Elizabeth Day is a podcaster, author, journalist, producer and, more recently, clothes designer. On a video call from her home in London, she’s wearing a stylish off-the-shoulder white poplin top, one of her creations in collaboration with the Aligne brand.
The day before our conversation, she hosted a lunch at her favourite London restaurant, The Dover, for an impressive list of women including the CEO of Jimmy Choo, Hannah Colman. All the guests wore pieces from Day’s clothing line. There are photos from the event all over social media including one of Day posing in a red minidress beside a car branded with the name of the collaboration, Elizabeth Day x Aligne. For a woman who made her name with a podcast that examines failure, she’s giving, as the kids say, the very model of glittering and multi-hyphenated success.
The irony that her How To Fail podcast has been the most successful thing she’s ever done is not lost on Day. We laugh about the fact that one of her closest journalist friends, Ed Cumming, likes to describe her in their text messages as “noted failure Elizabeth Day”.
Now 46, Day has spoken and written extensively about that time of her life which inspired the podcast. When it launched in 2018, she was nearing 40, carrying around the sense of “internal failure” and two years on from her divorce from former BBC news editor Kamal Ahmed.
The breakdown of their marriage was precipitated by a miscarriage, one of several twists in a fraught fertility journey. On a professional level, she was doing well but she was also “newly single, childless and facing an uncertain future”. The break up and this gnawing sense that her life had not turned out the way she hoped provided the impetus for the podcast where a long list of properly famous people – from her close friend Fleabag creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, to Kate Winslet – speak to her about their failures. The podcast led to a bestselling book How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned from Things Going Wrong.
Day has made her name and a thriving career from talking to people about the most challenging times in their lives and, crucially, about what they discovered along the way. It has had nearly 50 million downloads, while her nine novels and non-fiction books such as Magpie and Friendaholic regularly appear on the bestseller lists. Her brand is the kind with the power to sell out large theatres for live podcasts – the final date of her upcoming tour is in Dublin next month.
So has the failure mindset shifted now that she is a roaring success? Or does she still feel a failure in some ways? “I’ve definitely shifted my mindset because of what failure has taught me but I don’t feel that’s antithetical to the podcast – I’ve grown my attitude to failing. But yes, I mean, I fail every day.”
How so? Let Day count the ways: “There’s part of me that still has this deep rooted insecurity that makes me hyper competitive, that wants to be higher in the podcast charts. I know it’s ego-driven and I know it’s a lack of self esteem and self validation but I feel it’s a failure of mine that I need to continually work on and be aware of.
“Also, last week I was lucky enough to be offered this amazing trip to Spain. Yes, ‘noted failure Elizabeth Day’ was gifted a trip to this medical health spa. It was an incredible experience but it starts with you being weighed and monitored and measured, and I struggle with that.”
While she believes numbers on a scale don’t matter and that women “are amazing whatever size or shape, sometimes it’s really difficult if you’ve been socially conditioned by the dysfunction of the nineties to be confronted by the number on the scale, even though I know it doesn’t matter. That, for me, is a failure too.” (Later on I look up Aligne x Elizabeth Day and am pleased to discover it’s an inclusive range, the clothes go up to size 22.)
She’s not finished about her ongoing “multiple” failures. “There are those big aspects [and] then, there are smaller things – where I failed to reply to someone’s voice note or failed to meditate or failed to be present. And my new novel is out on submission in the US at the moment. I’m scared I’m going to fail to get a deal. All of that is going on in my head.”
In Spain, on that luxury White Lotus-adjacent holiday, the health review showed she had 98 per cent mental stress but that she had very low physical stress. “So, I suppose, part of my failure is overthinking and also seeking to control things in order to feel safe. All of those are sort of works in progress.”
As we speak, she’s sitting in her home in Vauxhall, London, that she shares with husband of four years, tech founder Justin Basini, and their cat, Huxley, who, at one point, stalks across the bookshelves behind her. Also in view is a large graffiti-style artwork that reads: “We don’t need their approval.”
