How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S11, Ep8 How to Fail: Maggie O'Farrell

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

For our season finale, I bring you the glorious Maggie O'Farrell. She is one of my favourite authors, and her books include the highly acclaimed novels After You'd Gone, The Hand That First Held Mine, Instructions for a Heatwave and the bestselling memoir I Am, I Am, I Am. Her most recent work of fiction, Hamnet, imagined the untold story of Shakespeare’s son who died at the age of 11. It won the 2020 Women’s Prize.She joins me to talk about resurrecting the untold stories of women, how to be a writer and a parent (Cyril Connolly and his 'pram in the hallway' come in for a bit of a bashing) as well as how she applies concepts of success and failure to her books. She talks about her stammer and her failure to do a PhD and we also discuss how a childhood illness changed her forever, and the various physical repercussions that she still lives with. Plus: why she always finds the back of a tapestry far more interesting than the front...*Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell is out now. You can buy all her books here.*My new novel, Magpie, is out on 2nd September. I'd love it if you felt like pre-ordering as it really helps authors! You can do that here.*How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Naomi Mantin and Chris Sharp. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]*Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpod     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Wearedame, D-A-M-E,.co, C-O. Dame products are also available in selected boot, Sainsbury's and Waitrose stores. Thank you very much to Dame. 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 first picked up a Maggie O'Farrell novel when I was in my 20s. It was After You'd

Gone, her debut, and I adored it. O'Farrell had published it at the age of 27 and it astounded me how someone that young could have written something so vivid, clear and moving. Although she doesn't know it, O'Farrell is a formative influence on me as a writer. Not only is she an incredible prose stylist but her range is phenomenal. Her eight highly acclaimed novels have taken on everything from ghosts and marital breakdown to incarceration and female madness. And she's written a highly acclaimed memoir too, I Am, I Am, I Am, reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her latest novel, Hamnet, which imagined the untold story of Shakespeare's son who died at the age of 11, won the 2020 Women's Prize. O'Farrell was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland and raised in Wales and Scotland.

At the age of eight, she was hospitalised for encephalitis and missed a year of school. Her love of reading helped her through a traumatic period of her life. Perhaps then it was inevitable that she would one day write herself. She once said she couldn't remember a time when she didn't want to commit her thoughts to paper. But O'Farrell took on a number of different jobs before becoming a published author, including waitress, chambermaid, bike messenger, teacher, arts administrator, and journalist. She was the deputy literary editor of The Independent on Sunday. Critics have lauded her exquisite suppleness and elegance,

a quality she shares with one of her favourite authors, Alice Munro, whose selected stories she recently chose as her castaway book on Desert Island Discs. The best writing you can do is the writing you can't not do o farrell said in a recent interview you have to tell the story that is bursting to be told maggie o farrell welcome to how to fail oh that is so nice thank you very much for having me it's such an honor to have you on here. I meant every single word of that. I just remember picking up after you'd gone and being so completely absorbed in the world that you created.

And I always know, if your name wasn't on the cover, I believe that I would know from the first page that it was a Maggie O'Farrell novel because I love your prose so much. But tell me a bit about that notion of a story bursting to be told. Was Hamnet one of those stories for you? It definitely was, although it took me a while to getting myself organised to writing Hamlet, actually.

I think I had the idea. It's funny, I was looking back through an old notebook the other day for some other reason. And it's a notebook which I've had for years. It's one of my longest running ones. And I scribble in any sort of vague ideas or titles or phrases or anything at all and occasionally I sort of thumb through it and I did find an entry from I think it was 2011 and it says something like novel about Shakespeare's son Hamlet obviously at a later date in a different ink I had put square brackets around it so I obviously had gone through it and thought, actually, that's an idea worth returning to. There were lots of sort of spanners that got thrown in my works with it. My main delay, I think, was a weird superstition

that I didn't want to write it before my own son was past the age of 11, which was how old little Hamlet was when he died. Just because I knew that I was going to have to put myself inside the mind of a woman who is forced to sit at her son's bedside and to watch him die. You know, she's unable to save him. And I just knew that I couldn't do that until my own boy was well past. He's now a six foot 17 year old. So not that there was ever a huge risk of him.

