How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - 🎤 How To Fail LIVE: Caitlin Moran on parenting failures, body image and big vaginas

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

TW: eating disordersAll this week, I'll be dropping the recordings of our How To Fail live shows, held at Shoredtich Town Hall earlier this year.Now, I know we shouldn't have favourites. Having a podcast and labelling one of your episodes as your 'favourite' is akin to choosing your preferred child. But, sod it, this is one of my favourite conversations of all time. Caitlin Moran is as brilliant, witty and generous as you might expect. Here, she talks about the terrible sadness of realising her daughter had an eating disorder and how she didn't deal with it in the right way at first. She also talks about childhood insecurities, learning to love herself, the joy of female solidarity and plenty more. You will laugh. But you might also cry, so do bring some tissues.--This podcast was recorded on 6th October 2022 in Shoreditch Town Hall and is sponsored by Sweaty Betty. You have a chance to get 20% off everything until 14th December with the code HOWTOFAIL20. That’s 20% off everything until 14th December with the code HOWTOFAIL20 on sweatybetty.com Terms and conditions apply, and can be found on sweatybetty.com--How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted and produced by Elizabeth Day. To contact us, email [e-mail]--Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpod Caitlin Moran @caitlinmoran Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned

from failure. I'm so delighted that this evening's recording is sponsored by Sweaty Betty. Yes! I'm sure many of you in the audience will already be familiar with this global active wear and lifestyle brand who are on a mission to empower women through fitness and beyond. I personally wear their clothes all the time and I'm a massive fan of their best-selling power leggings, so good that they sell one pair every 30 seconds. I love the way that they make me feel held and empowered with four-way stretch for extra comfort. They're so versatile you can wear them for almost anything, a spin class, a yoga session, or out to lunch with friends. And there's lots of clever little details like pockets I can slip my phone into. They are bum sculpting, sweat wicking, and quick drying. Truly everything you could ever need in a pair

of leggings. You have a chance to get 20% off everything until the 14th of December with the code HOWTOFAIL20. That's 20% off everything until the 14th of December with the code HOWTOFAIL20 on sweatybetty.com. Terms and conditions apply and can be found on sweatybetty.com. Now, when I was 12, I remember hearing a teenage girl being interviewed on the radio about a book she'd written. She was 16, and her debut novel, The Chronicles of Namo, had just been published. In the interview, the writer was funny and smart and brilliant,

and because I, too, wanted to write books and be a journalist, I took note of her name. It was Catlin Moran. In the three decades that followed, I watched her career with a mixture of awe and jealousy. She became one of the most prolific and influential newspaper columnists of the modern age, a best-selling author who changed the face of feminism, a screenwriter and cultural commentator with a clutch of British press awards to her name. In short, she became an icon. I have learned so much from Moran's work. Her first non-fiction book, How to Be a Woman, published in 2011, was part memoir, part manifesto, and became a global hit, shifting a million copies in 38 countries. It's no exaggeration to say that a generation of women and men have had their outlook

on life forged by her wit, intelligence, and her fearless capacity for exploding taboo subjects. Her follow-up, How to Be a Woman, was published in 2020 and explored how Moran's middle-aged years were not exactly how her younger self imagined they would be. True wisdom, she says, is realising how little you know and how many mistakes you've made and that you're going to carry on doing this stuff until the grave. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the phenomenally talented, the utterly brilliant, the irrepressible Katlin Moran. Wow. Well, it's not going to get any better than that.

Cheers, darling. We've finished. Thank you very much. Good night. You were my childhood hero, but also my childhood contemporary, which shouldn't be allowed, quite frankly. We were both very young, I guess. I was the same, because I was watching Victoria Corrin Mitchell publishing a book at the age of 18 when I was 16, just being like oh god yeah she's my hero but I too am jealous I kind of this is what women do like kind of like you know we think there are so few

opportunities available to us that we have our role models but we also think maybe we'll have to destroy our role models in order to get their job which is not how it works now every time a woman is successful it opens the door for another woman This is one of the key facts that we need to learn. That's so true. And very often jealousy is also a feeling of possibility. It's pointing out the thing that you want. Yeah. And I think also I realized that kind of all the boys that I wanted to fuck when I was younger, it wasn't so much that I wanted to fuck them. It was I wanted to be them. And there were so few, I just thought that thing of like, kind of like you're confusing the fact that you want to have sex with them with the fact that you kind of want to eat them and have them inside you and live their lives. When you've sorted out those

two different conflicting feelings, you sort a lot of stuff out in life. Before we got on stage, I was explaining to you that I was reading this advertising trail for Sweaty Betty. And you revealed that your nickname was Sweaty Betty and so is mine. Right. Because we're both proud sweaty women. I'm enormously sweaty and it's the worst kind of sweat. So this is where you're different. You do sweat from your face, don't you?

Yes, I get a very, very sweaty face. Not right now. I've got a shitload of powder on. Yeah, yeah. But in a yoga class, like every yoga class for me is a hot yoga class. See, I'm envious because the one place you do want to sweat is from your face

because you want to cleanse the pores and have glowing skin. My face has never sweated once. I've basically got Prince Andrew's face. And that's just a fact. But the rest of me just sweats profusely, and it's not a lovely glow. It just smells of onions. It's literally...

And one of the good things about, you know, kind of like doing press and publicity and photo shoots and stuff is that you get to talk to makeup artists, and makeup artists know everything. And I was doing Alan Carr's show, and the makeup artist was talking about how sweaty I am, and she was like, yeah, I know, I can smell. And she went, have you never used sweat pads?

And I was like, what are sweat pads? And she was like, well, you can buy these special ones that are very expensive. And they're like a pad that you put inside your clothes and it absorbs the sweat and protects your clothes. Or you could just use a sanitary towel. So I currently have two sanitary towels in my armpits. Occasionally one has fallen out when I'm shaking hands with people, but I feel we're in the modern world now and that's perfectly acceptable. But do you think, top tip, but also do you think that we should actually reclaim sweat?

We should reclaim the power of sweat as women who for so long have been told that it's unfeminine and that we must pretend to glow rather than sweat. Absolutely. And actually we should be proud sweaters. No, totally. I mean, I wish it smelled less, but like visually, I think it looks really cool.

And also the thing... One of the things that I really love, I realised a while ago that I'd never watched men's films when I was growing up. Like, you know, I just won't watch The Godfather. I don't care. It's just some men just having a fuss about something. I don't care.

The films I love are musicals, and that's because the female character is in the center, and unlike the female characters that you see in men's films, rather than just being sexy and standing around and being a bit sulky and then being murdered, girls in musicals are amazing at something. They have a fantastic fucking ability. They can dance. They can sing. They're usually really funny as well, and you get to see a woman just, you know, I'm sure she was sweating, but they powdered her down, but you see a woman straining every sinew and dancing and singing. And, you know, that was until very recently the only place that you would see a woman

being amazing physically. Now, obviously, we live in a world of women's sports and women winning the Euro World Cup. But back then, it was the only time you could see a woman doing anything other than just sitting around being thin and pretty and then being murdered. As we spoke about in the introduction, you have lived so much of your life through the written page. Yes. And you have also written about your life and your opinions. And I wondered how that has been sort of growing up in the public eye. Do you worry or care what other people think of you? It's a really weird binary because on the one hand, I'm a massive people pleaser. Like I don't want to hurt anyone. I don't want to offend anyone.

I just want to amuse people. I want them to like me. I want to be helpful. I just want to be their best friend. But on the other hand, a lot of the things that I want to write about I'm aware could shock or offend or alarm people or make them think that I'm a horrible person like when I first started writing how to be a woman I was writing about having my period masturbating having an abortion having a miscarriage having an eating disorder things that like would make people feel uncomfortable

or judge me and so so much of the effort was going I need to make this palatable to everyone like whatever I'm going to do effort wise it's going to be doing things that someone could And so, so much of the effort was going, I need to make this palatable to everyone. Like, whatever I'm going to do effort-wise, it's going to be doing things that someone could burst into a room and go, fuck you, I'm going to talk about my vagina. And going, okay, I'm not going to do it that way. I'm going to try and do it in a nicer, kind of warmer, more inclusive way. So, yeah, it's a literal 50-50 mix of really desperately never wanting to offend anybody and wanting to make everyone happy but going ultimately what I do is if there's something that is seen as secret or shameful or taboo or not to be spoken about that's always where I want to go like that's my primary thing

if I spot something that no one else has talked about I feel like a footballer on a field going oh my god I've got the whole pitch and there's an empty goal why has yes and and often you see the shock in that like I remember when I wrote about masturbation and how to be a woman it was like I was summoned onto news night and I was inquisited by Jeremy Paxman who just started the conversation by going but why would you talk about masturbation to which I could only reply because it's a great hobby it doesn't it doesn't fat, it doesn't cost any money, and it really relaxes you. And he just seemed very, very unhappy at that point. He looked like a really unhappy horse that wanted to gallop away. You're a truth teller, essentially. So why did you wait 10 years

to write more than a woman after How to Be a Woman? Why was there a 10 year gap? I mean obviously you had to become more of a woman I guess. Yeah, I literally had to become more of a woman. I put on a stone and a half between those two books. And it was really weird when I realised I put on a stone and a half. Whenever a woman says I've put on a stone and a half

you then expect them to go, so I've gone on this diet and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that and I'm going to overhaul my life, and I've realized I've made a terrible mistake by becoming bigger, and I'm now going to ensmore myself again. And my only reaction when I realized I'd put on a stone and a half was to go, well, I'd better buy some bigger trousers then. Like, that's an option. Like, you don't have to suddenly go, oh my God, I've made a terrible mistake, and I must reverse it. You can just go, well, I'll just go to a size 14 and carry on. It absolutely fine so yes one I had become more than a woman and secondly I

just had to live some more life the first book was about my life from the ages of 13 to 32 and I deliberately chose every chapter as a subject of something that I think would happen to most women so sort of periods growing pubic hair kind of you know bad boyfriends a ludicrously expensive wedding and then that's it I kind of sp you know, bad boyfriends, a ludicrously expensive wedding. And then that's it. I kind of spunked all my life. So then I had to go and live another 10 years and realize the big difference between being a younger woman and a middle-aged woman is that when you're younger, all your problems are you. You're trying to work out who you are.