She says: “It’s a useful reminder.”
Although English born, Day’s formative childhood years were spent in Derry and Belfast, when her parents moved the family to Northern Ireland after her dad got a job as a surgeon in Altnagelvin Hospital. “It was profoundly shaping of me as a person,” she says. “I speak with a very English accent. I never picked up the Derry accent, which is actually quite weird, and I’m not sure why. I never felt that I fully fitted in. I was, understandably, constantly asked ‘Are you on holiday?’, or ‘Are you armed forces?’
“I was a bit of an outsider, which is a position of immense opportunity, because you can look at what’s going on, think about it, observe and try and understand it. I think that’s what made me a storyteller, actually. Connected to that is the fact that Ireland is such an extraordinary culture of storytellers and storytelling, and I was living in a part of Ireland that was going through this incredibly traumatic and troubled time, [which] made me aware of the stories that weren’t being told as well.”
Day, in contrast, is an open book. Having always been public with her fertility struggles – including miscarriages, egg freezing, operations on her womb and failed IVF attempts – she is in a different place now. While not having children is, she says, “a sadness that will last a lifetime for me”, she decided to stop trying to conceive two years ago and found peace with the idea of not becoming a parent.
The turning point came after a session with a psychic recommended by her “dear friend and mentor” make-up entrepreneur and television presenter Trinny Woodall.
“If she gives me advice, I always listen very carefully. Trinny said to me, ‘I think, maybe, you should let it go.’ She probably saw my face fall and then she said: ‘If only for six months, and then you can pick up again. You probably need a break.’ She was the one who put me in touch with the psychic.”
Day spoke to the psychic shortly after the devastation of a failed egg donation. She and her husband had been recommended to a top fertility clinic in Los Angeles but the year-long process of finding an egg donor was “complicated and unbelievably stressful”.
“It was not easy or aligned, looking back, but we got to the stage where there was this one fantastic embryo – like A plus, plus, plus, nailed their A levels, that kind of thing.” The couple flew over to the United States for the transfer.
Day was doing “all the right things”. Eating well, not drinking alcohol, having acupuncture and being closely monitored. The embryo was transferred. Ten days later she went in for a blood test and afterwards the clinic informed her, by email, that it hadn’t worked and that she should “cease all medication”.
“I can’t believe they communicated that by email but also I can, because it tracks so much with the fertility industrial complex and how little they actually care at a moment in a woman and a man’s life where they need care and sensitivity.”
It was, she recalls, “one of the lowest points of my life”. Back home in London, she was “an emotional wreck”, consumed by questions of what to do next. Should they try fertility treatment again? What about surrogacy or adoption? “But Justin already has three children so adoption was a different prospect for us. I had to be very respectful of what he wanted too and how precious our relationship was. I was so confused.”
It was at that point she consulted the psychic. “She knew straight away I was a writer. She also said I hadn’t even written my best book, which was lovely to hear.”
The psychic intuited that Day had two major romantic relationships, that her current partner’s first name began with J and that he worked in some kind of ethical finance.
Day says that 20 minutes into the consultation, the psychic asks if she does something other than writing, followed by the question: “Are you maybe a life coach talking to people about their failures?”
At this point, my credulity is stretched a bit. “Are you sure she didn’t google you before the session?” I ask Day. “She couldn’t have, she only had my first name,” she replies.
The psychic then told her she had a sense that Day was grappling with whether to let go of a lifelong desire. When Day agreed, the psychic said: “I don’t know if it’s to do with children but if it is, I feel very strongly that in a past life you were the mother of six and it almost melted you.”
Day says: “That’s the word she used. Melted. I looked back at my notes recently. She said: ‘This life has been offered to you to live on your own terms. And that’s why, if you’ve ever tried to have children, you might have encountered fertility issues or miscarriage, because the universe is saying ‘No, no, no. This [life] is for you.’”
