How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong

Copyright

4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © Elizabeth Day 2019

Cover design by Anna Morrison

Elizabeth Day asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008327323

Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008327347

Version: 2019-03-08

Dedication

For my godchildren: Imogen, Tabitha, Thomas, Walt, Billy, Uma, Eliza, Elsa and Joe.

Epigraph

‘Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour’

Truman Capote

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

How to Fail at Fitting In

How to Fail at Tests

How to Fail at Your Twenties

How to Fail at Dating

How to Fail at Sport

How to Fail at Relationships

How to Fail at Being Gwyneth Paltrow

How to Fail at Work

How to Fail at Friendship

How to Fail at Babies

How to Fail at Families

How to Fail at Anger

How to Fail at Success

Afterword

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Elizabeth Day

About the Publisher

Introduction

One of my earliest memories is of failure.

I am three years old, and my sister is ill. She has chicken pox and is lying in her bedroom upstairs, hot and crying, the duvet twisted around her small limbs, while my mother tries to soothe her by placing a hand on her forehead. My mother has cool palms that feel good against your skin when you’re sick.

I am not used to seeing my older sister like this. There are four years between us and she has always struck me as the epitome of wisdom. She is someone I adore and admire in equal measure, the person who looks after me and allows me to sit on her back while she crawls around on all fours pretending to be a horse. The person who, before I was born, told our parents firmly that she would like a sister, please, and could they get on with the business of producing one? Whenever my sister draws a picture or makes a castle out of Lego, it is always so much better than my own attempts, and I will lose my temper at this perceived injustice because I so desperately want us to be the same, her and me. My mother will have to remind me that I’m younger, and all I have to do is wait a few years to catch up. But I’m impatient and don’t want to wait. I want, as much as I’ve ever wanted anything, to be just like my sister.

Now, seeing her wet cheeks and pale face, I am upset and fretful. I don’t like her being in any sort of discomfort. My mother is asking my sister what she would like to make her feel better, and my sister wails ‘a hot-water bottle’ and I see a way that I can help. I know where my mother keeps the hot-water bottles, and I toddle off to the cupboard and pick out my favourite one, which has a furry cover made to look like a bear, with a black button nose. I know that a hot-water bottle must be filled, as the name implies, with hot water. I take the bear to the bathroom, a place I associate with the much-hated evenings my mother washes my hair and I fix my eyes on a crack in the ceiling until the unpleasant task is completed. The single thing I hate more than having my hair washed is having my toenails cut.

The only tap I can reach is the one in the bathtub rather than the basin. Leaning over the enamel lip, I stretch forwards to place the hot-water bottle under the nozzle and turn on the tap with the red circle, not the blue, because I’ve learned that blue means cold. But I do not know I need to wait for the hot water to heat up. I imagine it just comes out, automatically, at the requisite temperature.

When I try to put the cap back on, my stubby fingers cannot quite fasten it tightly enough. No matter, I think – the most important thing is to get this hot-water bottle to the invalid as quickly as I possibly can so that she can start feeling better, stop crying, and become my composed, calm and clever older sister again.

Back in the bedroom, I hand the hot-water bottle over to my sister whose tears stop at the sight of it. My mother looks surprised and I feel proud that I have done something she didn’t expect. But almost as soon as the hot-water bottle is in my sister’s grip, the cap loosens and cold water pours out all over her pyjamas. She wails and the sound is worse than the crying that came before it.

‘It’s c-c-c-cold!’ she stutters, glaring at me with incomprehension, and my mother starts stripping the sheets and telling her everything’s going to be fine, and they both forget that I’m standing there and I feel a swelling of acute shame in my chest and a terrible sense of having let down the person I love most in the world when I was only trying to help, and I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong but I know this probably isn’t, on reflection, how hot-water bottles are made.

My sister recovered from chicken pox, no thanks to me, and I learned in the fullness of time about boiling kettles and waiting a few seconds to pour the hot water carefully in through the rubberised neck, tightly winding the cap back on after you’d pressed out the excess air. I also learned that even if your intentions are good, the execution of a task can sometimes be lacking if you don’t have the necessary experience. This is one of the most vivid recollections of my childhood: clearly my failure to help when I most wanted to made a big impact on me.

It wasn’t actually a big failure, or an exceptional one, but then failures don’t have to be notable to be meaningful. As I got older, I would experience greater failures, which were harder to come back from. I failed exams and a driving test.

