How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is a podcast that celebrates the things that haven’t gone right. Every week, a new interviewee explores what their failures taught them about how to succeed better.
Episodes
Thursday Aug 30, 2018
Thursday Aug 30, 2018
A thank you from Elizabeth for listening to the first season of How To Fail With Elizabeth Day and a sneak peek of the guests lined up for season two.
See you in October!
How To Fail is hosted by Elizabeth Day and produced by Chris Sharp
How To Fail is sponsored by Moorish
The Party by Elizabeth Day is published by 4th Estate
Social Media:
Elizabeth Day @elizabday
Chris Sharp @chrissharpaudio
Moorish @moorishhumous
Wednesday Aug 29, 2018
Wednesday Aug 29, 2018
For the last episode of the first season of How To Fail With Elizabeth Day, our interviewee is…well…Elizabeth Day. Which means I’m currently writing shownotes about myself in the third person. Which is weird. Let me stop doing that.
Over the course of the last eight weeks, I’ve been lucky enough to interview some truly wonderful, interesting, successful people, all of whom have opened up to me and made themselves vulnerable by discussing the place failure occupies in their lives. It seemed only fair to turn the tables on myself.
In this episode, I’m truly honoured to have my brilliant friend Dolly Alderton interviewing me. Dolly is not only the author of the bestselling memoir, Everything I Know About Love, but she’s also a super-talented journalist and co-host of the iTunes-topping The High Low podcast. The way she interviewed me is really quite spectacular because she made it feel like a conversation, sharing her own excellent insights and humour along the way. As a result, I ended up being far more honest than I’d intended, opening up about everything from infertility and grief to intimacy and regret. I also talk about my conspicuous failure to be good at sport, despite lots of people assuming I must be good at things like tennis and running because I’m tall. I know, it makes no sense to me either.
This is the final episode in this season, but How To Fail With Elizabeth Day will be BACK with a whole new selection of fantastic guests in October. In the meantime, if you’ve enjoyed listening, please do rate and review us on iTunes. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for listening, and see you in October!
How To Fail is hosted by Elizabeth Day and produced by Chris Sharp
How To Fail is sponsored by Moorish
The Party by Elizabeth Day is published by 4th Estate
Social Media:
Elizabeth Day @elizabday
Dolly Alderton @dollyalderton
Chris Sharp @chrissharpaudio
Moorish @moorishhumous
Wednesday Aug 22, 2018
Wednesday Aug 22, 2018
David Nicholls, bestselling novelist, critically acclaimed screenwriter, aspiring piano player and thoroughly nice man, joins How To Fail to talk about his myriad failures. You might not expect the author of One Day, which sold five million copies and was adapted into a film starring Anne Hathaway, to have much of an acquaintance with failure, but Nicholls insists there’s plenty to discuss.
We touch on his failure to be an actor for 10 years (he was always the understudy; never the main part), the anxiety that comes with success, the challenges and beauty of fatherhood and his failure to drive a car competently above 40 miles per hour.
We also talk about his Booker-longlisted novel, Us, and his brilliant TV adaptation of the Edward St Aubyn Patrick Melrose novels starring Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as the time he acted with Dame Judi Dench.
Despite all his achievements, Nicholls admits he still feels ‘very thin-skinned’ which is partly why he left Twitter after accidentally getting into a row with Stephen Fry (trust me, it’s a good story) and why, when a critic once said ‘No-one turns to David Nicholls for great sex scenes’ he felt he had to defend himself. So listen in to find out how to write sex. Or maybe how not to write sex. One or the other.
How To Fail is hosted by Elizabeth Day and produced by Chris Sharp
How To Fail is sponsored by Moorish
Social Media:
Elizabeth Day @elizabday
Moorish @moorishhumous
Chris Sharp @chrissharpaudio
Wednesday Aug 15, 2018
Wednesday Aug 15, 2018
Political activist Gina Miller is best known for one major victory when she successfully took the government to court over the triggering of Article 50 to leave the European Union. But in this week’s How To Fail, she discusses the failures that led her to that point. In a frank and honest conversation with host Elizabeth Day, Gina talks about failing to graduate from law school, surviving an abusive marriage, raising a daughter with special needs and building up her emotional resilience so that when it came to the crunch, she was able to find the strength to take a stand for what she believed in. Now that she has been catapulted into the unforgiving glare of the public limelight, Gina faces a daily barrage of death threats and racist abuse. She talks about how she handles this and how her unlikely heroes, Iggy Pop and Bruce Lee, have got her through even the darkest times.
How To Fail is hosted by Elizabeth Day and produced by Chris Sharp
How To Fail is sponsored by Moorish
Gina Miller’s memoir, Rise, is published by Canongate on 30th August 2018.
Social Media:
Elizabeth Day @elizabday
Gina Miller @thatginamiller
Moorish @moorishhumous
Canongate @canongatebooks
Wednesday Aug 08, 2018
Wednesday Aug 08, 2018
This week on How To Fail, we’re joined by the brilliant writer Olivia Laing. Her three critically-acclaimed works of non-fiction, To The River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City, have explored themes of alcoholism, loneliness and suicide (and yet somehow manage to be deeply uplifting to read). Her recent debut novel, Crudo, has everyone from Jilly Cooper to Viv Albertine in veritable ecstasies.
Olivia talks to us about losing her way in her 20s, how the torture of romantic break-ups has ultimately led to some of her greatest creative work and about what it’s like to be made redundant from a job you love. Along the way, we discuss gender fluidity, whether women are conditioned to self-deprecate, getting married at 40, why being raised by lesbians made Olivia less susceptible to patriarchal assumptions about What Men Want. We also debate whether Brighton has more dogs on strings than the average British city (spoiler alert: Elizabeth thinks that yes, it definitely does).
How To Fail is hosted by Elizabeth Day and produced by Chris Sharp
How To Fail is sponsored by Moorish
Crudo by Olivia Laing is out now, published by Picador
Social Media:
Elizabeth Day @elizabday
Olivia Laing @olivialanguage
Moorish @moorishhumous
Picador @picadorbooks
Wednesday Aug 01, 2018
Wednesday Aug 01, 2018
This week, journalist and author Sathnam Sanghera joins How To Fail and kicks off by saying how flattered he was to be asked to contribute to a podcast on failure because he hates hearing nice things said about himself. So that’s good.
As well as discussing his failure to take a compliment, Sathnam talks movingly about growing up in a household where both his father and his sister had schizophrenia. At first, he tried to run away from accepting it and then when that didn’t work, he wrote a brilliant, award-winning memoir called The Boy With the Topknot which was later adapted for the BBC. (Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling is a fan).
Sathnam talks about his social failure at university (and his inability to get a girlfriend for three years), as well as his failure to learn an instrument, his failure to score a high Uber rating and his failure to read back his own handwriting moments after he’s written something down.
Along the way, we cover his childhood job in a Wolverhampton sewing factory, the modern tendency to confuse anxiety with serious mental health issues, grief and how he coped with the death of his best friend, heartbreak, success, the concept of 'negative mindfulness', racist dogs and Sathnam’s undying love for George Michael and Club Tropicana.
We also spend longer than necessary trying to remember the common colloquial phrase 'prepare for the worst, expect the best' which is embarrassing given that we both make a living from words.
How To Fail is hosted by Elizabeth Day and produced by Chris Sharp
How To Fail is sponsored by Moorish
The Boy with the Topknot is published by Penguin and available to buy here.
Sathnam Sanghera’s website is here.
Social Media:
Elizabeth Day @elizabday
Sathnam Sanghera @sathnam
Moorish @moorishhumous