In the wake of the failed fertility journey, Day had been struggling, in particular, with the prospect of whether her life would have meaning without children. “The psychic said: ‘I promise you, you are going to have such a big life.’ She painted this beautiful picture. She said I would have meaning and legacy, that there would be children in my life and, honestly, from the moment I put down the phone from that hour-long reading, I felt at peace. I was very grateful.”
She’s not giving the psychic all the credit, though. “Obviously, alongside that, I’ve done lots of therapy so that’s really helped me get to that point too.”
Does she believe in past lives? “Yes, I do. I believe that there is this entire spiritual plane which, as flawed human beings, we cannot hope to understand. That’s why, when we apply our human logic to it, there’s lots of rational arguments against it if you’re working through the prism of human logic, but this is a realm that doesn’t belong to that human logic. I completely believe in all of that and in something bigger and higher.”
[ It took leaving and returning for me to become a Derry girlOpens in new window ]
I ask how she feels that some people reading might be dismissive of her experience with the psychic. “I completely understand,” she says. “There are people very close to me who don’t get it either. Each to their own. I think people have to find their own path through this life. I just encourage people to be open minded to experiences that they might not normally expect or understand. There’s nothing wrong with not understanding something but there is something wrong, I think, with judging something you don’t understand before experiencing it.”
In conversation, Day is funny, empathetic, smart – everything that makes her such a brilliant podcast host. And whatever about Friendaholic – the book that explored her lifelong addiction to making friends – she is something of a workaholic too. “I do love work,” she grins.
Having achieved an awful lot in the last decade, you get the sense that she has a lot more left to do. Lately, she’s been committed to expanding her podcast platform “because I need to take on all of those male podcasters, the white middle class men at the top of the charts constantly, men with unbelievably long episodes. I’m constantly told I have to make my episodes less long, like, hang on a second, how come they regularly do an hour and forty five minutes and nobody blinks an eyelid?”
The blokes dominating the top of the podcast charts are “a particular bugbear”. It’s why she launched Daylight, her production company, which is focused on elevating diverse voices in podcasting. She has enjoyed taking more of a back room role, producing a podcast masterclass, or podclass, called How to Write a Book.
Day also co-presents How To Date with relationship guru Mel Schilling, in which she uses her experiences of dating to help others. (While she has a lot of torrid accounts of dating, she met her “distractingly handsome” second husband on Hinge.) She may, she says, produce a podcast about infertility at some point.
Then, there’s the upcoming tour. Irish-Nigerian writer and academic Emma Dabiri will be her guest in Dublin for the live podcast, the final date on her tour. Following the format of How To Fail, Dabiri will discuss three failures with Day. “The audience can also bring their own failures and Emma and I will be on hand to answer as best we can”.
Her latest book, the one seeking a US publisher – spoiler: days after we meet, she signs a deal for it – is a sequel to her novel The Party and gave her a chance to vent on recent events in Britain. “I’m fascinated by class and what it conceals. It’s really about how we fall in love with the things that end up damaging us, with careless things and people and I include the electorate in that. There’s a political undercurrent.”
Ultimately, what Day says she loves most of all “is being on my own writing books. And it just so happens that I’m lucky that life has turned out to be really interesting and multifaceted. But I never anticipated it.”
Having let the idea of parenting go, she’s also been thinking more about legacy and purpose. “I’m very aware that as much as I’ve made peace with [not having children], I’ve spent the last two years working like a demon to try to compensate in some way. I’m probably compensating because I want to leave meaningful work behind. My purpose is bringing meaning to this experience of being human. Whether that is through writing and connecting with a reader, or creating podcasts and helping someone through a challenge. It’s about doing a little bit to help people feel less alone, less lost, less sad. Because we’re all connected”.
Elizabeth Day will host a live episode of How To Fail at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre with special guest Emma Dabiri on April 6th: bgetheatre.ie
