Elizabeth, welcome to Waterstones.
Thank you for having me I'm so thrilled to be in the staff room bit.
This is where it all happens. We met a couple of
years ago when you were publishing your novel, The Party. And I think like a lot
of people, and as Dolly Alderton said on your podcast, I met you and I just
thought look at this tall, beautiful, successful, smart, erudite
woman, look at how she's just winning at life. And now I've read How To Fail I
know that if I look at the timeline you had been through quite a lot of stuff
actually by the time I met you and that of course this image that we present to the
world hides the real story of what might be going on. You've been through all
sorts of difficult things and you've talked about them in your book and in
your podcast. Were you surprised, first of all, about the success of that podcast,
how the idea of failure has chimed with so many people?
Hugely and first of all thank you so much for saying that's such a lovely thing to hear.
It's quite rare that you hear someone talk about their impressions of you two years on. And
you're absolutely right that I had gone through some stuff at that stage and I
remember that evening very vividly because The Party is my fourth novel and
my previous novels, I'd obviously been extremely fond of and put a lot of work
into but they'd never done exactly what I had dreamt that they might do. And The
Party was really the breakthrough for me because it became a best-seller and that
was a really wonderful thing and felt successful. But as I explore on the
podcast, success might not feel as one expects it to all the time. And that
internally one often feels one is doing a whole heap of stuff wrong and failing
on a very mundane level every single day. I mean the other day I failed to hold a
yoga pose that I normally hold and I know that that's the most trivial
example but it was so annoying to me and it was annoying to me on two levels. It
was annoying that I couldn't hold the pose and it was annoying that I wasn't
living by my own philosophy of failure which is actually learning how
to fail as learning how to succeed better. And that's a long-winded way of coming
around to saying that the success of the podcast was a huge surprise to me
because I had really done it from an extremely personal place.
And then to find that personal thing connect on such a universal level was a
really beautiful discovery and entirely unanticipated.
You mentioned, you're quite open at the beginning of the book actually where you say that there could
be a criticism of sitting down to talk with very successful people about their
failures because of course we know that they always end up eventually successful.
But there is something actually quite honest about the fact that all people
fail and succeed in their own way, wouldn't you agree?
I totally agree with you and the reason I chose 'successful people' for the first eight
was because I know I was a totally unknown quantity. So if anyone
was going to listen in, it would probably be because of the lure and the pull of
the name that I'd got. And I think that there's something actually very
democratizing about having a successful person admit to failures because you can
aspire to that person from a distance but then actually to hear them talk
about how their twenties were a nightmare or how they really had to deal
with being rejected from the university of their dreams or job loss or divorce
or infertility or failing at driving tests; actually that's a very reassuring
thing. But as the podcast has progressed I have expanded my remit a bit and so
now I do have people who aren't necessarily household names. They might
still be very successful in their own fields but they have really gone through
the mill. And the one that really sticks with me is Johnny Benjamin, who's now a
mental health campaigner but who was standing on the edge of Waterloo Bridge
a few years ago about to take his own life.
And hearing from someone like that I think is incredibly powerful.
It's interesting you mention him because listen to that episode and thinking
about what might unify all of these podcasts in a way was that for a lot of
people it is getting down to the very, very bottom, it is reaching that
point that is the spur for them to then move up and to achieve real success in
their lives. Is it really actually only through failure that one can succeed?
I think that you can succeed without having failed but that you won't
appreciate it as much as you will do if you failed first. And that for me is
part of success. Success isn't just earning enough money to travel in a
stretch limousine, it's also having the human experience that
got you there. It's also being able to connect with other people through
vulnerability and it's also acknowledging that life is texture and
there are going to be rough patches along with the smooth. But that all of
that added up is quite a beautiful, intangible experience and that's what
makes us human. So success for me is all of those things wrapped up. And so I do
think that if you've failed, not only do you appreciate success more, but you sort of
know how to handle it a little bit better. Because there's that sort of
famous saying and it comes from kind of Daoism and Buddhism – just mixing up my isms there!
It's definitely an ism!
It's not Thacherism but it's Buddhism or Daoism.
About things being just what they are. It is what it is.
So success and failure are facts until you
attach emotions to them and it can be an incredibly liberating thing to treat
them both equally, to treat them both simply as experiences that you're
observing how they make you feel. And you don't necessarily have to automatically
assume that failure is an unrelenting negative and you certainly don't have to
define yourself because of it.
Reading the book as a man is quite an
interesting experience and that's because obviously you talk about some
very important experiences for you as a woman throughout your life actually,
through your childhood and young adulthood and then obviously to where you are
now. And there's a chapter called How to Fail at Anger, where I found myself getting
quite angry on your behalf. - Thank you, Will!
Because you're talking about your
your experiences with trying to become a mother and the time in your life where
you were I suppose reaching that point at which the biological clock is really
ticking and that some time was wasted basically by a relationship. I think
that's one of the really important messages of this book is for men to
realize the many ways in which they are making women's lives very, very difficult.
Because you talk about body image and body shaming and things like
that. Were those kind of things quite hard for you to write about honestly or
did you just have to confront it and say, right deal with it.
I'm actually so glad you picked that chapter, Anger, because it was the one that came most easily to me.
And it was also a chapter that I hadn't intended to write. It hadn't been in my synopsis
and I just found myself in the midst of writing this book and then I realized
that there was this particular thing that I wanted to say and that chapter
poured out of me because I realized that I have been so angry for so many years
but that as a woman there had been a social conditioning that had meant that
I didn't feel able to express that anger in its rawest form. I felt that I had to
appear to be nice and pleasant and I could transmute it into sadness, but I
never really faced it. And it was when that relationship ended with a man who
was nine years younger than me who decided to break up with me on the eve
really of my 39th birthday that I felt devastation and then I felt pure fury.
And it wasn't directed at this individual, it was directed to a sort of
broader social issue ,which is I think we don't teach boys or girls
enough about fertility. And I was completely clueless, I mean most of my
sexual education was revolved around the very serious notion of not getting
pregnant. I mean that was the main thing and I was never taught that I was born
with a finite egg reserve and I was never taught what IVF involved and
that was really it was a very tough realization for me when I came to it.
And I'm so glad that that's been your response as a man having read the book,
thank you for that. Obviously I can only write from my particular
perspective which I realise is a very privileged perspective, number one. I'm a
white middle-class women and I'm not a man and and I can't talk with any sort
of experience, and it would be patronising to try, about the conditions
that other people will find themselves in. Whether that be a man, someone who
identifies as trans, a person of colour. And I'm very aware that my experience is
extremely specific. Having said that there are lots of women I know who
hugely relate to the issues that I'm discussing. And in answer to your question,
did I find it hard, I actually found it necessary. And therefore
I mean obviously there were patches that I was writing about that
were uncomfortable for me personally and upsetting but it's actually very cathartic
as well. Because it was the first time that I was able to explore all of those
issues in my own voice in my own space with a really really big word count!
Because in my day job as a journalist I always have to write to the behest of an
editor and I only have a certain number of words. So that was actually
incredibly liberating doing those chapters.
I could talk to you all day. But I can't. But I so enjoyed reading this book. Not only for what I learned about
you personally, but some of the guests on your podcast, but of course, inevitably,
through reading it you learn something about yourself because you start
thinking about your own failures. So, as you say, it really is a book for anybody
who's failed and therefore a book for everybody.
Thank you so much, Will. Thank you for being a male reader.
Well that's my pleasure. There's a lot for men to
learn from that book so I hope they read it. But for now, Elizabeth, thank you so much.
Thank you.