I failed to make the boy I liked fancy me back.

I failed to fit in at school.

I failed to get to know myself properly in my twenties, existing in a succession of long-term relationships where I outsourced my sense of self to another person.

I failed to understand, at the time, that people-pleasing was never going to be a fulfilling way to live. That in pleasing others, you end up failing to please yourself. That in doing so, you are trying to shore up your dwindling internal confidence by collecting the positive opinions of others, without realising that this never works; that it is the equivalent of ignoring a fire-breathing dragon by lighting a candle from its flame.

I failed at a marriage and was divorced by thirty-six.

I failed to have the children I always thought I wanted.

I failed, over and over again, at playing tennis with any degree of confidence.

I failed to acknowledge big, difficult feelings such as anger and grief, preferring instead to mask them with easier, more pliable emotions like sadness.

I failed by caring too much about the unimportant stuff and things I could never hope to control.

I failed to speak up and find my voice when I was being taken advantage of at work and in my intimate relationships.

I failed to love my own body. I fail still. That is a constant work in progress, but I love my body more than I used to and I am grateful, now, for the honour of inhabiting this miraculous, functioning thing.

Self-acceptance is, I believe, a quietly revolutionary act but for years I failed even at that.

Along the way, I loved and I lost. I had my heart shattered. I changed jobs. I moved houses and countries. I made new friends and shed old ones. I endured breakdowns and break-ups.

I grew older. I came to understand myself better. I finally understood the importance of spending money on wheeled suitcases and winter coats. As I write this, I’m approaching my fortieth birthday, which is older than my mother would have been in that early memory of hot-water bottles and sisterly devotion. And if I have learned one thing from this shockingly beautiful venture called life, it is this: failure has taught me lessons I would never otherwise have understood. I have evolved more as a result of things going wrong than when everything seemed to be going right. Out of crisis has come clarity, and sometimes even catharsis.

In October 2017, a serious relationship ended. The break-up was unexpected and brutally sudden. I was about to turn thirty-nine. Two years earlier, I had got divorced. It was not an age at which I had anticipated being single, childless and facing an uncertain personal future. I needed, in the language of modern self-help culture, to heal.

So I went to Los Angeles, a city I return to again and again to recharge and write. It is a place where I breathe more easily in the certain knowledge that the sun will probably shine again tomorrow and the eight-hour time difference means blessedly few emails after 2 p.m. I was ghostwriting a memoir for a political activist at the time, and although I felt vulnerable and flayed of a layer of skin, I would spend my days assuming the voice of a strong woman who knew exactly what she thought. It was an interesting dichotomy, returning to my own uncertain self after a day at the laptop, giving expression to this woman’s forceful and eloquent beliefs. But it helped. Gradually, I began to feel stronger as myself too.

It was while I was in LA that I first had the idea for the How To Fail With Elizabeth Day podcast. I’d been downloading a lot of podcasts, because listening to music post break-up made me feel sad, but listening to nothing made me feel alone. One of the podcasts I subscribed to was the renowned relationship therapist Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin? in which anonymous couples agreed to be recorded as they discussed their issues. Perel would prompt and cajole and sensitively offer her insights, and I was gripped by the way in which her clients would reveal their most vulnerable and intimate selves. At the same time, I was having conversations with my friends about heartbreak and loss and tapping into their stores of accumulated wisdom.

I began to think about what it would be like to do a series of interviews with people about what they had learned from things going wrong. If I examined my life, I knew that the lessons bequeathed by episodes of failure were ineffably more profound than anything I had gleaned from its slippery shadow-twin, success. What if other people felt the same way but were too afraid to talk openly about it for fear of humiliation? But what if this was a conversation we needed to have, in order to feel better about ourselves and less isolated when life didn’t go according to plan?

We live in an age of curated perfection. On Instagram, our daily posts are filtered and framed to shape the impression we want to give. We are assailed by a constant stream of celebrities sharing their bikini-body selfies, of self-styled clean-eating gurus telling us which quinoa grain to eat, of politicians posting pictures of all the great things they’re doing in their constituencies, and it can feel overwhelming. In this bubble of smiling, happy people, littered with laughing face emojis and showering heart gifs, there is scant space for meaningful reflection.