You're trying to work out what you're going to wear and who you love and what you want to do in your job and, like, what you think about everything. And then when you become a middle-aged woman all your problems are other people's problems because as a middle-aged woman you are taking care of everyone you're taking care of your children you're taking care of your family you're taking care of your parents who are getting older or getting ill or dying your friends are divorcing and you're there as a support system and the job of a middle-aged woman is to love and care endlessly for no pay at all and hold the threads of society together with your bare hands whilst doing everything else at the same time and I really wanted to write a book about that because the middle-aged women that I met would just be like no I'm boring I kind of I don't really do anything

like you know I'm so ugly don't look at me And I just wanted to write a book that just went, no, you're fucking amazing. The job that middle-aged women do, because it's in the domestic sphere, because it happens in the house, it seemed to be dull. And the things that women are doing at this age is the kind of stuff that you would normally have

in a ring quest in a massive action movie. This is genuine life and death stuff you are having to psychologize people you are saving people you are literally making love and care and i just wanted to throw a spotlight on these women and go you are actually fucking superheroes you are actually the hero that gotham doesn't want but needs you are you are like batman the person who is solving everything and fixing everything for absolutely no fucking credit at all. And I love you. That is such a beautiful answer.

I mean, such a profoundly beautiful answer. My best friend Emma and I talk a lot about the power of the crone years. Yes. Just the crone, again, reclaim the crone. Yeah, crone, hag, witch. Yes. Kind of like, they're awesome things to be. Yes.

I'm reading this amazing book at the moment, book club moment. It's called Girly Drinks by Mallory O'Meara, who's an American journalist. And she, there's been lots of books recently that have been rewriting of history, telling it from women's points of view. Sort of reclaiming of feminist heroes

and telling stories that we didn't have before. But a lot of them do tend to be sad, because these women do tend to end up dying and terrible things happen to them. This is the first positive retelling of women's history that I've ever read, because it's done through the medium of alcohol. And unbeknownst to me, previously, the jobs that you would have pre-feminism, you could either be a wife, you could be a nun, or you could be a prostitute that was it those that was the options that we had and she's pointing out that no there was a fourth it was the women in every country in the world all the way through history who made alcohol we were the ones who were put in charge of brewing so in china and japan the young women would chew up the rice and spit it into a massive communal pot and that would

be brewed up to make sake and in the uk we had ale wives and they would make ale in a huge copper cauldron and when the ale was ready they would take their brooms and stick them in the roof of their houses to tell everybody that was the sign to say the ale is ready and they would wear their puritan hats they would make extra large ones like an advertising hoarding and walk around the town so everyone would know the ale was ready. And obviously at this point in the book, I'm going, hang on. So they were looking like witches. They had the cauldron and the broomstick and the big hat. And sure enough, because the ale wives ale houses were so popular, people chose to go to them on a Sunday and get drunk rather than go to church. And you can see the first edicts that are brought out by the church going you can choose to come to god in church or go to the devil with the ale wives and that is the

start that of the witch trials is amazing this whole book is absolutely fucking mind-blowing i cannot recommend it enough it's talking about cleopatra was in a drinking club with mark anthony and julius caesar and they were called the immortal livers, because they believed they could get so drunk they would live forever. Oh, it wasn't just that their livers were really good at detoxing. And also, yes, obviously to us, we're like, yes. That's so clever. This book is so wonderful. What's it called again? It's called Girly Drinks. Okay, that sounds amazing. Yes. You, before we get on to your three failures, you, and we chatted about this before, said something so brilliant about the presumption that all women in the public eye

must be so aware of their privilege that all of their work has to speak to absolutely everyone, otherwise they're a terrible person. Yes. And I know that that's something that has been levelled at you and at me, and we are both incredibly privileged women. But one of the things that you said, which really resonated with me, was that no one ever goes, Philip Roth,

you've written something that hasn't included all men. Yes. Tell us, unpack that a bit for us, because I think you're so eloquent on it. Well, how could you ever write anything that addressed everyone? There are, even if I'm just writing for women, so I knock out half the population and I'm just talking to women, there are 4.4 billion women in the world and I haven't met most of them and I haven't lived their lives. Like all you can ever do is talk about what you know and what you think. And so, and what sentence, like, you know, how would the book start if you started to write a book that you intended every woman in the world to read and relate to and go, yes, that is my truth also,

how would the first sentence be? It would have to go on forever. When you were just sort of saying hello to your readers and just naming every single country and tribe and religion and skin colour and sexual preference, it would go on forever. It would be ugly writing and it wouldn't be truthful. And I also don't believe that it's correct or right to write to other people's experience. Like, you know, the base fact of

being a writer or a communicator is you are selling your life, and that is the material you have to sell. I don't want to go around claiming other people's lives and selling that as well. I want those people to write a book so I can read it and go, this is amazing, and tell everybody else about it. That's ultimately the only thing you can do with your privilege. You tell your truth, and when someone else tells their truth, you tell everyone and go, here's another amazing truth. That's the only way it can work. And I feel this burden on women, and particularly younger women, that they feel that if they can't include everyone and cover everything, then they've failed, and they will be held up to accusations of kind of ignoring the rest of the world. There's a difference between ignoring the rest of the world and going,

I don't know about it and I'm not going to pretend to know about it because I don't want to take their material. That's their job to do and I can't wait for them to do it. So yes. Thank you. You also make the point that women or people of any gender shouldn't undermine what they do know because they're too worried about offending other audiences. Yes. You shouldn't just constantly be in a state of self-dismissal. Like, actually, we do all have things to share about our own unique experiences.

Yeah, no, every story, you know, my favourite thing in the world is just going and talking to someone, you know, just literally sitting down with someone and going, so, tell me the story of your life. Like, kind of like, even if you're sat next to the most boring person in the world, if you ask them enough questions, they will become fascinating. You know, they will have a story to tell. And everyone has that inside them.

And yeah, you just want more stories. I don't want the three most successful women to write everyone's stories and every experience. I want 3,000 women to all write their stories and their experience. One of my biggest mottos is always expand the lexicon. Like, kind of like, it's never about a few people doing better. It's about expanding the lexicon, having thousands of people all doing well. That's, to me, what progress is.

Let's move on to your failures. Yes. There's quite a shift change here in terms of tone, because your first failure, and I'm so glad you're talking about it because I'm sure it will affect many people in this audience your first failure is you wrote it to me as being so afraid of sadness I did not deal with my daughter's eating disorder in the right way yes so I was raised in a family that just kind of had never heard of or didn't believe in sadness like kind of whatever my problem was when I went

and talked to my mother whether it was like kind of like I have terrible period pains or I'm very depressed and anxious about the fate of the whales or kind of you know what will my life be like was always to say this why don't you have a poo and a hot bath and go to bed so that was that was sequentially yeah it wasn't you weren't doing them at the same time sometimes I did do them

all at the same time I have to admit it's a lovely image yeah if you're clever enough with a hot water bottle and a duvet you can do all three at once

but yes so we just didn't there were eight children and two parents in a three bedroom council house in Wolverhampton and at one point

they were breeding Alsatian dogs as well. So it was a very crowded house full of poo. And there wasn't time for anyone's emotions. Like, kind of like you just couldn't have them. And as I was saying before, I was raised on musicals. So for me, it was like, okay, well I can, like Marge Simpson says in The Simpsons, I can take all my emotions and crush them down into a ball

and push them to the bottom of my stomach and ignore them. And simply watch the jolly musicals instead and I will just pretend that I'm cheerful Judy Garland cracking on with everything and that has actually generally worked for me like I don't really have that many terrible emotions I'm a very cheerful person and so because it had worked for me when my daughter started being depressed and anxious and scared of things at the age of 11 or 12 first of all like obviously told us to have a poo and a hot bath and go to bed. And then I progressed to, why don't you take all your emotions and push them down to the bottom of your stomach? I'm sure it'll be fine. And then we watched a lot of musicals. And that, oddly enough, did not cure her

of what is a mental illness. Like, I did not know that that was the start of her being, you know, very profoundly mentally ill. So how I'm sure there are people in the audience who know this and have experience of this whether themselves or someone they love and I just want to say hello I know what your life is like and you know I wish I could hug you all but you know for those who don't know an eating disorder is like an iceberg the bit where they stop eating and start self-harming and overdosing is the tip of an iceberg. What's underneath it is depression and anxiety. And as I came to understand in the years that followed, she was ill for five years, is that the reason someone starts physically showing you how unhappy and depressed they are

by not eating, by turning into a skeleton, by cutting themselves up, by overdosing, is because they can't say it anymore. That if they were saying how sad and unhappy they were, that's all they'd be saying all day. And either they become bored of saying it, or they run out of ways of saying it, or they feel that it's not being understood, or they don't want to make a fuss, or they don't want to draw attention to themselves, or even the act of saying it makes them feel worse, that they have now gone into another phase where they're just going to physically show you all the time how unhappy they are.