Yeah, well, I'm not sure. Insofar as kind of superstitious writing hexes, I think. Yeah, hopefully. I'm interested in that notion because I remember interviewing the novelist Emma Donoghue once and she had written Room, which is all about, I mean, it's just this incredibly vivid and disturbing tale about a mother and her son who are held hostage in someone's cellar. And she said that she used her children as kind of research tools. So there's one scene in that where the boy gets rolled up in a carpet and that's part of his escape. And she did that with her own child, who was the same age. Do you think, I know, dark, I mean, talk about dark. She wanted to see if it worked and if they'd be able to roll up the carpet and she found that it did. Anyway, do you think, I know, dark. I mean, talk about dark. She wanted to see if it worked and if they'd be able to roll up the carpet and she found that it did.

Anyway, do you think you would have been able to write Hamlet were you not a parent yourself? Well, not really. I don't really think it's a kind of necessary equation. I think it would have been a different book, certainly if I hadn't had children, but then it probably would have been a different book. You know, there are so many variables that would have been altered. I think every experience you

go through probably alters your writing, certainly profound, life-changing ones like having children. But no, I don't think you need to have experienced something to write about it, not at all. Obviously, you know, if I hadn't gone to university to study English literature, it probably would have been a different book. Or if I hadn't lived in Scotland and had a patch of ground that I could have planted a medicinal garden you know it would have been different again so I think it's just one of those very variable you know big variable in your life now it's one of those questions I wanted to ask because like Emma Donoghue I interviewed you way back in 2013, we've discovered, even though it feels like 18 months ago. And you had just had your third child. And I remember asking you about that

infamous Cyril Connolly quote that the pram in the hall is the enemy of good art. I know. And you gave such an amazing answer. And I basically just want you to give me the same answer again, because it blew my mind. That feels like a lot of pressure I can't remember you basically said that's not true yeah well I I really loathe that quote and I really loathe and resent the idea that's out there in the ether probably because of Cyril Connolly that you can't be a mother or a parent and to write books I mean it's obviously it's absolute nonsense and we all know that and yet still oh you know always women i have to say get this claim leveled at them often with a slightly sort of malicious gleam in the eye from questioners i mean obviously it's rubbish i mean i don't know it's just one of those things

you know i find it so ridiculous i mean obviously and actually what's really distressing about cyril connolly's quote is he's saying she and by which he says she he means the artist's wife must know that the enemy of good art obviously because women can't be artists in Cyril's world so it is ridiculous but obviously it's total and utter actually I can't say that what I was going to say is too rude nonsense we shall say I don't know there are all kinds of things you could say I don't know a divorce could cost you a book or moving house yeah it's one of those really bizarre equations I mean I think to me the biggest enemy of good art is actually distraction and by which I mean you know these days it's electronic distraction I think the biggest enemy of good

art is the router in the hallway that's the thing we all have to oh I love that Maggie I haven't let you down you haven't you could never let me down you did say something when I first asked you about it which is that it just made you more focused because you knew that you had a certain allotment of time in between child care necessities and actually you felt it might have made you into a better writer I think it has I mean I'm wary to say this because I am very aware that there are women out there who want to write books and also have babies and for whatever reason can't do either and so I don't want to make this big statement saying oh in order to be a good writer because how painful is that to hear for people who

for whatever reason can't have children and of course there's no but I just in terms of my own life certainly I think it has made me focus a lot better and it certainly makes you concentrate a lot better certainly you know my youngest child is now eight so I mean she's obviously at school most of the day now but I do remember in those days of having a tiny baby in the house or a toddler in the house and your brain is kind of shattered like stardust into these and your concentration is interrupted and I think what teaches you which I still find a very useful skill actually is being able to switch very quickly from your domestic life into your creative life. That you've got to make that bridge as short as possible because you've got to make the most of the 20 minute nap or the half hour nap or all those blissful hour naps that you get.

And you haven't got any time to faff about rearranging your pens and sharpening your pencils. You've just got to get down to it. Is there anything that you always need to be in place in order to write? Or are you one of those people who can write anywhere on trains, planes and automobiles and whenever you have a scrap of time?

Oh, wouldn't it be great to go on planes, trains and automobiles? Wouldn't it? Remember those days? Oh, I just thought I suddenly got this flash of this sensation of being in a train. Yes, I pretty much can, actually. I mean, I can write every word, just by necessity, really, just because that's the way life has been.

