TWISTS OF FATE
Elizabeth Day explains how to turn setbacks into success
Elizabeth Day offers expert advice on how to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again
On the inside cover of her new autobiographical collection of essays, the writer Elizabeth Day quotes Truman Capote: ‘Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.’ It encapsulates the upbeat tone of a book that is both a deeply personal memoir and a manual on how to handle life’s highs and lows. Sharing its title with her chart-topping podcast, How to Fail, it weaves lessons learnt by Day herself with those of her high-calibre interviewees, who range from Mishal Husain to Jessie Burton.
The award-winning author is a compelling raconteur and a master of chiaroscuro, steering her narrative from horror to humour and from grief towards good cheer, almost within a sentence. In conversation, she is the same: when I mention how struck I was when reading her book by the fondness she expresses for her parents, tears make an appearance – not for the last time in the interview. They are closely followed by peals of laughter and an eye-roll when she reminisces about her days as a fledgling diarist for the Evening Standard, ‘bowling up to politicians or Stephen Fry at mad parties’.
On paper, a field guide to failure from someone who graduated from Cambridge with a double-first and was described by the former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, Dominic Lawson, as ‘probably the most brilliant young talent that most of us have seen in 20 years’, seems somewhat disingenuous. Yet although Day currently finds herself in a moment of professional and personal peace, the past 10 years have proved tumultuous for her. ‘During my thirties, I got married and divorced, had two rounds of IVF, a miscarriage, moved to LA, moved back,’ she says. It was while living in Los Angeles – a three-month sojourn during which she cleared her head post-divorce and ghost-wrote the campaigner Gina Miller’s memoir – that she discovered the Belgian therapist Esther Perel’s famous podcast Where Should We Begin?. ‘I really valued the intimacy of those conversations,’ she remembers. It occurred to her how interesting it would be to host a podcast in which guests discuss, in a similarly honest vein, the strength and insight they gained from mistakes or adversity. ‘Because,’ as she puts it at the start of each episode, ‘learning how to fail actually means learning how to succeed, better.’
As a writer, Day’s job is to produce articles and novels with a narrative arc. As such, she would script her reality, complete with plot twists and appropriate pacing, only to find that ‘life has a frustrating habit of not accommodating these visions’. Her thirties taught her to adapt. When the podcast’s inaugural guest, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, appeared on the show, she mused: ‘I’d really like to have the skin from my twenties… but I prefer my heart and my guts now.’ Does Day feel the same? ‘Oh, I couldn’t agree more.’
She quotes a line she likes from Desiderata, the prose-poem by Max Ehrmann: ‘The Universe is unfolding as exactly as it should.’ Later, I go to read it for myself, and the ending sums up both Day and her book almost perfectly: ‘With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,/It is still a beautiful world./Be cheerful./Strive to be happy.’ ‘How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong’ by Elizabeth Day (£12.99, Fourth Estate) is published on 4 April. Elizabeth Day joins Bazaar At Work for an event in London on 21 May; see page 56 for details and tickets.