So it took a long time to understand that and I went through many phases of trying to cure her anxiety and depression. First of all, I tried to reason her out of it. I was like, she's incredibly bright. I am reasonably clever. If I give her all the facts that she needs to know, then I will TED talk her out of not eating. So I would talk to her about nutrition and energy and life and all these things

you need to eat. Every creature on earth needs to absorb energy in some way. You are no different from the plants or the animals you must eat. And that didn't work. And then I got angry. And I was like, why are you doing this? You're an incredible girl. Life is amazing. You can make the choice to stop this now. Like, come on, just stop this. Like, don't do this. Take control of it. You're a strong girl. Stop. That didn't work. And then I thought maybe suffering like our Lord Jesus Christ might help and just cried a lot in front of her to show her how sad it was making me feel and going if you can't feel how bad this is if you're emotionally shut down then maybe if you see in

someone that you love how sad it makes them to see what you're doing and how you're living your life maybe that will be the breakthrough that we need and amazingly enough that wasn't the answer either and in the end what I had to learn after a bunch of therapy and amazing experts and reading as much as I could is that what she really needed was for someone to look at her and say, you're sad, aren't you? You are sad. I can see that. I am so sorry that you feel this bad. I'm not scared of this. You can talk to me about it. I'm going to be with you all the way through this. I have a plan. I know what we need to do. And I'm going to help you however hard it is to work through this plan that will make you better. And that took five years to learn that. Because when I, and I went

everywhere, and I rang everyone, and I looked for all the information, there isn't anywhere that tells you that that's what is happening and that's what you need to do everything that I've learned is pieced together from hundreds of different sources and that was why I wanted to write about it in the book because when she finally got better she and she is totally better now she's too better she's she's too fucking much she's she's she's thriving as the young people say and what she said was you need to write about this because for my generation there is no stigma or guilt in talking about mental illness and eating disorders we have found a way to talk about this we talk about this all the time but your generation

the parents you were brought up in a time when you didn't understand these things and a lot of you think it's your fault and a lot of you have guilt and so every time you're talking to us we can see that you're freaking out and feel terrible and worried you're going to make things better and the parents need to know how to make the children better because even if you do finally get to the top of that waiting list for help and mental health is so criminally underfunded in this country and it's such a terrible waste of time and money and lives that they only help you when you're at a crisis point and also it's so damaging because young people aren't stupid they know if they're at the bottom of a waiting list then if they become more ill and more troubled and cut themselves up more and take more overdoses and become thinner then

they'll be taken to the top of the waiting list. And so you have this appalling situation where these children are doing something which is in a kind of really weird, horrible, dark way, quite brave, and going, I'm going to fuck myself up even more because that's the only way I can get help. And that is a terrible position to put young people in. But they know the truth of the way the system works. So even if you get to the top of the waiting list and you finally get all the help that you need, you're only going to see that doctor two or three times a week maximum. And the rest of the time is down to you as the parent to take care of that child. And if you do not know what you are talking about, and if you do not know how to help that child, and if you have not worked out all of your problems, then that child is probably not going to get better. And so that is why I wanted

to write about it in the book, just to go, everything I've learned I hope this is helpful because the thing I want to do more than anything else is be useful and I have to say of anything that I've ever written the response to that was nuts we serialized it in the times and I literally got thousands and thousands of parents contacting me going now I understand it now I understand the language now I understand the basis of this now I can help and that was a profound privilege because you know I love to entertain you know I love to be funny I love to like talk about secrets and stuff but the thing I wanted you most is be useful all the books that I read that I loved the most at the end of it I was like okay I feel like I've learned something now I mean it's why you write how-to books yes yeah that's why you write how-to books right it is too but that's you know that's the clue is in the titles like when you write a how-to book you're just going yeah this is knowledge I'm

not just turning up and kind of going wow it's like I genuinely want to tell you something really important we can't all progress until we know these things. So, so important and so powerfully spoken about just now. And I do highly recommend that everyone reads that chapter in your book. I wanted to ask you about that exchange that you had with your daughter where she said, write about it because your generation needs to know because you think it's your fault. Yes. Did you have that phase and was it particularly painful because you are a feminist icon oh god yeah and have been so helpful

to so many people in embracing who they are and their natural shape and all of that did it feel particularly difficult for you oh fuck me when you asked me to do this I just sat there in my kind of toad of toad haulish way and was like but I've never failed at anything because i kind of that's so droll she's asked me i'm sure i'll pull

something out my ass but like genuinely quite awesome um but that was the most profound failure because when you go in when you first start getting the help you're put into classes with other parents to you know to be given a very hasty kind of like desperate cobbled together brief and primer on what's going to happen and the first thing they tell you is like kind of like you turn up thinking that at the end of this one hour lesson as a parent they're going to go so this is why it happened and this is what you do and she'll be fine in two weeks that summer holiday is definitely going to be fine. And the first thing they tell you is the average course of an eating disorder is five to seven years,

and that is unbelievably devastating because you just go, well, that's all of her teenage years, and all I ever wanted her to do was to be happy. I had a fairly shit adolescence, and my dream was always that I would be able to have children who had a happy childhood and would have everything they would want and would have no guilt and no shame and would love themselves and like I did everything I could to make sure that they would hit their teenage years and just have the kind of teenage years you see in American movies where it's all just proms and giggly sleepovers and kind of wearing nice clothes

and being happy. And it was like, oh God, it's not. It's going to be five to seven years of hospitals and ambulances and medication and NG tubes. And so walking into that room, and everyone did know who I was in there. It was a North London hospital, and they'd all read the book.

And so they, you know, walking into that room, it was like, OK, so the body-positive feminist has fucked up a kid. Like, kind of like, she obviously didn't know what she was talking about. Like, kind of, it's great she wrote a book, but she's fucked up a kid, well done. Oh, God, I'm crying. Sorry. Sorry. Thank you, thank you, thank you for talking about this.

Oh, no, no, no, thank you. No, it's, um, thank you. Thank you, thank you for talking about this. Oh, no, no, no, thank you. No, it's, thank you. Yeah. Oh, God. Oh, wow. Have a swig of champagne.

Oh, wow. I have never cried on stage. Oh, my God. And I put my special Chanel eyeliner on as well, so we'll soon find out how waterproof that is. As an interviewer, you know that that's like fantastic for me. Oh God, no, of course. What a scoop.

I know. Every time I've made someone cry, I'm just like, yes, that's the sweet, sweet gold you want. As a people pleaser, you've definitely pleased me. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Obviously, subconsciously, I was like, yeah, it's failure.

I will cry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the pain that you and your daughter lived through and survived. Yes. I mean, God, she's so well now. She's amazing. But yeah, as a parent, I mean, any parent will know this, like your nightmare is that your child is sad.

The worst sentence that you can hear in the world other than there's something wrong with the toilet is yeah because then you can't go for your cheering up poo exactly right cycle it's a vicious cycle but the worst thing that can happen is something to your kids and especially if it's your specialist subject like that was the biggest humiliation i was like teenage girls on my specialist subject and you know i wrote the fucking book on how to get through a troubled teenage years like kind of like i'm an expert in teenage girls bright weird teenage girls how the fuck did this happen to me no now she's well you just realize well that's that is how life works you know you think you know everything and then you know and particularly a

really bright clever daughter they just turn up and go boom you know, you think you know everything. And then, you know, and particularly a really bright, clever daughter, they just turn up and go, boom, you know nothing. You know nothing, Jon Snow. Yeah. Your mascara hasn't run, by the way. Oh, thank you. Beautiful. Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, historian and host of a new chapter of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit.

Join me and world-leading experts every week as we explore the incredible real-life history that inspires the locations, the characters and the storylines of Assassin's Creed. Listen and follow Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? This is a time of great foreboding. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago set in motion a chain of gruesome events

and sparked cult-like devotion across the world. I'm Matt Lewis. Join us as we unwrap the enigma and get to the heart of what really happened to Thomas Beckett by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Before we move on to your second failure i i want to ask you because you have analyzed what is going on with teenage girls right now and one of the things that you cleverly say is that they don't have that much to look forward to yes because of how we are right so we don't celebrate older women in the way that maybe

we should that would make teenagers feel positive about growing older this is a huge thing like and i didn't realize but like kind of like the conversations that our children hear like children are always listening they are always aware what's going in the house and their specialist subject is their parents and what's going on in the world and what the future is going to be because they've got to live in it and all the conversations are about how fucked everything is it's like you'll never be able to buy a house like you know that the world is going to burn the right is on the rise like you know sort of like you know sort of like racial and sexual attacks like kind of like you live in a bin like there you go yeah and then when they come to us stricken and go, I hear there's some bad news about my future,

what we say is, oh, God, no, okay, shit. No, because what's going to be amazing is you guys are incredible. Like, we're just old assholes and we fucked it up, but you young people are amazing and you've got your internet and your Greta Thunberg and you'll fix it all. I believe in you, kid. And we think that makes them feel better. We think that's an empowering thing to say, but it's not because all the kids are hearing is, mummy and daddy fucked this really

hard. Save us. And we take the responsibility away from ourselves. That's a really notable thing. And the other thing as well that I really realized the difference between writing a book for and for and about younger women and writing a book for middle-aged women is young women are that the wave of feminism that we had in the last 10 years has been so amazing about your younger life your teenager life your early 20s is endlessly chronicles in broad city and girls and fleabag and beyonce and rihanna and kind of we have all this thing about talking about being young and having City, and Girls, and Fleabag, and Beyonce, and Rihanna, and we have all this thing about talking about being young, and having your fun, and working out who you are, and being a boss girl, and all this kind of stuff.