Because I've been a mum now for 17 years, so it's just one of those things that you learn on the go. I have actually once or twice written while pushing a buggy along, having a notebook balanced on the hood. Not often, but occasionally. Probably if I'm going to really get into a scene or create something I do really need silence that's about the only thing and it doesn't mean it doesn't have to be complete silence I can work in a cafe as long as you know the conversation around me is

just the kind of background hum it's fine but I can't write with music if I can hear music it drives me really crazy I used to live actually once in a bedsit in the next door room there was a man who played a madonna track over and over again honestly i thought i was going to lose my reason that was one of the near-death experiences you had and i am i am i am yeah like his near-death experience actually i should say but i still remember the look of astonishment every time i knocked on his door to say please can you turn it down it was always every time he thought oh is it annoying the entitlement yeah exactly I think although I said in the introduction your novels have astonishing range and they do one of the

things that connects them is that you bring the untold stories of women to light and you do the same in Hamnet which is really although it's Hamnet, it's really Agnes's story, his mother's story, and a sort of study of her grief. How important is that to you to bring these female-driven narratives to light? Well, I think what interests me is the story behind the story, in a sense. I have a friend of mine who does the most beautiful sort of avant-garde embroidery and tapestry. When she shows me her work, what I really like to do is turn it over. Because you have this beautiful perfection on one side, then you turn it over and it's only on the underside that you see the incredible amount of labour that goes into it. All these knots and cross-stitches and crazy paving of effort to make it look beautiful. There's an untold story, isn't there? And I think it's always that that interests me.

And there's probably a reason why a lot of those stories turn out to be female. You know, I never really intended to write so much of Hamlet's mother in the novel. You know, for me, the novel started off as, I know, I always thought it was going to be about fathers and sons and ghosts, actually, and haunting and absence. But actually, what happened was I became so enraged by the way the woman who married Shakespeare has been treated. The way she's been treated for the last 400 odd years since she died was nothing sort of appalling. You know, I'd read really respected scholars and biographers who would make these really terrible, wild claims about her,

that she was ugly, that she was illiterate, that she was stupid, that she had loose morals, she was a slut, she was ugly, you know, she lured this boy genius into marriage. We've been told one single narrative about her for hundreds of years and that is that she trapped him into marriage, that he hated her, that he had to go away to London to get away from her and it's across the board. It goes all the way from biographers and scholars to other novelists to writers of Oscar-winning screenplays. We are always told this story about Shakespeare wanting a retrospective, you know, retrospectively giving Shakespeare a divorce. And I could not find a single shred of evidence to support any of that. And there is actually one portrait of her in existence.

It's a pencil sketch. It was done 80 years after she died, but it was from an Elizabethan original. And actually in it, she's very beautiful. She's got a rather grave expression, a very narrow face, high cheekbones. She looks astonishingly like the actress, Saoirse Ronan, who I think we can all agree is pretty far from being ugly. I was just so taken aback by all this that I, you know, and I wanted readers to forget everything

they think they know about her and to open themselves up to a new interpretation that perhaps they did love each other, perhaps their marriage was a partnership and that he went to London to find work, which actually a lot of men in Stratford-upon-Avon did do because that's where the jobs were. And what's always seemed most telling to me is that at the end of his career, when he retired from the stage in London, you know, he was the equivalent at that point of a multi-millionaire he was incredibly wealthy and all his money he'd sent back to Stratford so he lived in a single room lodging in London and he bought houses and fields and

cottages and things that you know land that he rented out in Stratford and also when he retired he could have set up a household anywhere anywhere in the world if he'd wanted to but he chose to go back to Stratford to live with her and that is recorded fact and that to me speaks volumes speaks much more than any sort of invented opprobrium and misogyny on her behalf oh you express things so beautifully and you handled it so beautifully in Hamnet and you never name Shakespeare in the novel which as a writer myself like that's such a hard thing to do. I mean, there are only so many iterations of he that you can use, but you sort of do it in such a magical way and redress the equilibrium. And it's so interesting. It goes to the root, doesn't

