How to Fail with Elizabeth Day

In this interview, we catch up with Elizabeth Day — author, journalist and creator/host of the popular How To Fail With Elizabeth Day podcast.

Her memoir, How To Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong is a Sunday Times top 5 bestseller. She has also written four novels — her debut Scissors, Paper, Stone won a Betty Trask Award. Her follow-up, Home Fires was an Observer Book of the Year. Her third, Paradise City was named one of the best novels of 2015 in the Observer and the Evening Standard, and was People magazine’s Book of the Week. Her fourth novel, The Party was an Amazon bestseller and a Richard and Judy Summer Book Club pick which has been optioned for television.

Elizabeth is also a columnist for You magazine and a feature writer for numerous publications in the UK and US including The Telegraph, The Times, the Guardian, New York Magazine, the Observer, Vogue, Grazia and Elle. She is a contributing editor for Harper’s Bazaar. Here’s her story:

Newnham: What was your childhood like? How would your friends and family have described you?

Day: Interesting. My family moved to Northern Ireland when I was four so my childhood was quite literally like a scene from Derry Girls, where I’m the weird English dude at school. My friends and family would have described me as funny, stubborn and…