But we don't, the feminism stops at the point where it stops being young women. We stop talking about being older women, and then we see women dropping out, and all we hear is, you become invisible as an older woman, and then you're going to get the menopause, and the rah, rah, rah. And we don't make being a grown adult aging woman look like a great job. If you were an 11 or 12 year old girl just going into puberty, and you were told, okay, well, you'll

have 10 years of like fucking around and drinking and being a boss girl, and it will be crazy, but maybe your friends will get you through it. And then after that, I don't know. That all sounds a lot if you're 11 or 12. And like the really big thing is that in the last century, the start of puberty has shifted from 16, which is where it was in the early 1900s, to 10 or 11. There are eight and nine year old girls starting puberty. So they're having the physical experience of becoming a woman, but they still have the brains of children. And that's terrifying that you're a child and you're bleeding and you're growing breasts and someone's going, well, here's what happens when you're grown up. Like, you know, one in four of you are going to

be sexually assaulted and kind of like, you know, you're not going to get paid equally and kind of like, you know, I hope you've got some good friends. We need to remember that the children are watching. We need to remember so much, half of feminism's job is to point out the problems and the scary things and the things that are bad in our lives. But the other less examined part of feminism is joy and talking about why it is amazing to be a woman and what is incredible about it

and the power of it and the beauty of it and the potential of it and the comfort in it and the security in it and all the amazing things that you can do as you get older as a woman that mean that and i suspect this is generally across the board there is no 47 year old woman i'm 47 but whatever age you are in the room who would ever go back and be 16 again like you just would not and that's what we need to tell them it is that old motto it gets better and it is amazing

it is an amazing job to be a woman. I love men. I have had sex with them. They are my friends. But I would not want to be one. Like, this is awesome. We have multiple orgasms. Like, we can make babies grow and come out of our bums.

I think that's what happened. You know, we are the future with half of the population that still hasn't yet had a chance to tell all of our stories and see exactly how we would rule the world if we got a fucking chance like this is amazing i'm going to ask you about it later but your next book is about men yes i'm going to ask you about that later because we're going to move on to your second failure yes which is that when you first started writing, you decided you wanted to be a hot young gunslinger, i.e. assassinate people in print.

Right. And I'm so glad you've chosen to talk about this, because I had exactly the same thing. Right. So where did you get that idea from? Well, I suspect in the same way that you did, Elizabeth. Print media was dominated by men, and the men who were most celebrated were the ones who were just like biting and dark and would take someone down the pieces that you'll be talking about would be like oh did you see that interview where you know he took him down did you see that review where kind of you know so and so was

eviscerated if you read A.A. Gill have you seen Charlie Brooker have you seen what Clive James had Clive James has described Arnold Schwarzenegger. Have you seen what Martin Amis has said about Philip Roth? It was all about men attacking men. So you go, okay, well, if I want to be in this industry, if I want to be a writer, it's all about men shitting on other men and men assassinating each other, but doing it in a witty and amazing way. And I want to be a writer and this is the only place I can do it. And that's the so I will play the game and as a one of the rare women in this industry if I want to do well I have to do it better than the men however cunty the men are I need to be five times cuntier like that's how I will how I will make my way in the world so when I started working for the music press you know I

turned up at Melody Maker I was 16 years old I was wearing a giant hat because I was working under the presumption that wearing a hat would make my body look smaller and it would be an enthining process it's the Nicole Richie approach to massive handbags literally yes yeah one large accessory will take a stone off you yeah I'm not sure what the science is but that's what we believed in the 90s yeah um and I was a virgin i had never been kissed i had applied for a job as a music journalist and i owned no albums and no music we didn't listen to the radio in our house because my dad didn't like modern music and i probably knew about 20 bands tops i knew everything about the beatles i knew everything about ste Beatles. I knew everything about Stevie Wonder.

I knew whatever was on the best of Simon and Garfunkel. And that was it. And musicals. So the first review that I wrote for Melody Maker, I had to go to the library and order some current music. I ordered a Happy Mondays album, because I'd heard that was quite good. And I wrote a review of that.

And I knew that you had to send more than one review. So for the second review, I reviewed the soundtrack of Annie. And... That was so sweet. Yeah. I knew nothing. I literally didn't know anything about music. But that was the one place I knew that you didn't have to, like,

have gone to university or to school. I didn't go to school. I didn't go to university. And so I knew the music press was a place where you could send a review. And if they liked it, they printed it. so that was where I could get a job and so you had to write about music if you wanted to be a writer so it was like okay well I'll review any music I've got I mean I would have reviewed a jingle off an advert if I'd had to I just wanted that job and when I walked into that office everyone else was like kind of like a cool man a lot of them

were wearing leather jackets I knew that it would be a grown-up environment with grown-ups in so i'd carefully bought a packet of silk cut the night day before and i bought a bottle of thunderbird 2020 drink for children that they used to sell in the 90s and i went into the office and i sat down at the editorial meeting and i lit a cigarette and i took a swig from the bottle and it was 11 o'clock in the morning and everyone looked at me like what the fuck is going on here but I literally didn't know any other way to be a grown-up other than smoking a cigarette and drinking some alcohol it was like I need to pretend to be a grown-up now and then I started writing about bands and at the beginning I you know the first gig I ever went to

was the first gig I reviewed like kind of Like I'd literally never seen a gig before. So my review was like, oh my God, it's amazing. You go in a room and there are people and there's a band and they're doing it all there. And it's just amazing. And so I was very overexcited about everything I reviewed. And it became apparent within six months that that was not how you progressed. The people who were getting the big reviews were the ones that were going and, like, assassinating bands.

So famously, one of the writers at Mellon-Demeyker did a terrible review of U2 when they were on tour. He absolutely obliterated them in print. And Bono sent that writer a knife covered in blood in a box to the office. Bono? Yeah. Wow, you wouldn't expect that of Bono, would you?

I think it was really funny. He was just going, I've just pulled this from my heart, kind of like I will present it to you. And to me, that was like Bono was kind of going, well, that's the game. I found it funny. Like, now you've got a free knife.

So I was like, okay, after six months I've not progressed. Okay, I've got to step it up a gear. I will be the biggest arsehole on this paper I am going to destroy everyone that's what a hip young gunslinger does and so I just went about being you know it was always very funny but it was far too much it was horrible and it peaked in doing a review of a band called Ned's Atomic Dustbin who were from the Stanbridge area they were just a bunch of guys in a band. And the format of the album review

was that it was the funeral of the lead singer and I was the priest officiating over his burial and I was throwing the earth onto his dead face and listing all the reasons why he died from being so shit. Wow! Okay. Did he send you a coffin? Well, I mean, it was, so the review was printed the next day. It was the editorial meeting. So I came down for Wolverhampton. I'm still a virgin. I'm still

living in Wolverhampton with my parents. I still don't really know anything about music. I go into the office with my cigarette and my bottle of Jack Daniels now waiting for everyone to be like whoa you went there you did it and this lovely man wearing a cardigan who I'd seen sort of shuffling around the office just sort of looked at me and went I don't know I was a bit off I was a bit I don't know I don't think that's you that man is now my husband plot twist yes i didn't know that that was coming no i know and he was totally right because i turned up on the paper and i was this is cheerful girl in love with music the reason that i was there was because i loved all this music and i wanted to write and in six months i turned into this poisonous person destroying everyone and also the job of giving yourself

the job of destroying people who were making music like fair enough if you're writing like really catty reviews of nazis but like these are they were just some boys from stabridge trying to earn some coin by like making songs that people liked it was just absolutely extraordinary to me that of all the people and all the jobs that i'd set myself was destroying something and then 20 years later so this was was the being going on a music paper and then being a terrible person and realizing maybe you've made a mistake, was the plot of the film that I wrote, How to Build a Girl. And one of the reasons why I really wanted to make that film, other than they were paying me and asked me to, and who's going to say no, is because I realized that what happened to me at the age of 16, in that I had a national platform in which to write my opinions and eviscerate people

was what every 16-year-old in the world can do now because that's what social media is. And that tends to be the pattern that we have. You see time and time again, when people go on social media, you turn up and, you know, so you go and look at people's accounts and like their first post is like,

oh, does this thing work? Doing my first tweet, here's my breakfast. Hi guys. And then over six months, usually a week later when someone's gone, your breakfast looks shit, then they'll start sort of hitting back. And then six months later down the tunnel, everybody's just turned into Charlie Brooker 10 years ago and everyone's just stabbing everybody.