it? Of what we have been taught to think of as great artistic genius. It's the kind of man who is supported by the woman who can sometimes be his wife and sometimes be his muse, or sometimes just be a domestic shrew. And I was so stunned when I read into your inspiration for Hamnet, and I looked at the Wikipedia entry. There's a Wikipedia entry for Hamnet, and it says something something like it's very disputed in scholastic circles what if any impact hamlet's death had on shakespeare and you're like hang on a second i mean it clearly would have had some impact yes i mean it's just i haven't read that wikipedia entries but sentences like those are not unusual in biographies about shakespeare which i find absolutely jaw-dropping because little hamlet is lucky if he gets maybe two mentions in these big 400, 500 page biographies of Shakespeare,

which are works of brilliance, you know, a brilliant detective work and scholarship. They are incredible what scholars have dug up, you know, these strange documents and leads and traces of Shakespeare. Because, I mean, it is a kind of detective hunt because so little is known about Shakespeare. The man, he is a very mysterious and shadowy figure has left a very scant paper trail but at the same time you do find people who are loftily sort of dismissing Hamlet's death and they sort of wrap it up in statistics about child mortality in Elizabethan age which of course was heartbreakingly high but I just refuse to believe that at any point in history, anywhere in the world, the death of your 11-year-old son is anything less than catastrophic and heart-shattering.

And I want to sort of shake these books and I want to say to the people who wrote them, just look at the play through the lens of losing a child. They are the same name in the 16th century. Spelling was a lot less stable and they are completely interchangeable in parish records. So there's no person on earth who approximately three or four years later, after your son died, would use that name for the title of your play, for the name of your protagonist, for the name of the ghost. He would have had to write that name over and over again in manuscripts. He would have had to hear it over and over again in manuscripts. He would have had to hear it over

and over again in rehearsals. He would have had to speak it himself on stage in front of crowds of thousands, in front of people who had no idea of the towering significance that it had for him. And it just seems to me that if you look at the play in that light, it's obviously a message from a father in one realm to an unreachable son in another. The whole play is underpinned by grief and loss. And there is a story, perhaps apocryphal, I don't know that Shakespeare himself took the role of the ghost in the first production of Hamlet at the Globe Theatre. And it doesn't take a psychiatrist to see what he's doing there. He's taking his son's death for himself, saying saying I will be the one that dies and my son

can be the one who lives wow thank you thank you for sharing that before we get on to your specific failures I'd love to ask you one question about how you measure success or failure as a writer and maybe you don't maybe it's not a metric but how do you feel about winning prizes and being a bestseller on the one hand and just the daily trudge of writing and feeling like you're rubbish all the time on the other how do you balance that I mean obviously it's always a fantastic phone call to get somebody telling you that you've won a prize or on a shortlist or any of those things but as you I'm sure know Elizabeth that it's always wonderful when somebody responds to your work or see something in your work or it produces some reaction in them whether or not that person

is on a prize jury or it's somebody in a book signing queue or it's a child in a library who wants to stop you and tell you about their pet rabbit which happened to me recently which was such a great conversation oh that's so sweet was that prompted by one of your books yes it was one there was one of the i've read obviously it was a children's book i'm not expecting small children to read that much but yes and she wanted me to dedicate a book to her but her mum said will you dedicate it to her and she said very very sternly no it has to be dedicated to my rabbit oh so of course I dedicate it to the rabbit. It's always such a great feeling, isn't it? When somebody responds to something you've said, or it produces some kind of reaction or memory in them, you know, because as I'm sure

you know, as we all know, you know, if there is a book that provokes that in you, it becomes part of who you are. It gets twisted into your DNA, doesn't it? You metabolize it and it becomes part of your cells. So it's a great feeling knowing that that can happen sometimes through your books to other people. In terms of sort of commercial idea of success, I take a terribly insular ostrich approach to it all. I completely detach myself from it and try to just pretend it isn't happening or just ignore it.

I don't read my reviews at all and I don't follow sales figures or I've never been diagnosed as dyscalculic, but I think it wouldn't take a very long assessment to realize that I am absolutely appalling. I can't even read out a phone number in the correct sequence. So actually numbers do completely elude me. So when I receive my, I don't know, royalty payments,

