Hello, I'm JAMA and welcome to you another episode of Good Influence, the last one of season two if you can believe it.

This is the podcast where each week you and I meet a guest will help us pay attention to something we should know about as well as answer some of your questions.

This week we're talking about failure. How are cultural conversations around failure have changed?

The failures we relate to the most and how perspectives on failure from older people can teach us lessons while we're young.

So joining me this week is Elizabeth Day. Elizabeth is an author, journalist and broadcaster. If you're a big podcast fan you probably don't need me to tell you that she hosts the hugely popular podcast How to Fail with Elizabeth Day in which she examines life's supposed failures with her guests and reflects on how these failures affect and change us.

Her latest novel Magpie is out on the second of September and has been described as a tense twisting story of jealousy, motherhood and power.

I think it's really important that we know when we look up to someone and we might aspire to their levels of success that they too have their really difficult moments.

So I guess I'll start by asking you so a lot of people will already be familiar with how to fail your podcast because it's such such a huge platform.

How did you actually sort of get into talking about failure in the first place? How did it come to be a thing that you were focusing on in making the podcast?

It came about through failure in my own life is the really short version of the answer but the slightly longer version is that I found my 30s a really intense decade of transition.

And on the one hand professionally some things seemed from the outside to be going according to plan in that I was a Sunday newspaper feature writer I'd published my first couple of novels.

Inside and personally it didn't feel like that to me I was actually quite unhappy in my job and I was in a marriage that would implode in divorce.

I tried and failed to have children I had unsuccessful rounds of IVF and then my marriage ended.

It took me about a year to get into dating after that and when I did start dating someone I made deliberately different decisions.

And I started dating someone who I thought represented like the person I'd become like I'd got all this self knowledge from all the stuff that I'd been through.

And that relationship I had so much hope for but it ended really briefly out of the blue three weeks before my 39th birthday.

And I was yeah exactly it was the worst breakup I've ever had and I would include my divorce in that weirdly because I think looking back I'd potentially use that new relationship as emotional scaffolding to avoid looking at the wreckage of my marriage.

So when that relationship ended I was almost also processing the divorce and it just feels like such a key time particularly for a woman 39 because you're looking down the barrel of your 40s and for me I'd always wanted to have children and suddenly I was like oh I'm single again and alone and that seems like vanishingly improbable now.

And it was at that moment that I think was like one of the lowest moments of my life that I kind of really re-evaluated what I wanted from life who I was and where I've been going wrong.

And that made me start thinking about failure and I realized that for every time that I had failed I'd also survived and I wanted to look into that more and just come to the head of a very long answer.

That's great. My life as a Sunday newspaper journalist was incredibly privileged in many ways and I got sent interview a lot of celebrities but the focus of those interviews were always their successes.

It was always about the film they wanted to promote or the album they were proud of or the book they'd just written and that's just the way of a lot of newspaper journalism in this country.

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