And like you're being a hot young gunslinger. And the thing that I've realized having sat on social media for 10 years and seeing this happen, particularly in progressive movements like in feminism and anti-racism, anti-Semitism and stuff, is that if you go on social media and your whole thing is that you want to destroy someone,

even if it's someone from your own side, but you think they're doing feminism wrong, say. You see someone doing feminism wrong and you go online and you decide to destroy them because they're doing feminism badly. And you put all this effort into it and maybe it works and maybe you destroy that feminist and kind of like they're crushed and they withdraw and they stop doing stuff then you still have to do the second part of the job which is presumably to show how you would do feminism better you've now got to go and make the effort of giving a better alternative to the one

that you thought was so bad and what i've realised is that why don't you miss out that whole first part where you're spending all this energy destroying someone that you don't agree with and just go straight to the second part, which is brilliant and joyful and in which no one gets hurt, where you just make the better alternative. I won't disagree with anyone on social media now. I don't attack anyone. I don't criticise anyone.

Because it's like, OK, well, if that's working for someone, that's fine. If I think you're doing a bad job, I will simply do something better. And then we have market forces and we have increased the lexicon and no one's got hurt. And I have saved so much energy and so much bile. And I will not, as I had to when I was 16, compile a list of all the bands that I'd slagged off in the press and write letters to every single one of them going, I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I'd heard that the mother of the lead singer of Ned's Atomic Dustbin

had cried when she'd read that review. I had to send her a really long letter going, I'm so sorry. Oh, it's so lovely that you did that. And you've made something, again, so deep out of what was a very funny anecdote. And my experience is going to be nowhere near as profound but when I started when I started out in journalism and I was on the London Star on the evening standard I was desperate to be a news reporter and then I became a news reporter and I was desperate to write features and I got a chance to write interviews for six

months I was covering someone's maternity leave and I did exactly the same thing. I thought, because that was the era of the great Lynn Barber, who is this incredible writer and who often has an acerbic turn of frame. The Barber of Fleet Street, they call her, because she would go in and destroy people, yes. And I think because I didn't know myself and I didn't trust my own voice

because I didn't know what it was, I tried to assume other people's voices and I just ended up being really mean. Right. and it stuck with me and I also have apologized the people that I was mean to apart from one who didn't deserve it who who who go on Paolo Coelho is not a nice person who's that he wrote the alchemist oh god yes all Well, my experience of him. Well, my... Maybe I'll tell you afterwards. I love the gossip. I love the gossip. I kind of like...

He just told me about... He's now my enemy. Okay, fine. He's now my enemy. Tell me why we must... I wasn't even that bad. I actually just... I wasn't that mean about him.

I just wrote his quotes. Yeah. One of the things that he said about his own path to spiritual enlightenment was about very much listening to what he wanted to the expense of what other people wanted and he gave this example and he meant it as an example of his spiritual depth he said I was I was sitting on a plane waiting to take off from Brazil to London and I just felt my spirit calling me to have a cigarette I just had to have a cigarette that's

what my spirit was telling me I needed to do and so I said said, I lit up. I lit up in the airplane. And then the air steward came across and said, no, you're not allowed to smoke on the airplane. And I was so offended. And my spirit was so unsettled. I said, well, fuck you, because I want to smoke a cigarette. And he caused such a ruckus

that they had to escort him off the plane so that he could smoke a cigarette on the tarmac, thereby delaying the entire flight for everyone else on that flight. And he was saying to me, because he was proud of that story, because he was like, I listened to what my spirit was telling me. I was like, You listened to what your nicotine addiction was telling you?

Is that a nicotine hit? That wasn't God. That was Silk Cut. So, apart from Adequelo, I have apologised to other people. Wow! I can't believe you weren't going to tell that anecdote. I mean, aside from the fact that you can just put in a bulging file just called men, that is just absolutely extraordinary.

We love the men here. Exactly, not all men. But, so, other than that, what I realise, the order that I've got, and I'm so grateful I've realised this, is that there is such power in vulnerability and in being nice. And that's where all of this has come from, how to fail, because actually I got really tired of doing that

because those interviews weren't about the people I was talking to. They were about how I could create a voice for myself that wasn't me. And so having this kind of conversation with you and seeing you in your courageous vulnerability is such a beautiful gift for me. And that comes about because we're being nice.

Well, I mean, there's two things. Like, first of all, like the greatest gift you can give yourself every night is to go to bed and go, God, I wasn't an asshole today. Like kind of like if you've ever had problems with insomnia or just being a very sweaty person, whatever it is, anxiety, just the gift that you give yourself by going,

no, every chance I had today, I was pleasant. Or the very worst, not obstructive to others' happiness. I was a neutral presence. Things flowed through me. Maybe I didn't push them, but I did not obstruct them. Bare no minter. It's a massive favor to do to yourself. And secondly, hack talk for a minute. When you're interviewing someone, they are giving you meat and energy and substance. They're giving you a part of their life that you're being paid for. They're not being paid for it when you're doing promo

and I always try to remember to be very respectful of that because A, I'm being paid to do this and they are not. B, if they are trusting me to tell me a secret or something tender or vulnerable, you have to be respectful of that and thirdly, they are going to be respectful of that. And thirdly, they are going to be answering questions about whatever you've asked them about, probably for the rest of their lives. If you have some big contentious argument or get something out of them or they give you something, you know, vulnerable or exclusive, they'll be answering questions about

that for the next 20 years. You do have a profound effect on other people's lives. And like, when you start off your career, you may not have that luxury but I now I'm in the very lucky position where I only interview people that I like and what I want to do is explain why I think they're great because I think this is a really underrated job to give yourself as a communicator whether it's just tweeting or if you're a journalist or whatever in conversations that you have with friends is just pointing at things that are awesome and going I like this yes and then talking about why you like it. And the best conversations I've ever had in my life are when you meet someone who loves the same thing as you and you're trying to figure out why you love it.

Yeah. Why is Paul the best beetle? He is. You know, why is butter the greatest thing that you can have in the fridge? It is. And you're there three hours later, just so full of excitement and joy.

Elizabeth Gilbert calls it being an enthusiast. There are loads of cynics in the world. Actually, sometimes it's the braver choice to be an enthusiast. There's a final failure here, and I want to get onto it because I also want to leave enough time for a Q&A because I know that there'll be so many people here

who want to pepper you with their questions. But your final failure made me sad. Your final failure is that when you were a child and a teenager, not being in any way beautiful or thin. Yes. Now, does that genuinely feel like a failure now, or is it that it felt like a failure then? Not now.

Now it feels like a massive gift. But at the time, I was aware, so I was born in 1975, so I'm sort of like 1985, I'm 10, I'm heading towards puberty, and I knew what the job of being a teenage girl was, and that it's to be hot and sexy. That's what you have to do at some point when you're a teenage girl, you have to be hot and sexy. You might not start off hot and sexy, but at some point you have to have your makeover, and you will be hot and sexy. Every woman's movie movie every movie for a woman has a makeover scene the point where your life changes and suddenly you are hot and sexy and like kind of that's where your life changes so you know I

knew that you know at the age of 10 I was you know I was very fat mono brow my hair was down to here in plaits we were very poor so I only had one outfit of clothing, which was a shirt of my dad's and a skirt I'd bought from a jumble sale. And I didn't have a coat, I wore a dressing gown. And so I would sort of look at this in the mirror and sort of go, wow, okay, well, it's going to be difficult to get a makeover out of this because I have no stuff. I have no money. I don't have things. I don't have deodorant or makeup. We had felt tips. So every so often we'd sort of draw lipstick onto our mouths with felt tips and colour every so often we'd sort of draw lipstick onto our mouths with felt tips and colour in our eyes blue because it was 1985. But yeah, so it was like,

okay, not beautiful and sexy now, but I will have to be at some point because otherwise, what is the point of a teenage girl? And I signally failed to do that at any point. Like, I know there was a massive feeling of, and now at the age of 47 the narrative that I hear so much from women's it and I'm not sure it's so much it's from actual women but the narrative that you see in movies and when people are writing often they go as you get older it just becomes so much more disappointing because everything slides down and you become invisible and people stop catcalling you and you you realize how beautiful were you were when you were young and how you know sadly and inevitably you are becoming sort of more faded and tired and less hot and sexy and the gift that I've been given for

just looking like a bag of shit when I was a teenage girl is that everything's been uphill since then like kind of it's it's not that I've got a completely reverse narrative like kind of things have literally got better and better because I found some nice clothes and I learned how to exercise and what to eat and I got eyeliner and I dyed my hair and like constructed a version of myself that was on the outside. That was how I felt on the inside. But I knew absolutely that I'd failed at being a teenage girl. The fear that any young girl has when she goes down the street, I hear is that if you go past some men or some teenage boys or some builders or a man in a van is that they will shout, all right, sweet tits, or, you go past some men or some teenage boys or some builders or a man in a van, is that they will shout,

all right, sweet tits, or, you know, some kind of sexual sort of come on at you, which never work, by the way, if anyone's still thinking of doing that. We don't, no one ever, when they were getting married, went and how we met was that... LAUGHTER ..Lee leant out of the van and shouted,

I'd give that a poke and now here we are. Like, that just doesn't work as a tactic. But I knew that even that wasn't on the cards, even that terrible moment, kind of when you're 13 and the first time someone shouts sweet tits at you, I knew even that wasn't going to happen, because all I had shouted at me by any man that noticed me

was, and this is where we'll test the age of the room here, all right grot bags. I don't know. So, OK, we can see there's, okay, age wise. So, grot bags was the witch on the show Rudd, Hull and Emu's Pink Windmill, which is a children's TV show. And grot bags was just a massive fat green-faced witch with curly hair and very much not who I wanted to be at that point. Now, I think grot bags is fucking awesome. She was... She's making the ale. Yep, exactly. She's the male wife. Like, Grop Baggs is awesome, but it's not what you wanted to hear when you were 13. So, I couldn't work out how I was going to be an

adult, because I couldn't see any women that looked like me. I couldn't see any girls that looked like me. I couldn't see them in films or TV. I could find a couple in 19th century literature, like when Jane Eyre talks about being kind of poor and ugly and weird and meek, I kind of, I related to her hugely. But mainly the only female role models I had were in cartoons, like kind of, you know, and puppets, like Miss Piggy, I related to her. If anyone's watched the Disney animated version of Robin Hood, there's a character called Madam Cluck, who's a very big jolly hen. I was like, that's a viable. I could do that.