I actually completely forget I can look at them and then 10 minutes later I've forgotten what they are which is useful even the word success I don't like but the idea of success that interests me or the one that I'm engaged with is whether or not I feel the writing is working whether or not the book is a success in itself in its own world in its own sphere creativity for me is it happens in a sort of wave pattern I don't know if it's the same for you when you're writing your books but you know you have this huge upswing of confidence and inspiration if you're lucky a couple of days a week you think yes this is it I'm getting close to exactly what I need to say the characters are talking to each other everything's

humming along really nicely and then that's always followed by a huge crash in confidence you know and that's the kind of down swing of the wave where you think this is absolutely useless it has no heartbeat none of these people are believable no one's going to be interested in this but actually you need both because you know you have the upswing to get words down on paper and you think yes yes everything's happening and you write write write and you get you know I don't know 10,000 words or something if you're lucky and then the downswing fall, is when you need to edit yourself. You need to look at yourself with a critical eye and think,

well, that doesn't work and that doesn't work. But maybe this paragraph, maybe there's something in that, there's a kernel in that that might work. So you need the kind of creativity and then you need the edit and then you have, hopefully, it'll be followed in not too long a gap of time by another sort of burst of inspiration and then you'll have the crash, which is when you edit and self-criticise. But you need both. Such a good way of putting it. And I do think you're really evolved. You're very Buddhist in terms of like how you see success and how you detach

yourself. You're in the thing itself. So the thing itself is important, but you detach yourself from how it's received. I just want to be like you Maggie this is the nice edited version what you're not seeing is the me sitting with my head on the desk going in my pajamas and my hair looking like a hayrick going oh I've got I'm gonna I've got to get another job what am I gonna do you do realize this is the edited version that I'm giving you. Fine. That makes me feel slightly better. Let's get on to your failures. So your first failure is one word and you've written it to me as stammer. So tell us about your stammer. The verb to use for this, although the participle is a tricky one because I have a stammer, I had a stammer. There's an interesting conjugation that goes with it. So as a child, I developed a really, really severe stammer,

which is much more unusual in girls than it is in boys. And the funny thing is, I was thinking about this as I was running around the house looking for my headphones to talk to you. My children steal them and I never know where they are. And I was thinking about when it began. And I can't actually pinpoint a moment when I remember it. I do remember being able to speak very fluently. And then I remember that speaking just suddenly

became an absolute terrifying minefield. It became like walking across a ground that you think is solid and grassy and you realise actually it's just full of potholes and marshes and that you're going to fall and trip and possibly break your ankle at any moment. Gosh. Is it related to the time you

spent hospitalised? When I was a young child, I had this kind of repeated sound. So I couldn't say a word. But when I became an adolescent, of course, that I don't know what it was, but I sort of clamped down on that sound. So through adolescence and then on into my 20s and to this day, what I will have is a complete fluency breakdown. Just I won't be able to talk it as if somebody's put a car clamp on my tongue. That's the only way I can describe it. And your chest closes up, your lungs just empty, and your throat closes and you can't produce a single sound, nothing at all.

I have one one absolutely horrifying memory which still wakes me up of I think it was probably maybe the second time I was ever on woman's hour and they surprised me and it's live and see live radio it's absolutely terrifying to me so they said they wanted me to do a reading and so I looked down at the text and obviously it was something that I'd written but I suddenly couldn't say it began with the name of the character was called Elina and Elina is it's a very it's quite hard sound to produce for a stammerer and so I couldn't do it and there was this awful which felt like an incredibly long moment of dead air on live radio on women's hour and I saw Jenny Murray looking at me of her bifocals her her spectacles and then she turned

around and looked at the producers who were in the glass wall my speech just completely vanished on me and my husband said later that he was at home and he had his head in his hands and he was thinking oh come on come on come on you can do it you can do it because he knew exactly what what had happened I think I just put an extra word into it or I said she and that was I was able to do it then it was only after that actually that I got some speech therapy I thought I can't go on like this I have to see a speech and I'd never had speech therapy before not as a child or as a teenager and so I saw this brilliant speech therapist called Moira for a couple of years and she said that having a stammer particularly as an adult is like living with an iceberg that only the very very tip of it is visible above the

water because if you've had the stammer since childhood you've learned all sorts of coping mechanisms and cover-ups but underneath the water there exists this huge mass of freezing jagged ice that nobody else can see but you how utterly terrifying i wonder just hearing you talk about it it feels like at a certain point you became aware that something most humans take for granted like breathing or speaking was an extraordinary detailed effort was there a sense that it sort of coincided with your growing awareness of yourself as a person do you think yes actually I think probably more than anything probably been the most influential thing in my life I'm sure and the most defining thing in my life certainly I do remember as a child sitting in a classroom and the teacher asking question and knowing that I couldn't answer just keeping my hand down and just looking at the other my classmates and as they speak and just thinking how do they do that

