is worth. Dexter travels, and then his charm finds its natural employer: he becomes a presenter on late-night television, and famous. Emma tours with a theatre company, and then, in London, in a creative drought, works in a Mexican restaurant; life in London is not what she expected. Before long she is with Ian, a would-be comedian she met at the restaurant, who loves her and resents the hold Dexter has on her.

None of this is offered here as a verdict on either of them. It is a description of how ease and difficulty are handed out, and of what each does to the person who receives it. Charm and money open doors; cleverness without either carries plates. And the series makes it plain that neither inheritance is good for its heir. Dexter is handed so much that he nearly drinks it away. Emma is handed so little that she spends years talking herself down.

That habit of hers is the subject of this essay. Talking yourself down is not quite modesty, and it is not a flaw of character. It can be learned, and learned early, wherever aiming high got a person laughed at, and a joke at your own expense has the advantage of arriving before anyone else’s. It protects. It also sets a ceiling. Someone who says often enough that she could never do the thing she wants can arrange a life in which she never has to find out.

It matters who was cast to play her. The Emma of Nicholls’s novel is written as white. Ambika Mod, who plays her, is the daughter of Indian immigrants to Britain, and was known before this for the BBC’s This Is Going to Hurt. According to an interview in W Magazine in March 2024, she declined more than once to audition. Much as she loved the character, and identified with her, she said, “I just didn’t see myself in that position in a believable way.”

She also said that she had felt like an outsider in many of the ways Emma does, and that she often feels like one in her industry. That is her account of herself, and this essay will not read an actor’s life through her part. It sets down only the shape of what happened. The part of a woman who cannot quite see herself as the lead in her own life went to an actor who, by her own account, could not at first see herself in it; and the series she led went to number one on Netflix’s English TV list in its first full week.

Why the makers cast her, and how the choice was received beyond what she has said herself, this essay does not claim to know. But in a story about a woman who has to learn that she deserves the main part, who was given the main part is not beside the point. For one week in February 2024, the series at number one on Netflix’s English TV list was a love story whose heroine, a working-class woman from Leeds, was played by a British Indian actor.

In 1991 they go on holiday to Greece together, and Emma arrives with plans for keeping it platonic: a set of rules for the week. They end up sharing a bed under them. In a game of secrets she tells him that after they met in Edinburgh she had a crush on him. Later he suggests something casual between them. She says no.

It is easy to hear that no as nerves, or as a game, and both readings miss what she knows. She has known him for three years. She knows what something casual with Dexter would cost the one person in it who would not be casual, and she has just told him who that is. The rules were never about feeling less. The feeling is already out, told to him as a secret. The rules are about deciding what she will do with it.

That is the first thing to say about the years between the dates: they are where Emma learns to make terms. Her no in Greece is not a failure of nerve. It is clear, early information about what she wants, and it protects the thing she actually wants to keep, which is the friendship. A no can do that. Wanting someone and agreeing to what he proposes are two different things, and in this scene the series lets her keep them apart. What he suggests does not happen, and the friendship goes on.

The next years pull them in opposite directions, and the series marks each step. In 1992 Dexter turns up at his parents’ house still drunk. His mother, Alison, is seriously ill, and she tells him plainly that he is wasting himself. His father drives him to the station and tells him not to come back like that.

In 1993 Emma, who has become a teacher, puts on a school play, and on the opening night she is the one who gives her young cast their nerve; the play is a success. The same year Dexter drinks before a live broadcast of his own show, and it goes wrong on air. The series sets the two nights side by side: a woman who cannot quite believe in herself, making other people brave, and a man everyone believes in, losing his nerve in front of the cameras.

Then 1994. Dexter takes her to a glamorous restaurant, keen to show her the life he leads now. He is famous, and more and more often drunk or high. As the dinner goes on he turns on her, and belittles her for being only a teacher, and not the writer she had meant to be. She walks out, and tells him they are no longer friends. They do not speak for a year.