I could be Madam Cluck. Did you feel insecure? Oh, God, not even insecure. Just like absolutely, like I had no options. Like, no, just what can I do? This will not work. I have no options. Where can I go? What can I do? I am not a teenage girl, so, what can I do? Like, this will not work. I have no options. Where can I go?

What can I do? I am not a teenage girl. So what else could I be? And do you feel that that led you to believe that you needed to earn your place? That you needed to do something else because you couldn't exist on your looks? This is your internal monologue.

Yeah, so I knew I wasn't a teenage girl because a teenage girl's like, so you've got to remember as well that I wasn't going to school because our parents home educated us and we weren't allowed to have friends and they weren't no one was allowed to come to the house so I knew no one of my age I wasn't seeing actual real people all I could see was what was on tv and movies and you're the oldest of eight and you weren't seeing anyone older than you in the same age range I was the first one to go through

puberty and puberty was seen as a very shameful thing in our house like as I write in how to be a woman sort of you would have a bath upstairs everyone shared the same bath water so I sort of like after my dad and my mum and like maybe the babies I would then get in and then you'd come downstairs and sit in front of the fire with a towel because that was the only warm place the day that I came down there at 13 to get warm by the fire and my mum went is that a pube is that a pubic hair Kate oh you're turning into a little lady like kind of like I was the first one to go through puberty, and that's not the way that you wanted to start. But so, yeah, all the girls that I was seeing were on TV and in movies,

and they wore pink rah-rah skirts, and they were all called Becky, and they had blonde hair, and they roller-skated around, and they went out with boys called Brad, and they worried about the prom, and that was about the extent of their lives. And so I found that very unrelatable. Do you think that's why you started writing? But this is the beautiful gift. This is why now I'm not sad about this

because I was so absolutely excluded from society and so absolutely not allowed to think that I was even really a human, let alone a teenage girl, that it was like, well, what am I? And I was absolutely, totally alienated from my body. I literally had to pretend it didn't exist. So I was like, well, I'm just a brain in a jar.

And it's attached to this. This is what walks it around. But I'm just a brain in a jar. And all I can do now is just observe things and try and work things out. And there's actually, I now see, it was almost like becoming a hermit or something or going on like kind of a retreat

or looking down at Earth from space. Because if you're so absolutely out of the game of being a human being, if you're so absolutely not included with what is normal then your eyes become gigantic and your ears become gigantic you're just receiving stuff and not interacting with any human beings or feeling any worth just means that you're suddenly gathering all this knowledge you're just watching watching watching for 10 years what everybody else is doing and trying to work out anything that might be relevant to you trying to figure out people so that was you know i now see that gave me a massive head start because like so you know by the time i started writing

i just all i'd done was watch people and absorb stuff i had transmitted nothing into the world i had not existed i had not interacted with anyone and the first thing i ever did where i was outputting rather than inputting was when i wrote the first thing I ever did where I was outputting rather than inputting was when I wrote my first book and that was why writing was like that's the addiction that started then that has never ended because it was like oh wow I'm in control of this doesn't matter what I look like just you know everything that was wrong that I was just watching things is now this astonishing power I've got thousands of hours of observations to share about people I've got thousands of thoughts of observations to share about people.

I've got thousands of thoughts. I've been watching you all. Now I can do it. So interesting. And we're so grateful that you do. What would we do without you? Before we get on to the audience Q&A. Before we get on to the audience Q&A, I want to ask you quickly about your next book. Yes. Men. Men.

A primer. Writing about feminism and women and girls for 10 years. I talk about women, I talk about the feminism, I talk about the women and the feminism. And then when I would do an event, there would be questions. And either the first or second question would be, yeah, okay, women, girls, but what about the men?

And for the first five years, I was like, I don't care. My specialist subject is women. I can't do everything. I'm doing the women. Like the ultimate irony of feminism would be if women having solved the problems of women then had to solve the problems of men. I'm not going to do that. And then I just started to think, well, yeah, maybe,

because what I hear from young men all the time is that they think now, and they truly believe this, and they are angered and scared by this, is that it's easier to be a young woman now than it is to be a young man. And at the beginning, I was like, no, it's not. I've got some things to tell you. But I think they are right, because women have feminism.

We have this crowdsourced, 100-year-old, astonishingly effective transformation machine that has taken us from the property of men, unable to vote, unable to own property, unable to stand for office, unable to wear trousers, unable to smoke cigarettes, without contraception, unable to talk about sex, uneducated, to people who rule countries and are going into space and can talk about sex and are creative and astonishing. And that's in 100 years because of feminism. We have changed utterly. A woman 120

years ago would not recognise our lives now. In the same time span, nothing has changed for men. Men's lives are exactly the same as they were, give or take a bowler hat or a cummerbund. To what their grandfather's lives were like. The idea of what a woman is has expanded and become so exciting and joyful. The idea of what a boy or a man is has not expanded

at all and is not filled with joy. It's filled with fear. So I wanted to basically pay men the favor back for all the things we've stolen from their culture and go here's a thing you can have from female culture feminism it's about talking about your problems it's about going am I happy with who I am what would I like to change how would I like to expand what are the skills that I need to learn how do I need to change the world in order to be happy what do we actually want men to be let's ask the question what is a man so yeah that's the next book and I'm just really really excited about it I haven't been this excited about a book since had to be. Let's ask the question, what is a man? So yeah, that's the next book. And I'm just really, really excited about it. I haven't been this excited about a book since Had to Be a Woman,

because I just don't think anyone's talking about boys and men at the moment. And if you solve the problems of boys and men, you also solve a lot of the problems, let's face it, of girls and women. So I think the second part of feminism. what a note to end on I can't wait to read it Catlin Moran I grew up in awe of you I've read you all of my adult life but in person

you have exceeded all my wildest dreams I cannot thank you enough you know the only reason I did this is because I wanted to meet you let's get that on tape I never leave the house so the only way I get to meet you. Let's get that on tape. Literally. Have you recorded that? I never leave the house, so the only way I get to meet people whose writing I love and admire is if they just finally ask me to talk to them on stage.

So this is really weird, but this is kind of like friend dating here. This is our meet-cute. I finally get to meet her. And just thank you so much for everything you do. You are so amazing. So you're amazing. Next time we'll do it without an audience.

Callum Moran! Oh, diolch, diolch, diolch. Mae'n ddrwg. Rwy'n dweud, cyn i'r Q&A ddechrau, mae gen i gwestiwn i'w gofyn, Elizabeth. Ydych chi ddim yn drwy'r rest o'r champagne? Wel, rwy'n. Ond gallech chi, roeddwn i'n mynd i'w ddweud, mae gennych chi'n ei dderbyn mwy. a question to ask Elizabeth. Oh, yeah. Are you not drinking the rest of that champagne? Well, I am. But you can have... I was going to, but you deserve it more. Do you want to go hard? Hang on. No, no, no, you take it. I feel like... Just needs a little more pop. Okay. Look at that feminism in action. Yeah.

50 for cheers. Share the pie. Grow the pie. Okay. So, we do have some roving mics. Yes, the mic is just coming to you. While the mic's travelling there, can we just do a round of applause for Elizabeth's boots?

Aren't they amazing? Fuck it up. Zara. Yeah. Fast fashion, but I intend to wear them a lot, so sustainable. It's a good boot, man. Thank you.