you know how incredible that they can just open their mouths and there's these words come out just being astonished by that. Not so much jealous, but just thinking, well, why is it I can't do it? And I think what it does make, particularly as a child, it gives you an incredible sensitivity to language. You ask a child's stammerer a question and they can instantly, inside their head, even as young as eight or nine can think of maybe five or six different synonyms for one word or that and you are constantly as a stammerer editing yourself and rearranging your grammar to avoid your problem sounds so I couldn't say m b's and p's with many other sounds but if somebody asked my name that's really problematic so instead of saying Maggie I had to say you can

call me Maggie I had to launch off on something else it makes you incredibly linguistically dexterous I think at a young age which of course has proved to be quite useful to me in the long run but also just the idea of writing was an absolute joy to me I remember looking at my pen nib and just seeing these words coming out with no stoppages no problems no traumas And it was such a relief and such a joy to be able to pick up a pen and write whatever you wanted to say. Nothing could stop you. Oh, I can imagine the relief of that.

I'd love to ask you about accents because I mentioned in the introduction that you were born in Coleraine in Northern Ireland, which is a weird thing that we sort of have in common in the time that you were moving to Wales. Yes, you were. I was moving to Northern Ireland with an English accent. And how much did you feel like an outsider when you

made that transition? Because I presume you spoke with an Irish accent? Well, I was quite young. I was a toddler, actually, when I moved to Wales. But certainly, yes, I think you're right. We did feel just even having an apostasy in front of your name was difficult and of course Britain in the 70s was not particularly welcoming shall we say to people from Ireland you know relations between Britain and Ireland were at the time at all-time low you know that was terrible things were happening both sides of the sea and it was a really terrible and difficult time you know know, very, very fraught. And so we did, as children, get quite a lot of flack.

And we also moved to a community in South Wales that was quite, I think I was the only person, possibly in my class, who wasn't from the town where we lived. And the same thing happened when we moved to Scotland and we weren't Scottish. And I think also, I mean, my accent varies quite a lot depending on who I'm talking to. And I've had to sort of consciously learn relearn and relearn again how to speak so my voice is a bit strange and I know that it sounds a bit odd and no one can quite work out

where I'm from but that's fine I kind of think what the fact that I'm getting the words out feels miraculous to me so people are just gonna have to deal with it but someone I know someone once said to me in a signing queue I think I'd done a reading I don't think it was the one that we did together but he came up to me and he said he said I really like the way you spoke and I really like what you said he's about I can't stand the way you keep saying kind of and sort of and you keep stopping and saying um I just remember looking at him thinking and I was really astonished and I said to him well actually I've got a really bad stammer and I said I sometimes say those things to cover up my stammer and he said well you really need to learn not to

oh my gosh wow thanks it didn't bother me I just thought god so yeah thanks for that you're lucky I can say anything and I thought god there's people like you that give people stammers honestly but I did think god and I thought no I'm not gonna internalize that I'm just gonna brush it off it's people like you that give people stammers honestly really but I did think come on I thought no I'm not gonna internalize that I'm just gonna brush it off it's obviously some issue with it I'm sure you've been asked this before because it's a deeply unoriginal question but I wonder how much you feel because of the various things that you went through in your early life moving home not really fitting in having that year in hospital, being close to death and developing the stammer. How much did that make you into an observer of

people? And do you think then that that has fed into your writing? Do you think that most writers are observers? I think you have to be really, don't you? And I think the most important thing as a writer is to be curious, isn't it it you've got to be curious about other people and what makes them tick and why they do the things they do and why they say the things they say and it's more that I think it's more curiosity that for me that seems to be in the ascendant rather than perhaps the outsider sort of someone who's a bit of an outsider but I always was certainly I was never somebody in with the in crowd and that's never really bothered me I'm quite happy to be in the out crowd I quite like the out crowd they're my people I think certainly moving house I'm sure had something to do with it quite a lot and moving

