(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Whenever we’re asked to pick the highlights for anything, whether it’s a relationship or an overseas trip or our childhood, we unerringly pick the glowingly positive high points, driven by some unspoken acknowledgement that for something to be a highlight it must have unquestionably upbeat qualities.
But what that impulse to pick the best of the best and ignore the rest misses is that sometimes the moment when things went terribly wrong or we made a wrong move or the universe decided to sh*t on us from a great height actually carries some positive outcome or at least a realisation that changed the way we look at the world.
It’s a point movingly and cleverly made by Our Life in a Day by Jamie Frewery who introduces us to Tom and Esme, two Londoners who have been reached their tenth anniversary as a couple and who mark the occasion in the usual way with a lovely dinner and some warm and lovely celebratory moments.
Well that’s the idea anyway but to Tom’s surprise, Esme ambushes him with a game where he has to choose 24 of the most significant moments in their relationship – one for each hour in the day.
What can go wrong there? Simply pick 24 gushy, wonderful write a postcard extolling how great your love is to anyone with a mailing address endlessly cosy moments and – BANG! – mutual loved-up bliss.
But for a whole host of reasons, that’s not what happens for Tom and Esme.
The window was open slightly. Tom could hear the muffled coos of London pigeons which sporadically settled on Esme’s windowsill, and the nearby hum of traffic from the Vauxhall Bridge Road. The sun was shining, its rays beaming across the rooftops of the white stucco and yellow brick townhouses of Pimlico. The tops of the trees outside swayed gently in the breeze. It was a perfect day.
What actually goes down can’t be revealed because it’s a bridge way too far into spoiler territory, but also because much of the considerable impact of this wondrously good and seriously affecting book comes from the way in which Frewery takes what seems like an innocuous game and turns it into a referendum on the seaworthiness of a relationship that lie many before it, and many that will follow, has had its share of rocky low points.
That’s pretty much a given in many ways – after all, name a relationship that hasn’t come close to plunging off a cliff at one point or another; it often doesn’t happen but those dark relationship are still scars on the body romantic and they cannot be ignored, no matter how hard you try.
What’s hugely interesting and deeply involving about Our Life in a Day is that Frewery doesn’t just confront this truth head on, making it clear that while Tom and Esme had an instant meet-cute chemistry and love each other deeply in a way that works beautifully for them both and which is the envy of their friends and family, they are also dancing across fault lines that neither wants to acknowledge and hiding secrets neither wants to admit to.
The biggest culprit here is Tom, and no, the secret in question is not the one you’ve likely gone straight to; rather his is of another type completely, one that admitted early might have been strength and resilience into the relationship but which, by being hidden, slowly corrodes and hollows things out.
(courtesy Greyhound Literary)
Of course what you’re likely dying to know is if this secret holding on Tom’s part is a death warrant for one of the loveliest relationships you’ll find in a book outside of a rom-com (and to be honest, it’s more compelling that a rom-com relationship because it all feels so gloriously, and alarmingly real).
That cannot because revealed because, once again, SPOILERS, but suffice to say as a panicked Tom recounts the high and low points of his and Esme’s relationship, and in so doing, makes a solid case for not simply listing the obvious high points, it becomes clear that hiding things away, even if for the noblest of purposes does not do a relationship any favours.
Not realising that is a truth is such a pity because Our Life in a Day brings to life a relationship of two very human, flawed but in love people who are so perfect for each other that they are often held up as #couplesgoals by, well, pretty much everyone.
If Tom and Esme had played all their cards right, then maybe the secrets and the things withheld may not have been an issue but they’re human, and so of course they didn’t, and what Our Life in a Day is what happens when a pivot point like an anniversary is reached and a highly unexpected and unorthodox game suddenly brings everything to the fore.
‘I’m okay,’ he said, convincing himself [Tom] as much as her [Esme].
‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure,’ he said, taking a determined step forward, and forcing a better version of himself back into life, piece by piece by piece.
The game forces Tom to think back over ten years, and even earlier since his past, as it is for all of us, is inextricably bound up with the present, and as he does that, we are given wonderfully revealing snapshots into who Tom and Esme are and why the moments chosen, not all of them good – this doesn’t happen because Tom is trying to subvert the high points only impulse; rather the game triggers a reckoning of sorts at a delicate point in the relationship – meant so much to who they are as a couple.
It’s an extraordinary tale of two very ordinary, quite likeable people who enjoy some quite perfect times amidst all the inevitable imperfection, but who have to reckon with the fact that sometimes we lie, sometimes, we obscure the truth, sometimes we lose it badly and can’t recover our emotions or the moment.
This quite wondrously good and moving and funny and sweetly charming book is at times deeply searing and at others lightly energising, and always very likably honest about the messy, imperfect business of being human and it wins your heart because it doesn’t pretend happy ever after, with bumpy blips on the radar, is really an option for any of us.
Our Life in a Day is one of those books that grips you hard with its raw honesty and shaky hopefulness, its story of Tom and Esme one many of us can relate to because while it celebrates love and connection, it also knows that’s not the end of the story and sometimes for the tale to finish happily, a lot more is required of us than simply falling in love.