Boot well. Hello. Hiya. I think you're amazing. Oh, thank you. Your boots are amazing. I love this question. Thank you very much. Less this question, thank you very much

that's a question more of an observation I just wondered with everything you've been through and everything you talk about you show huge vulnerability as well as your strength but do you like yourself? oh god, I really really do

that is a revolutionary thing for a woman to say. Well, I wrote a column for The Times about four months ago now, and the first paragraph that is going, which is true, it's taken me ten years to screw up the courage to write this column, and the column is this. I think I'm really hot. You are. And the second paragraph is, you have to understand,

I'm not saying this in a kind of like, you know, hierarchy. I'm hotter than you. Fuck all of you. You are. And the second paragraph is, you have to understand, I'm not saying this in a kind of like, you know, hierarchy, I'm hotter than you, fuck all of you, you plainer bitches. It's just to let women know that that is a possible thought for you to have. There is literally no reason why I should think I am hot, like, or, you know, or why any woman shouldn't think they are hot. Like, kind of, you just have to make that choice. Because as the system is at the moment, no woman thinks they're beautiful. If you read an interview with all the most beautiful women in the world, Scarlett Johansson's going, I've got really weird elbows. And Sharon Stone's going, my calves make me sad. And kind of, you know. I literally, I spent two days researching this. I

have not found a single one of the most beautiful women in the world who would actually go, yeah, I'm pretty fucking decent. And I like this. They just, everyone has to. And first of all, that taps into the fact that every woman is not allowed to love themselves and is not allowed to be strong and powerful. We all have to hate ourselves a tiny, delicious 10%. Like kind of, you know, sort of like if someone's praising you for doing something,

you have to go, oh yeah, no, I did that. But you know, but I'm actually an idiot and I keep falling over and I kind of, I actually feel really bad about my head. Like, we think that compliments make us fat, I think. That kind of... That they're made of, like, bone marrow and cream. And if we eat them, we'll become disgusting.

And compliments are fatty. And they are made of bone marrow and cream. And they're delicious. And you need to eat them. They are nutritious. You need them for your brain. Like, women... The biggest thing that I wish I could teach young women and girls is to accept a compliment. Next time someone sends something to you, just go, thank you. That is correct. Don't go, oh no. Oh God, I'm kicking your compliments away. Please don't do this. It agonizes

me. And secondly, if you do not make the decision to say, I am beautiful, this is my body, this is my face, this is what I'm going to have for the rest of my life, I need to become friends with it and really like it, then what you're presumably doing is waiting for someone else to tell you you're beautiful. And if you're a straight girl, it's you're waiting for a boy to come and tell you you're beautiful. Why would you leave that in the hands of someone else? Like, you wouldn't ask, you know, or if you're queer, like kind of a girl, you wouldn't wait for a girl or a boy to come and tell you, you should

like this music. You wouldn't wait for a boy or girl to come and tell you, you're a cat person or a dog person. You wouldn't wait for someone to come and say, this is how you should decorate your house. Why would you leave one of the most important opinions you're ever going to have, which is whether or not you love yourself and think you're fucking fantastic, to some other dickwad? Like, honestly, like, that's not a good system. Like, we have to

be able to do that for ourselves. We need to self-gift just thinking we're awesome. Because you're not Nazis. You haven't stamped on a hen. Like, you know, you're not responsible for climate change. You're human-shaped and and you're facing the right way, and you've put on a thing that you like. That's enough. You look fucking amazing. Like, you know. I love that. I particularly love the comparison of someone coming to tell you

whether you're a cat or a dog person, because really my hackles raised there. I was like, if anyone tried to tell me i was primarily a dog person yes i love all animals but you know yeah wrong but dogs better but yes well no okay this is another podcast yeah yeah yes we're going to go up to the balcony now so if anyone has a question up in the balcony just as a kicker to that a woman's right to choose extends to everything from abortion to choosing to decide you are beautiful it's a choice you have to choose extends to everything from abortion to choosing to decide you are beautiful it's a choice you have to choose this thing yeah it's a very nice venue this isn't

it really beautiful isn't it's like being inside a beautiful wedding yes hi hi darling any ideas on balancing being an enthusiast and being kind and nice against people pleasing okay balancing being an enthusiast against people pleasing. Or with people pleasing. Yeah, kind of turning into people pleasing sometimes. Yes, because you can't always be nice. No. But what I would say is that like,

kind of like being a people pleaser, so long as you're also pleasing yourself, then being a people pleaser isn't a bad thing. Like kind of like it's fine to want to make the people around you you happy it's fine to want to create something that delights someone else it's fine to act in a way that makes someone else feel happy if it's at the expense of your own happiness if you're not telling the truth if you're lying if you're twisting yourself up then that's where people pleasing becomes toxic and you do see that a lot particularly in women it's a very female trait but to be a people pleaser and also a self-pleaser, so long as those two things are balanced, then, you know, I think people please

away. So long as you're not lying, so long as you're not kind of giving people more than you're giving yourself, then I delight in the idea of people pleasing. I think, you know, there aren't many people, particularly as I write to women generally, you know, there aren't many people who want to please women. Like, kind of like, there aren't many people who, like, burst into a room and go, you know what? I'm going to make all you middle-aged women really happy right now. That just doesn't really happen culturally. So, you know, I'm very happy to do that. I think so, as a recovering people pleaser myself, I think I realised that for years and years and years, I was outsourcing my sense of self to other people's opinions of me.

And I was masking that as people pleasing and being nice. But actually, all of that time was wasted because I could have been getting to know myself, which is really what you're saying. And so I think if you think of it like that, it's not being unkind, it's getting to know yourself first, which actually ends up being a very generous act. Because when you know yourself, and you say yes, you can commit to that yes. And when you say a no, it's for a good reason and people respect it. And the last thing I would say is, again, I quoted my best friend twice tonight,

but some of you might know she's an amazing therapist. And she talks about boundaries being a point of connection. There's actually setting a boundary. There has to be a point of connection between the two of you. So in a way, it kind of serves both of you both parties and ends up bringing you closer because you're both clear about who the other person is and that's really helped me that's so true and also best way you can please other people is when you know who you are and what you're pleasing

people with is just you yeah like kind of, when you are absolutely settled and joyful in yourself and happy, then what you're pleasing people with is basically you. Yeah. So that's why, you know, it's, you know, oxygen masks onto you first. Yes. Before you pass the pleasing oxygen onto others. Before your palo quelo getting off the plane altogether

and just smoking your fag. Yes, the fag. Fuck the oxygen masks. See, now I've had a glass and a half of champagne, I'm like, he had a point. Like, kind of like, why? Like, if he was pleasing himself. In the oxygen masks. See, now I've had a glass and a half of champagne, I'm like, he had a point. Like, kind of like, why? Like, if he was pleasing himself. In the 90s, right?

You could just draw that curtain on a plane and that kept all the fags in the smoking area and everyone loved it. Oh, we did it all day. Okay, we're going back down to the stalls now. I'm going to call him and say that you were wrong. I noticed you, but I'll come to you later I promise because I yes just there I feel like I have to go further back because otherwise it's just like

I'm favoring the front rows okay thank you okay thanks so much it was such a super evening I just wanted to ask so you spoke about how you didn't get promoted doing kind of nice reviews and then also struggled after you did your aggressive reviews of that band so how can we go far with traditional feminine traits of like compassion and things like that because all the great female leaders that I see they do adopt a lot of like masculine energy which is great for them and I'm not saying every single woman has to have these feminine traits but how can we make them seem as valued as masculine traits? That's such a fucking great question. Well done.

So the problem I had at ManageMaker was that it was a paper run by men that was mainly read by men. And so when I realised that I just couldn't write man-pleasing, horrible things anymore, and they wanted to write pleasing, feminine things somewhere else. I just had to go somewhere else where I can do that. And, you know, I was very lucky. It was very difficult in those days, because

there weren't many women in journalism, there weren't many women, even at that point, who were section editors and stuff, but I was very lucky that I found somewhere. The big revelation that I had a long time ago, and I think it's maybe one that Liz Truss hasn't had yet, is... LAUGHTER What are you going to say? It's that you can't grow a pie.

That's not that. But you can't grow a pie. You can't grow a pie. How would you grow a pie. You can't grow a pie. How would you grow a pie? Anyway, it took me until I was in my 30s to realise, I still had in my head that the cool audience was the men and that I would have to be more mannish and write male things and write in a male way because that was who was in charge and that was who was buying papers.

And that was, those are the people that it was best to please you were doing your best if you made men laugh as a woman if you've done the thing of making men like what you do fucking hell okay you must be amazing and then sort of when i got to about 30 i just hadn't decided this shift in revelation it was like a beautiful freedom in my head i was like i could could spend the rest of my life writing in a female way being nice doing all this female stuff and only being read by women and that is still 52 of the population and they are the people i want to talk to like kind of like if the if the sacrifice is that the cool boys with power never care about anything i do again and never want to know who i am and it's only women that's amazing that's

incredible i suddenly see the value in that audience. And this was like 20 years ago before we've had this big wave of feminism now and so many amazing female authors and writers and pop stars and movie makers, where it just seemed to be an astonishingly revelatory thought going, even though no one's doing anything for them and we never hear about a female audience that's enough and i'm interested in that i don't know what they want i know how to please men i've learned all the skills to do that how would i please women what do they want what are they not getting like kind of like i'm happy for them to be my guys and it was the moment where finally the last bit of internalized misogynism

sort of flipped in my head and i stopped thinking it was inherently better to write like a man and please a male audience and where i was just like okay if they don't come, they don't come. I'll go to the ladies. I'm team tits from now on. Thank you. That's a brilliant question. Thank you. We're going to go up to the balcony again.