country because you've got to I'm sure you remember this as well from moving to Northern but when you get to a new school you've got to instantly work out how everything works and who the alphas are and who the betas are and where you fit in the structure and you've got to find the people that you think you can get along with and you've got to rapidly assimilate all that information and observation very quickly to survive in a school don't you in a new school i think being ill as well i think a severe illness is like nothing else you know you pass through it and it is it's a very profound experience and it's a bit like passing through a fire you are remade when you come out the other side and I think that happening at such a young age as it did to me does completely change you

you know you come back from the brink I think especially if you know you've had a near-death experience as I did you come back from that brink of mortality knowing you are different you know you are wiser and you're sadder and you're different from the children around you who don't, at the age of nine or ten, understand so much about mortality and risk and danger as you do. So it does mark you out, I'm sure. It's so interesting because hearing you talk, so much of your work makes sense. The fact that you're so aware of the thin membrane between life and death and sort of ghostly presences which haunt the pages of your incredible novels and also the fact that you're so good at evoking a sense of place and a sense of a house and a building you almost give as much care to that as you do your human

characters and it just all makes sense hearing you speak about your childhood it's really well I think we're kind of geological in our structure aren't we there's bedrock that's laid down in your early life and it's always there it never goes away and I think there are certain seismic events that can come up from underneath and force that to the surface unexpectedly and we are all layered like that you know our experience lay down you know new stratas but it's always there nothing goes away I mean I'm literally noting down the brilliance of your metaphors as you speak. I'm like, God, that's a great metaphor. The turned over tapestry, the geological layers. Oh, it's just so good. Let's get on to your second failure, which is failing to get, I'm so interested, you chose this one, failing to get a good enough result in your finals to do a

PhD. Yeah yeah what were you studying and yes how did you feel that you'd failed so I was studying English literature and I had come from Cambridge we should make clear I know I don't say that but okay we I know no one who goes Cambridge ever does I'm really not one of those people who talks about it oh in a loud voice so I come from a comprehensive school in Scotland and it was a bit of a shock to the system actually going to Cambridge I'm not quite sure what I expected but I was really surprised by the other people there and they just seemed very different from me and I realized there was a boy there's a certain sort of element at Cambridge who are very very

noisy and do make their presence felt I do remember there was a boy there's a certain sort of element at Cambridge who are very very noisy and do make their presence felt I do remember there was a particular group of people who referred to me as Stig as in Stig of the dump when they found out I'd gone to a comprehensive school I know but that's grotesque I know unbelievable isn't it it was a really hilarious joke that they found but you know there was just I mean I didn't care you know I really wasn't the kind of person to take that kind of thing to heart at all. And of course, you always find your people. And I did, actually, but it just took me a bit longer than I had thought.

So I'd always had this slight feeling that I shouldn't really be there. I don't know, I didn't kind of look or sound like the person who, a lot of the people who were at Cambridge. And I do remember being quite taken aback, actually, that most of the other people in my supervision group seemed to have a working knowledge of the Iliad. And we were sort of expected to be able to do that. And I do remember actually one tutor saying to me, he gave us something in French. And I said, oh, I can't read French. I haven't done French since I was 13.

And he said, well, you probably really should get it. He said, why don't you get your parents to send you to Paris for the summer? You know, I wanted to say to him, my parents don't have the resort. You might as well say to me, why don't you get your parents to send you to the moon for the summer? It's just ridiculous. But I hope it's better than it was. I mean, this was what the early 90s. And I hope it's a bit better and people are a bit more aware, of different socioeconomic statuses anyway so but

what happened and so I really wanted to do a PhD and I was doing my final year dissertation on Gawain and the Green Knight I really fell in love with medieval literature and I had this whole theory that Gawain and the Green Knight is actually written by a woman that's why it's anonymous you know she's or he or she it's just by nobody knows who it is they refer to the going the green knight poet or the pearl poet and it's possible they're the same person and so I had this fantastic supervisor and he got very excited and he said you must do PhD and and we both got really excited I thought this is brilliant this is what I want to do with my life I'm going to write this thing and I'm going to write a thesis about this poet who I think is female and anyway so what happened was that I just didn't do very well in my finals and I got a 2-2 which which was actually I was so devastated because obviously I needed a

first to get the funding and I didn't even come close to getting a first so my supervisor had said to me that I would get a first for my dissertation but actually I got a low third what oh that's so fascinating though isn't it Because you went against the prevailing orthodoxy and it's probably marked by men. That's what he said because he phoned me off and he was really furious and he said he'd made some internal inquiries and he'd found out who marked it.