This is the hinge of the series, and it belongs to Emma. Look at what she is refusing. Not him, exactly, and not love. She is refusing a friendship that has started to make her smaller: a man who once sat up all night in her flat talking about what they would do with their lives, now making her work the joke of the evening. For a woman who has spent years talking herself down, leaving a room in which someone else is doing it for her is a change of direction, and it costs her. She loses her closest friend. She chooses that over keeping him on those terms.

In the series’ own terms, it means that the next 15 July finds them apart because she decided they should be. The device can show only one day of the year, and that year the day it shows finds them in separate lives. The year is hers to spend. The next section is about how she spends it.

The title of this essay comes from 1995. It is the last day of the school term. Emma has left Ian, and she and Dexter have not spoken for a year. When she gets home the evening turns uncomfortable: Ian has let himself in and read her diaries. He tells her they are good, and that she should publish them. He is not a reader she chose. But what he says is true, and she hears it.

Later, on her way back from the shops, she runs into one of her pupils, who wants to read English at Edinburgh, the university Emma left seven years before. And then Emma sits down and begins to write a novel from her diaries.

Set that beside the device. The series can show only one day of each year, and for seven years the days it has shown of Emma’s life have looked like drift: a touring company, a restaurant, Ian, a classroom. But she had been writing it down. The diaries hold what the series leaves out, and in 1995 they turn out to be the material of her work. The years that looked, from one July to the next, like time going nowhere were years she had been keeping. They were hers in the plainest sense, and she makes something of them.

It is worth saying what this does not mean. It does not mean that the hard years were secretly good for her, or that years of work she did not want are a fair price for a novel. A diary is not a promise of a book. It means something smaller and more useful: that a life can be accumulating while it looks, from outside and sometimes from inside, as if it is standing still.

And the pupil matters. A teacher who talks herself down spends her days talking other people up, and here is one of them, hoping for the university Emma left. The girl is, among other things, evidence of what Emma’s belief can do when it is pointed at somebody else. The series puts that meeting just before she sits down to write, as if the last thing she needed to see was her own faith at work in another person.

The series moves Dexter forward too. Sober now, he meets Sylvie. In 1997, at the wedding of a friend from university, he tells Emma that he is going to marry Sylvie, who is pregnant. Emma says she is happy for him. She also tells him that she has missed him every day. They promise to stay best friends.

Every day. It is an exact phrase for what the series’ own device cannot show. The story visits once a year; she missed him on the other days, the ones it leaves out, which is where most of a friendship, and most of a longing, actually take place. And notice what she does with the sentence. She says it when it can change nothing, to a man who is about to marry someone else, and she asks for nothing with it. For a woman who spent years talking herself down, that is a new kind of speech: the truth about what she feels, said plainly, for its own sake.

The next year is hard on him. Dexter is working in a coffee shop owned by his old flatmate, Callum, while Sylvie, worn out by their baby daughter, Jasmine, is having an affair with Callum. This essay does not read any of it as a punishment. A marriage is under strain, and the essay leaves it there.

In 1999, getting divorced, Dexter goes to Paris to see Emma. She is living there, working on her second book; the synopsis of the episode calls her thriving, and him troubled. She is also seeing a Frenchman, Jean-Pierre.

Set the two of them beside the first morning in Edinburgh and the positions have nearly turned round. Then, he had been handed everything and she had a habit of lowering herself. Now she has work that is going well, a city of her own for the time being, and a man she is seeing. He is getting divorced; he has a small daughter; a year ago he was working in a friend’s coffee shop. She chooses him.

It is worth being exact about what makes it a choice. Not that she has stopped wanting him: the wedding showed that she never had. It is that she now wants him from somewhere. She has a life that does not run through him, work that is hers, and someone else she could stay with. The woman who said no in Greece because she knew what it would cost her, and who walked out of the restaurant because the friendship had turned cruel, chooses now with the same knowledge. He follows her to Paris. She decides.

“Normal People and the Damage Done by Love That Cannot Speak Clearly” read another long pairing across class, and found two people whose feeling was real long before their language could carry it: love, it argued, may remain real even when timing, structure and language fail it. One Day runs the same test from the other side. Emma and Dexter never lacked language; their first night was nothing but talk. What they lacked was something talk could not supply on its own: two people who could meet as equals. The series takes eleven years to make them, and the making is the story.

