Hello and welcome to a very special and somewhat unconventional episode of How to Fail

because there is no guest and I'm not going to ask about three failures but I am going

to introduce you to my new book Friend of Hollig Confessions of a Friendship Addict and this

is an exclusive extract from the audiobook of my new nonfiction work and I wanted to give you a

little bit of context for it because I consider you all my friends how to fail listeners especially

the listeners who have been with me since the start of this extraordinary and unanticipated journey

in July 2018 that's when the podcast launched. You know me so well because how to fail gave me

the chance for the first time professionally it feels like to show up as my real self to really

embrace that flawed authenticity that I think I'd been searching for for so long and I'd felt

as like disconnect when I wasn't able to live in the fullness of that imperfect truth so it's

just a way of saying that I appreciate you all so much and sometimes I'm very lucky and

people will recognise my voice or they recognise me in the street and they will come up to me and say

I feel like I know you I feel like we could be friends and sometimes the person question is

a bit apologetic about that and they think it sounds a bit creepy what they don't know is I'm an

extremely needy person and I love all compliments and I feel so seen and touched but it goes deeper

than that as well because actually you do know me if you listen to this podcast regularly we absolutely

could be friends I mean unless you hate what you're year in which case we probably couldn't be but

if you keep listening and you like it you do actually know me and you probably know me more and

deeper than many other people I have met along the way because podcasting is such an intimate and

beautiful form and it does feel very confessional because I can be here talking into my microphone

at my desk in my home in South London and I can reach the ears of you wherever you might be whether

you might be getting the bus to work in the morning whether you're on a beach in Australia

...