Yes, there is someone there in a black top. Hello. I'd love to know what you think about female friendships during that kind of transition period from like 20s where you're i don't know maybe you're living together and you're going out together and most of you are single and then you know as you enter your 30s some might settle down get married have children others may not people's careers go in different directions I'd just like to know your thoughts about female friendships well I'm going to be brief on this because I want to throw to Elizabeth because this is your specialist subject

I again had because so many of my experiences are not typical so I just having not gone to school then working in a male-dominated industry and then working at home and having my first child at 24 I didn't have really any female friends until I got into like my mid-30s and now they are the best people I know and we hold each other together but I was still very much like when you'd go to a party in the 90s the fun was at the men's end of the table and they'd be like putting a piece of cheese on a fork and be really funny and that was genuinely great comedy content in the 90s whereas whereas at the other end of the table it'd be the women and they'd all be sitting around and crying and going my fucking mother and like kind of like and and crying and at that point i was like i want to be on the fun cheese end i don don't want to be in like womb-topia over here, fuck this shit

and then I had some problems with my mother and my womb and I was like, now I get the value of that end of the table, I'm going to be down there so I've come late to female friendship but I'm a very very passionate convert because now my coven of women, like I mean we're on WhatsApp and we're literally talking to each other constantly

like kind of like it's, I now get it but you are the female friendship expert I think thank you that's very kind of you i'm i don't think i am yet but i have written a book about friendship i think that qualifies who knows if it's any good it's not out yet yeah but i i found it really fascinating to write and research friendship and it's something that we're starting to talk about more but it doesn't have a language it doesn't have the lexicon so my aim was to expand the lexicon, as Catlin so brilliantly says. And part of the problem is, is that friendship as a term is so diffuse, it can mean everything and nothing. And I think the other problem is, is that we are taught to believe that friendship,

in order to be a successful friendship, has to last forever. And yet there are no conversations about how we become friends, how we date, whether we need friendship contracts in the same way that we do have in romantic settings. And there's no plot to a female friendship in the way there is, you know, if you meet a man and you fall in love with him

and then you're supposed to have children and then you grow old together. And like, kind of like, what's the plot of female friendship supposed to be? Exactly. There's no arc to it. I mean, there is, but we don't talk about it. It's not acknowledged.

And I think the other thing is that we use moralising terms. So you're a good friend or a bad friend. You don't say you're a good spouse. Yes.

And so my perception now is that friendships are not failures just because they end. And friendships can come to you for a particular reason or a season in your life and that's often the case with friendships in your 20s.

And if you have been taught something through that friendship, if you experience joy together, you can always have a relationship with that friendship even if the friend moves out of your life. And that's the sort of beautiful thing once you realise that you can have a relationship with the memory of it and with the impact that it had on you. So in a they all live on in us and i think that's the thing that

we need to get our heads around because we need to stop shaming ourselves when friendships grow in different directions just as you were saying that this is all so true i can't wait to read this book can you say what the title is so yes it's called friendaholic i love that confessions of a friendship addict but as you were saying that i was thinking it's a bit like because we don't have the lexicon and the framework for understanding female friendships and i was thinking it's a bit like clothes yeah like you know you might have one dress that you wear and it turns you into someone else and you just wear it to death for two years and then suddenly it doesn't work whereas there are other things like

the pair of shoes that you buy and you're still wearing them 20 years later and you never know exactly which ones are going to last forever and which ones you're going to like get rid of but like permission to steal that metaphor yes i should just bracket this all by saying friendship is the passion of my life that's why i wanted to write about it and i don't know what i would do without my core friends but i, and I think the pandemic has made us all realise maybe, that that core group of friends is much smaller than I had kidded myself it was. And actually the people that I really need to see and who are nurturing,

there's fewer of them, but I trust them more deeply. So that's... Have you written about the thing as well that when you first meet a new friend, when you absolutely fall in love with them, and it is like romantic love, you are obsessed with them and like you're just and like you know

what like often when i have made female friends i start talking like them like kind of like i just sort of get that kind of slip i'm kind of like i'll come back from meeting a new girlfriend and my husband be like you're talking a bit weird why yeah why are you welsh and i'm like i just met this amazing Welsh. She's amazing. She's got everything right. She's just incredible. And then there's the bit where you kind of like,

the passion and the kind of almost sexual kind of feelings you have for them slip and you're like, you see them for the flawed person they are. It happens. I'm just laughing because it's happened to me recently. And then you like, you over-romanticise it all and then suddenly you're like... She's perfect.

Yeah, then suddenly you break up and you're like oh my god yeah but they're totally no oh god i can't wait to read this book oh well i'll send you a proof don't you worry thank you very much quotes in the post babe thank you okay front row wait for the microphone sorry here we go thank you hi i was just going to ask because you mentioned at the start about that point that sort of the younger generation like looks at us and like maybe a bit like like you're not making it that exciting and we're doing all this great stuff and i know so many great like 30 year olds 40 year olds kind of like doing great things and i just think actually what makes us so great is that we've kind of gone through sort of those tough experiences and if we we give too much advice and we share too much that actually sort of the 20 something year olds that

coming through are going to maybe turn a bit a bit like those men that don't grow and develop what are your thoughts on that do you think we might get a sort of a generation that actually aren't as well rounded I mean i'm not saying that's necessarily what i think but i'm intrigued by that is that about like tmi basically what the we give them too much advice too much advice actually they don't really grow through it so they just kind of take on what we say as fact and don't really fully understand. Thickos. Kidding. I'm kidding. I was just joking. They're wonderful. Literally this. I'm sorry, the crone in me is going, you just have to listen to us. I'm kind of like, I had to listen to my elders. Now you need to listen to yours. That's

the privilege that we have. And also I want to really claim for women the ability to just drone on to a younger generation that might not want to listen in the same way that men have for centuries. Like, that we need to be allowed to be the person in the corner going rah, rah, rah in my day. Like, if I can't tell my stories about Britpop London in the 90s to a younger generation, then kind of,

you know, they just, they need to turn up and do their dues and listen to these stories. So, as we remember from when we were younger, you just screen out 90% of what people are saying to you anyway. So, you know, because you're on your phone and you're just not listening. So it's absolutely fine. If 3% of it gets through, which is probably all there is,

that's enough to get them going. And I think that thing that you said earlier about that 3% that does get through, how great if that's about joy. Yes, positive things. Yes. Yeah, I mean, I think obviously there is that worry that older women

are just scolding young women and going, it's not like that in my day or you're getting feminism wrong or whatever it is. I'm minded of the fact that we play that game, the name game in my family

where you write the names of famous people and put them in a hat and then you have to mime them. And I can remember when my brother got Jermaine Greer, the feminist,

his physical mime for Jermaine Greer and basically all of feminism was to go like this for people who are listening to this podcast and it goes like calin did a mime of two enormous breasts and then a finger wagging no no no no mime of disapprovement but basically that's feminism and all older women they're just women who are just going no no no no no you've got everything wrong. And I kind of... I've got

a really important question to ask the audience. Lady Three Doors Down, who's wearing the stripy tank top, where is that from? It's fucking lovely. So great. Just shout out a brand. I just need to go online. Wise. Wise. Okay. Very nice. Okay. Cool. And that's you sorted for

some sponsorship for the next one. I was literally about to say that. Okay. I actually am going to come to you in the roll neck in the second row back thanks so my question to you is out of all your life experience and from your three failures what would you say is the biggest thing that you've learned oh i mean that's a great bloody question to end on. Wow, okay. Is it about the wise tank top? Yeah, I mean, that's a solid tip, and I will be on that website tomorrow. I've got so many. White wine doesn't get red wine out of a white top.

You do need laundry bleach for that. Never, if you get offered the chance to travel business class or first class on a plane, ever accept it. Because unless you can do it for the rest of your life, it will ruin all travel for you. There's a reason why every so often they give you those free upgrades, because once you've sat on the big chair, and like it's turned into a bed, and you've tucked up in a duvet

and flown to LA, the next time you have to fly economy, you just want to kill yourself. It's just horrible. What else have I learnt? Oh, never trust a man who wants to read you poetry or wears a hat. That's very important. What if the hat is part of a uniform?

Oh, that's okay. Cosplay. Look, anything that the men in Magic Mike XXL have done, that's fine. So if they... That's fine so if they okay that's fine what do you think about the value of mistakes oh i thought you're going to say what do you think about magic mike xxl i was much more i mean obviously that's an easy love the thing i love most about magic mike xxl is that in andy mcdowell's character they have dared for the first time to have a female character who one of her main character personality traits is that she

has a very capacious vagina and that that is not seen as a bad thing and she just needs to find the right dick to fill it and I find that really uplifting like because the call to Andy McDowell's agent must have been you ever got this amazing role for Andy obviously Four Weddings and a Funeral was a while ago but we wanted to be Magic Mike XXL now obviously it's a great franchise she's playing a woman with a massive vag how do you feel about that but it's seen as a joyful thing like we woman with a massive vag how do you feel about that but it's seen as a joyful thing like we don't all have tiny mouse fannies like kind of like in the karma sutra they're very honest about this they talk about four different sizes of vagina four different sizes of penis and yet we all have to pretend that we have massive dicks or tiny

vaginas and we don't and i guess and i guess to go back around to what you asked, that is what I've learnt. OK. I'm so glad you answered that and not what's the value of mistakes. Yeah, no. Mistakes, meh. Vagina, forever. Yes. Oh, I have personally absolutely loved this evening.

It's been a complete riot. Do join me please in giving the most roof-raising round of applause to the utterly brilliant Catlin Moran. Thank you. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, I would so appreciate it if you could rate, review and subscribe. Apparently it helps other people know that we exist.