From here, this essay describes how the series ends.

By 2001 they are planning a wedding. Dexter’s mother has died, and he runs a café bought with what she left him. Emma’s fourth novel is about to come out. They are trying for a baby, without success. For a while the series looks like the ending the first morning seemed to promise, arrived at late.

Then, on St Swithin’s Day, fourteen years to the day after they met, Emma is killed in an accident on her way to meet him. It is an ordinary wet afternoon. The years that were hers end there, and nothing more about that afternoon needs to be said here.

The last episode is given to Dexter’s grief, and it takes its time. He goes back to drink and to cocaine. He is beaten up, and his father comes and takes him home. Friends try to reach him, Ian among them. Alone, he imagines Emma telling him that he will not always feel like this. Three years later he takes Jasmine to Edinburgh, and as she climbs Arthur’s Seat ahead of him he remembers the morning in 1988, and imagines kissing Emma on the steps.

The episode that takes her away is the one Nicholls wrote himself. Nicole Taylor, who led the writing of the series, told an interviewer that she had gone into the adaptation wanting to question whether this was still the ending they wanted, and that she had thought about others; it stayed because, in her words, it is “stitched into the work as a whole”. What she did instead, she said, was give a great deal of thought to the last episode and the aftermath: to Dexter and how he deals with it, and to Emma’s friends.

So the series ends where it began, on that morning of missed opportunity. The last thing Dexter imagines is the kiss that did not happen in 1988. It is natural to take that image as the series’ verdict on everything in between: if only they had been braver, all those years would have been theirs.

This essay reads it as something else: as grief’s way of thinking, given to a grieving man. “Looking Back Without Turning Every Alternate Life Into Regret” described regret as a simulation rather than a memory, run by someone who already knows how things turned out and placed inside someone who did not. It offered one narrow test. Could the person you were, with what you actually knew then, have reached the other branch?

Run that test on the steps in Edinburgh. The Emma of that morning had just graduated and was talking herself down. The Dexter of that morning had been handed everything and had not yet found out what it would cost him. The series’ own next years show what a kiss on the steps would have met: within a few years, a man drunk at his parents’ door and cruel at dinner, and a woman who had not yet learned to walk out of a room. The branch Dexter imagines was not open to the two people who stood there. It was built, slowly, by the years he now remembers as a delay.

“Past Lives and the Intimacy of the Life You Did Not Choose” argued that an unlived life can stay part of a person’s emotional vocabulary without turning into a verdict, and that the luck, when it comes, is not to confuse grief with error. One Day asks that of its hero in the hardest form. His life with Emma was lived, and it was cut short. What he goes back to in Edinburgh is the unlived one, perhaps because a single missed morning is something a grieving mind can hold, and fourteen years is not. The image is his. It does not have to be ours.

Nor does the series leave him there. Jasmine is climbing ahead of him, up the same hill, and the future is quite literally in front of him on the path. And before Edinburgh, alone, he had imagined Emma telling him he will not always feel like this. That sentence, given to her by his own imagination, is not about what might have been. It is permission to go on.

Seen from Japan, the story’s years had already been given a name. The 2011 film opened there in June 2012 under a title that translates as One Day: A 23-Year Love Story. It counts the years and calls every one of them a love story. This essay has argued that they were something else as well. But the Japanese title is right about one thing: it makes the length of the time the subject.

A reader in Japan may also hear an older story inside this one. Two people who meet on one day each July: that is Tanabata, the seventh night of the seventh month. In the story as it is usually told, the weaver, daughter of the king of heaven, and the cowherd married, and then stopped working: she no longer wove, and he let his cattle stray. The king parted them on either side of the Milky Way and allowed them one meeting a year, in some tellings only if the weaving was done. If it rains that night, the river rises, and they must wait another year.

