How To Fail With Elizabeth Day

This week, I bring you a truly incredible woman. Her name is Tara Westover. She wrote a memoir called Educated, which is quite simply one of the best books I have ever read: profound, moving, unerringly original. It tells the story of Westover's upbringing, born the seventh child of Mormon survivalist parents who didn't believe in public schooling or mainstream medicine. It wasn't until she was 17...

Farrah Storr, the award-winning editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, is this week's guest on How To Fail With Elizabeth Day and I'm so thrilled to have her on as have basically been stalking her on Instagram for years. In person, she does not disappoint. We talk about the curse of perfectionism, the notion of  having-it-all (ish) and Farrah's decision to be a child-free woman. We also cover her failur...

This week How To Fail With Elizabeth Day welcomes Alastair Campbell to the confessional booth. The former spin doctor to Tony Blair (and inspiration for the character of foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker in The Thick Of It) talks movingly about his mental health breakdown in 1986, and how that changed the course of his life. He also discusses living with depression, admitting to an alcohol problem, almo...

This week my guest is writer, podcaster and all-round megawatt woman, Otegha Uwagba. Otegha joins me to talk about her failures at getting a job, dealing with sexism at work, living with depression and why she just can't seem to help being petty on Twitter (her words). We also discuss racism and how she handles daily micro-aggressions: 'I’m so conscious to be overly polite if I encounter a sort of...

This week on How To Fail With Elizabeth Day, we're joined by the author James Frey who also just so happens to be my first American guest (hello, USA! I heart you!). Frey has written four critically acclaimed novels, and his fifth - Katerina, a sweeping love story set between 2018 Los Angeles and 1992 Paris - has just been published. But he's probably as well known for his notoriety as his talent....

The wonderful Mishal Husain joins How To Fail With Elizabeth Day this week, which I'm very excited about because she's basically my long-time woman crush. Husain, who has been presenting Radio 4’s flagship Today programme since 2013 and is also one of our most recognisable and respected television broadcasters, joins me to talk about failing at university admissions, failing to get what she though...

We're BACK! How To Fail With Elizabeth Day returns for a second season, and to kick this one off, I'm joined by mega-star, besteslling author Jessie Burton. Burton's 2014 debut novel, The Miniaturist, was published in 38 countries and sold over a million copies and last Christmas, it was adapted into a sumptuous two-part BBC drama starring Romola Garai and Anya Taylor-Joy. Her secnd novel, The Mus...

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 @elizabdayChris Sharp @chrissharpaudioMoori...

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...

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 tou...

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 abusi...

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 ecs...

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 schizophreni...

This week’s guest on How To Fail with Elizabeth Day is memoirist, podcaster and journalist Dolly Alderton. Dolly, the co-host of the utterly fantastic The High Low podcast and author of the brilliant Sunday Times bestseller Everything I Know About Love, talks about being rejected from Bristol University (and still feeling resentful of anyone she meets who went there), being ‘compassionately’ fired...

Sebastian Faulks, bestselling novelist and author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, joins How To Fail to talk about his failure to win the Booker Prize (“the whole thing is absolutely ridiculous”), his sense of social isolation at boarding school and a period of depression at university he feels he has never fully recovered from. Along the way, he talks about what it really means to be a “successful...

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator and star of Fleabag, writer of Killing Eve, superstar feminist and human embodiment of a Star Wars droid, joins How To Fail to talk about how she failed at her 20s (but got lots of brilliant material from the terrible dates she endured), failing at drama school, terrible auditions (including one for Downton Abbey) and how her female best friend is quite possibly the l...