That is changing: nowadays on social media, it is easier to find those admirable people who are endeavouring to be open about their struggles with everything from body image to mental health. But sometimes that can feel just as manipulated as the rest of it, as if honesty has become simply another hashtag.

And then there are the opinions. Endless, noisy opinions, generated at the click of a Tweet button. As a former journalist for the Guardian Media Group, which was one of the first newspaper organisations to allow online comments that were not kept behind a paywall, I can personally testify to the amount of aggressively opinionated internet bile that exists out there. During my eight years as a feature writer at the Observer, I was accused of everything from having sand in my vagina to not understanding the difference between misogyny and misandry, and being employed just because I was a woman or had some shadowy nepotistic connection to the powers that be (I didn’t). If I ever got something even slightly wrong – because I am human and occasionally, writing to deadline, an error might slip in that was not spotted by sub-editors – there would be a baying rush towards instant condemnation. Of course I should have got my facts right, every journalist should – but the outcry felt disproportionate to the offence.

In this climate, it becomes increasingly difficult to try new things or take risks for fear of immediate public opprobrium. A good friend of mine, Jim, was a civil rights lawyer in America in the 1960s, when he took on cases that he had no hope of winning because it was morally the right thing to do. Lately, he has been dispirited to see that the newly qualified lawyers he mentors are too scared to fight cases that are not guaranteed a successful verdict.

‘And I say to them: take a shot, at least! You’ve got to fail to figure out what to do right,’ Jim said to me one evening over dinner. ‘Who cares what other people think? When you’re on a desert island and you’re on your own, struggling to survive, will you give a fuck what someone else thinks? No! You’ll be too busy trying to make a fire with a magnifying glass and waving down a passing ship so you don’t die.’

But Jim’s students have grown up in an era where failure is viewed as the end point, not a necessary staging post on a journey towards greater success, and in a culture where everyone is entitled and encouraged to form knee-jerk hot takes and offer multi-platform critiques. At just the point when success has become the all-consuming aspiration, shame is now a public condition. No wonder these students felt hamstrung. No wonder we want to shy away from admitting to our mistakes or our wrong decisions.

And yet the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to pay tribute to my failures for making me who I am. Although going through negative experiences is never pleasant, I’m grateful for it because in retrospect, I can see that I have made different, better decisions because of them. I can see that I have become stronger.

That was the genesis of How To Fail With Elizabeth Day, a podcast where I asked ‘successful’ people about what they’d learned from failure. The premise was simple: I would ask each interviewee to provide me with three instances where they believed they had failed. They could choose anything from bad dates and failed driving tests to job losses and divorce. The beauty of this was that the interviewees were in control of what they chose to discuss, and as a result would hopefully be less reticent to open up. I was also aware that the choices each guest made would, in themselves, be revealing.

After seventeen years spent interviewing celebrities for newspapers and magazines, I felt a thrilling liberation at the prospect of not having to write the encounter up at the behest of a particular editor who wanted a particular angle. I would record as live, for about forty-five minutes to an hour, and I would let the interview stand on its own: as an honest conversation about subjects that don’t often get a lot of airplay.

When the first episode of the podcast went live, it attracted thousands of listeners overnight. The second saw it catapult to number three in the iTunes chart – above My Dad Wrote a Porno, Serial and Desert Island Discs. By the end of eight episodes, I had somehow accumulated 200,000 downloads and a book deal. I was receiving dozens of messages every day from extraordinary people going through difficult things, saying how much the podcast had helped them.

The woman who had been told at fifteen she would never be able to have children.

The advertising executive signed off work with chronic fatigue.

The person I had once interviewed for a newspaper who got in touch to tell me that his mother was in intensive care after a stem cell transplant and nine days of chemotherapy and that she could barely breathe or talk, but she listened to my podcast because it calmed her down. ‘It makes things so much better,’ he wrote and I read his message while making toast and burst into tears. The toast burned.

The university professor who said it brought home to him the realities of female infertility and that he was now able to understand his wife and daughters more fully.

The twenty-something student who messaged to ask if she could help in any way that I needed because she believed in the idea so much.

The ones who told me they felt less alone, less ashamed, less sad, less exposed.

The ones who told me they felt more able to cope, more positive, more understood.

The ones who told me about suicidal thoughts in the past; who confided in me about episodes of depression; who spoke to me about their lives with an honesty I was honoured to be thought worthy of.