One Day turns the old arrangement round. Nobody parts Emma and Dexter but themselves, and the date is not a meeting anyone has granted; some years it finds them together and some years apart. And in this story the work gets done in the distance. The years in which they are not a couple are the years in which Emma becomes a writer. The old story sets love against work and divides them by decree. The series lets the work happen in the time apart, and then leaves the viewer to decide whether that time was wasted.

One more thing may be close to home. Emma’s habit of talking herself down can look, from outside, like modesty, and Japanese has a whole grammar of courteous self-lowering: the present offered as a mere trifle, the compliment turned aside. The two are not the same. Courteous modesty is a form, and both people know it is a form. Talking yourself down is what happens when the form starts to be believed. Emma’s story is partly about how long it can take to tell the difference, and how much work can get done in the meantime anyway.

None of this makes the series a portrait of Japan, or of British class, or of anyone’s family. It is one woman’s story, visited on one day a year.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong, and the first comes from the series itself.

First, the series frames itself as a story of lost time, and this essay has read against the frame. The first episode’s synopsis calls the morning in Edinburgh “a morning of missed opportunity”, and the last image goes back to that morning to imagine the kiss. Between the two, the series may simply mean what it seems to mean: that two people who loved each other wasted years, and that the waste is the tragedy. This essay has read the years as Emma’s. It may be finding its own interest in a story that tells another.

Second, and the objection that matters most for a series about a woman: the heroine is taken away, and the last episode belongs to the man. Emma’s becoming, which this essay has treated as the story, is cut off on an ordinary wet afternoon, and what follows is Dexter’s grief, Dexter’s recovery and Dexter’s memory. It could fairly be said that this is an old shape, in which a woman’s life, however fully drawn, is spent on a man’s education in loss. The writer who led the adaptation has said why the ending stayed, and where she put her care instead. That is an honest account of a choice. It does not answer the objection, and this essay will not pretend that it does.

Third, the reading may flatter hardship. To say that the years were hers, and that the diaries became a novel, is to risk a story in which talent redeems everything, and a working-class woman’s difficult years are justified by the book at the end. No woman who talks herself down is promised that book, and years of work you did not want are not made good by whatever comes after. This essay has said that a life can be accumulating while it looks as if it is standing still. It has not said, and should not be read as saying, that standing still is secretly fine.

Fourth, the essay has been harder on Dexter than the series is. The series gives him a mother who tells him the truth, and a father who will not let him come home drunk but comes to fetch him when he falls apart; it gives him sobriety, a daughter, a café, and a last episode of grief that is a becoming of its own. A reading that makes Emma the subject risks turning Dexter into an obstacle she outgrows. He is not one. He is the other person who had to change before the choice in Paris could mean anything.

Fifth, the casting. This essay has made something of who was cast as Emma, and has leaned on the actor’s own words. An essay can easily turn a real woman’s account of herself into a symbol, which is its own way of not listening to her. What she said is hers. What this essay made of it is a reading, and nothing more.

Three things, none of them a rule.

A year that looks like drift from one day of it may be where a life is being made. The day the story visits is one day. The rest of the year is somewhere, and some of it may be in a notebook.

Ending a friendship that has started to make you smaller is not a failure of love. It can be the first time you take your own side, and it can be what makes an honest return possible later, if a return comes.

And the question of what might have happened if you had been braver on one particular morning is asked by grief and by regret, with knowledge you did not have then. It is not a verdict on the years that followed. The person you were that morning could only do what she could see to do.

If you are someone who has been told, or has told herself, that she wasted years, in the wrong job, in the wrong city, waiting for somebody to notice: you may have been keeping more than you knew. The years that looked like nothing from outside may be the ones you are made of now. They were yours. They still are.

This is a reading of a television series. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and it is not advice about anyone’s friendship, grief or drinking. Its only figures describe the series itself.

Which of your years would look, from one day of it, like drift? What were you keeping in it that nobody saw?

Who talks you down, and do you sometimes do it for them, before they can?

Is there a friendship you left because it had started to make you smaller? What did leaving cost you, and what did it give back?

When you ask what might have happened if you had been braver once, are you asking with what you knew then, or with what you know now?

If someone who loved you could tell you one true thing about the years you think you wasted, what would you want it to be?