Nicholls is best known for writing sensitive romantic fiction such as Starter For Ten, but told his Hay Festival audience that he would now ‘find it really hard to write a novel which was entirely about 20- or 30-somethings dating – which is strange because when I began my career, that’s largely what I was writing’.
The author joked that he has not ‘been on a date since 1997’ (Nicholls has been with his partner, Hannah Weaver, for more than 20 years) and said that he finds the world of dating apps difficult to comprehend. ‘There was a random quality to meeting someone back then,’ he said of dating in a pre-smartphone era. ‘You went to a lot of dinner parties in the hope you might be sat next to somebody. It was very random and unlikely that something would happen, and now there’s a frankness and directness. There are tools, for want of a better word.’
As someone so unfamiliar with the ups, downs and social cues of modern dating, Nicholls said that it was not something he was confident writing about, ‘especially when I meet so many brilliant younger writers who are writing about it really well.’ Given Nicholls’ popularity and skill, it seems unlikely that You Are Here will be his last romantic novel – even if he does avoid delving into the mores of Tinder…