All these people listened. All these people connected with the idea, so elegantly expressed by Arthur Russell in the chorus of ‘Love Comes Back’ that ‘being sad is not a crime’ and that failure contains more meaningful lessons than straightforward success.

It was overwhelming and emotional. I was moved and also quietly surprised at what a chord it seemed to be striking. I had long believed that being honest about one’s vulnerability was the root of real strength, but that message was resonating in a way I had never imagined it would.

The podcast is, without doubt, the single most successful thing I have ever done. I’m aware of the irony. Other people were too. One of my friends started prefacing each text to me with ‘Noted failure, Elizabeth Day’. There were some commentators who argued that having a succession of famous people on the podcast to bemoan lost cricket matches (Sebastian Faulks) or embarrassing one-night stands (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) was an egregious form of humble-bragging.

Their argument seemed to be that if a person ended up successful, then they couldn’t possibly have experienced real, all-consuming failure. Why didn’t I have guests on the podcast who were in the grip of current failure? Or why couldn’t I just leave everyone alone to fail in their own way, without being made to feel bad about the fact that they weren’t failing as well as they could be? Wasn’t failure just something to get on and deal with rather than talk about?

To which my response is, it’s not that I’m actively advocating failure. It’s that we will all experience it at some juncture in our lives and that instead of fearing failure as a calamity from which it is impossible to recover, maybe we can build up the muscle of our emotional resilience by learning from others. That way, the next time something goes wrong, we are better equipped to deal with it. When you hear a successful person – someone who, from afar, might seem to have everything – be open about their failures, it is inclusive, not exclusive. Especially when you hear these people talk about depression or about their careers taking wrong turns or about failed relationships, because so many of us will go through the same things and worry that they will define us negatively.

Nor am I saying that all failures can be easily assimilated. There are some things that one can never get over, let alone want to talk about. There are also many areas in which I have absolutely no first-hand knowledge. I’m acutely aware, as I write this book, that I am in no way an expert and cannot offer the reader anything other than my own lived experience. I am a privileged, white, middle-class woman in a world pockmarked by racism, inequality and poverty. I do not know what it is like to experience daily micro-aggressions or to be spat at in the street or passed over for a job promotion because of the colour of my skin. I have no idea what it is like to exist on the minimum wage, to be a refugee, to be disabled, to have serious health issues or to live in a dictatorship where freedom of speech is not allowed. I am not a parent or a man or a homeowner and cannot talk with confidence about any of these topics. For me to attempt to do so would be patronising and offensive, so for that reason, the following chapters are founded on personal understanding, with deep respect for my intersectional sisters and brothers. What follows is simply one version of failure. Maybe you can relate to some of it. Maybe you have your own. Maybe one day I’ll get to hear it.

I’ve learned a lot from doing the podcast, and from writing this book. One of the things that I found particularly interesting when I started approaching potential guests was how differently men and women viewed failure. All of the women immediately connected with the idea and all of them – bar one – claimed they had so many failures to choose from, they weren’t sure how to whittle it down to the requisite three.

‘Yes, I am very good at failing because I think I take risks and I push myself to try new things,’ said the political campaigner Gina Miller. ‘And when you do that, you open yourself up to failure, but it’s a way of really living life … In life we’re all going to fail, and my view is you’ve just got to get used to it. It’s going to happen, so you might as well have a strategy for how you deal with failure, and then once you’ve got that in your back pocket, you can go out in life and really take risks.’

Most of the men (but by no means all) would respond saying they weren’t sure they had failed and maybe they weren’t quite the right guest for this particular podcast.

There’s science behind this: the amygdalae, the brain’s primitive fear centres which help to process emotional memory and respond to stressful situations, have been shown to be activated more easily in reaction to negative emotional stimuli in women than in men. As a result, this suggests that women are more likely than men to form strong emotional memories of negative events or to ruminate more over things that have gone wrong in the past. The anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that helps us recognise errors and weigh options, is also larger in women.

The knock-on effect of this, according to Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in their book The Confidence Code, is that women routinely fall victim to their own self-doubt: ‘Compared with men, women don’t consider themselves as ready for promotions; they predict they’ll do worse on tests, and they generally underestimate their abilities.’

If women felt more able to own their failures, I suspect this would change. I certainly had my own mind blown when the author Sebastian Faulks told me that failure was all a matter of perception. Before our podcast interview, he sent me a playful email outlining his failures as: