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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in One Day, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Relationships and Time
Social Class
Coming of Age and the Search for Meaning
Addiction and Recovery
Summary
Analysis
Thursday July 15, 2004. Dexter has new gray hairs growing out his ears and eyebrows and now feels middle aged. He knows he’s still handsome, but his neck has started to sag in strange ways. He tells Emma he feels fat, and she recommends eating less cheese from his shop. It’s a slightly anxious time because two of them have sold their flat and placed several of their possessions in storage. They had hoped to find a house before they had to move out but are cutting it close. They have plans to see a house that afternoon.
Dexter’s gray hairs mark another sign that his youth is ending. His weight gain also shows how his past actions are starting to catch up with him and that even though he eats and drinks less now than he did in his youth, it has a greater effect on his body. Once again, although Dexter and Emma have a happy relationship, challenging tasks like finding a place to live can put stress on even a healthy, well-adjusted relationship.
Themes
Emma tells Dexter with disappointment that she just had her period. He tries to cheer her up and says they’ll try again. Together, they read the news, and Emma gets worked up about how no one seems to be protesting the Iraq War. She blames students for getting more passive than they were during Vietnam. Dexter is a little annoyed and says Emma herself should just go out and protest. Dexter says maybe people don’t care and think it’s good Saddam Hussein is gone.
Emma’s disappointment about not being pregnant show how some of her values have changed. Meanwhile, her opposition to the Iraq War shows how her other values have remained the same over the years. Dexter’s indifferent and less fully formed political views present a greater challenge now that he and Emma are married.
Themes
Emma and Dexter continue to argue about Iraq. He thinks what she’s really angry about is how she herself has become complacent over the years. Emma gets angry at him for changing the subject. She thinks the Iraq War isn’t about human rights but about oil. Dexter thinks oil is a decent reason to enter a war because everyone uses it. He says he thinks Emma is really just disappointed about getting her period.
Dexter used to have no opinions on political topics, and so the fact that he gets so passionate about the Iraq War suggests that even if he disagrees with Emma, she has influenced him to be more politically engaged. While his suggestion that Emma’s interest in world events connects to her disappointment at getting her period (signaling that she is not pregnant) is insensitive and draws on a tired, misogynistic trope that women act irrationally when they’re on their on their period, the narrative function of his comment is to contextualize this period of Emma and Dexter’s relationship within broader history.
Themes
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Dexter’s embarrassment at discussing politics seems to relate back to his old insecurities and fears of looking foolish, showing how even after he has left behind his public life as a TV presenter, he can’t stop caring about his reputation.
Themes
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Dexter and Emma talk about trying to get pregnant. They’ve been trying for two years, and Dexter says he feels like Emma looks at him like he’s disappointing her. Emma apologizes for taking it out on him. She suggests going to a fertility clinic. Dexter resists at first, but Emma says they don’t have much time left, given her age. To his surprise, she suggests that they might have to go to a private doctor instead of the National Health Service to avoid a wait list.
As a left-leaning person in the UK, Emma would be a big supporter of the National Health Service, which offers government healthcare for all. But one criticism of the National Health Service is that it can have long wait times for appointments. Emma acknowledges that in order to have a child while she still can, she might have to rely on a private doctor, which is faster but more expensive. It’s also a privilege that many can’t afford.
Themes
Dexter gets ready for work, having patched things up with Emma for the moment. They plan to see the house later, then cook dinner that evening. Emma kisses Dexter goodbye and jokes that Maddy, the manager who works under Dexter at the café, seems to have a crush on Dexter, so he shouldn’t keep her waiting.
Dexter and Emma’s ability to resolve conflicts shows how although their relationship still has its challenges, they have matured enough to be able to work through these challenges, as opposed to earlier, when their arguments would sometimes keep them apart for years.
Themes
Emma thinks about how she sometimes misses the intensity of her early time with Dexter but who the two of them still have fun in their own way. Still, she wonders if her 22-year-old self would see her current self as a sellout. She thinks it’s probably true, though she also acknowledges that her younger self had her own flaws: she used to be so judgmental and self-righteous. Now, Emma supposes it’s ridiculous to expect songs, books, or films to change her life at 38 the way they did at 22. Still, now she loves someone who loves her back. When people ask how she met Dexter, she says they grew up together.
Emma’s thoughts in this passage reflect how a person’s perspective changes with age. In some ways, Emma has succeeded in her goals of having strong relationships and making a living doing something fulfilling and creative, but she has had to make compromises along the way, including giving up some of her ideals and writing in a commercially viable genre. Her claim that she grew up with Dexter hints at how important each of them was in the process of helping the other mature, even if they didn’t know each other as children.
Themes
Emma goes to work on her fifth Julie Criscoll novel, which has been giving her problems. It ends up with a more melancholy tone as teenaged Julie gets pregnant and has to choose between being a mother and going to university. She want to finish the series so that she can get started on writing the type of book her younger self would admire.
By making her character pregnant, Emma accomplishes in fiction what she can’t seem to do in the real world. The uncertainty that Julie Criscoll faces in the next volume also reflects the uncertainty that Emma herself faces at this point in her life.
Themes
Meanwhile, Dexter is in the stock room of his café working on completing a quarterly tax form. He struggles to concentrate thinking of how he argued with Emma that morning, so he calls her cell phone, which she doesn’t pick up at work, and leaves a voice mail. He says he loves her and that he has a good feeling about the house they’re going to see that afternoon.
Dexter’s ability to do things like file quarterly taxes shows how despite his earlier efforts to resist growing up, he has begun to mature. His voicemail message to Emma here also shows a maturity that his drunken ramblings of the past lacked.
Themes
Emma works until 2:00, then she goes for a swim as usual. After swimming, she listens to Dexter’s voicemail on her cell phone and is happy. She calls to say she’s excited to see the house but might be five minutes late. She apologizes for arguing earlier and says things have just been crazy lately. It’s raining heavily as she rides her bike from the indoor pool to meet Dexter. All of a sudden, something hits her from the side. She is disoriented at first, and she doesn’t know why she’s on the ground without her bicycle. People around her ask if she’s OK, and she realizes she’s not. She imagines Dexter waiting for her in the rain on the steps of their new potential house. Then she dies on the pavement.
The novel includes two epigrams from the novelist Thomas Hardy, whose work was famously bleak and often portrayed the world as an amoral place where bad things happen to good people arbitrarily. Dexter has been much more reckless in his way of living, and so the fact that it’s Emma who dies young helps to capture the underlying unfairness of life. The fact that she is killed by a car also connects back to her argument that morning with Dexter over the Iraq War, when he said that there were plenty of good uses for oil. Emma’s death is a problem with no simple solution because it’s a result both of Emma’s ideals (that she chose to use a bike instead of buying a car, which made her vulnerable) as well as of Dexter’s apathy (that he accepts a status quo where cars are the main means for transportation, leading to traffic accidents and wars waged over oil).
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