But the thing is, I did actually also completely flunk my paper on tragedy. So it wasn't, it wasn't just, you know, it just, I don't know. That's a lovely metaphor too. It was, but I was absolutely devastated because it felt I was the only thing I was good at you know I could do exams I could revise I could get the work I could pass them and it felt that that was my kind of ability there wasn't much else I was

good at you know I couldn't do sport it just felt that that was the only thing I was good at so I was just to have that rug pulled out from under my feet felt absolutely devastating and I didn't know what to do you know with my life because I had this whole thing planned out so it was terrible I thought it was an absolute tragedy but actually now when I look back it feels like an intervention from some higher power saying you know you'd never be a good I would have been a terrible academic actually I really would have done I'm sure you would have been wonderful but you're someone who wants to engage with the world and is I can see what happened but I can also see why it was so devastating. Yeah it was devastating age 21 I was absolutely devastated and I thought my whole life would be derailed and that I was

never going to amount to anything and also fed into that terrible kind of imposter syndrome that I'd had at the back of my mind since I arrived at Cambridge it felt that I sort of said well actually no you don't really belong here you don't have what it takes and you met your husband at Cambridge and you were friends for many years first Will Sutcliffe is that right now what degree did he get he seems like a terrible thing I'm sure he went by himself he got a 2.1 and how did that feel at that point he was just one of many of my friends I think we were both going out with other people at the time you know he was just in a big group of people and I really liked him and I've never had any sense of resentment about anyone else's achievements not at all I would never think well they didn't deserve it but I did know that was that wouldn't

be in my vocabulary at all I don't think possibly have revealed more about myself there than anyone else in that question. It's interesting, Elizabeth. No, I'm sure not. No, it wasn't as if we were kind of vying for or jockeying for any kind of space. He was just doing the same course as me along with many other people. So after that devastation, what happened and how did you get over it? I just ran away. That was the way I dealt with it all I went out it was the recession it was 1993 and I think I did apply for some jobs I actually applied for lots of jobs in

Waterstones in London I got turned down by every single one which to this day still makes me sad which I had and actually I bet you they'd give you a job now do you think maybe I'll reapply get my CV together it was this kind of stupid decision you make well it wasn't a stupid decision actually in the long run but it was a kind of very rash decision that I think I would have made when I was 21 and I did I just decided to go to Hong Kong which was a slightly random decision because partly because I didn't speak any languages not being able able to do my parents' decision to Paris for the summer. So I thought, well, Hong Kong, that's far away. They speak English there, or some people speak English there,

and so I'll just go there. So I did. I just packed a rucksack and scrabbled together some money for a ticket and went out there. I had a friend who was out there already, and he'd said, oh, you can come out and you can get a job teaching English here. And so that is what I did. Have I remembered this right?

There was a whole Hong Kong aspect to My Lover's Lover, your second novel. Is that right? Distance Between Us, I think, one of them. Distance Between Us. Yeah, Distance Between Us is a Hong Kong. Yeah, it starts in Hong Kong. Yeah, that's right. So I lived there for a year and it was absolutely fantastic.

It was actually just what I needed. I remember my parents being absolutely appalled when I said, by the way, I'm just going to Hong Kong to teach English there. They just thought, why would you do that? You know, this is absolutely crazy. And they didn't try to stop me, but obviously, you know, because I was an adult at this point, but they made it pretty clear that I was making a big mistake. But actually, it was amazing. And it was just what I needed. I needed a total change of scene and being in this incredibly exciting city. So it's very varied in persona, Hong Kong. You know, a lot of people think it's just high-rises and skyscrapers. And there is that element to it, of course. But actually, it's only a tiny, tiny percent of the city. The city's vast and it's also the territory is huge. So much of it is actually wilderness and

mountains and beaches and far-flung islands where at that time, I don't know about now, I'm sure it's very different now, but at that time you could go out and you could just get a little sandpan, a boat, and you could go out and you could eat sort of fresh fish on the beach cooked for you and in a sort of little tiny stall. It was amazing. It was wild in all senses of the world. And then I know people are rightly fascinated in how novelists become novelists, how they get published, just the practical element of that. So you became a journalist. You had various other jobs along the way, but ultimately you ended up as the deputy literary editor of The Independent on Sunday. Was that when you started writing after you'd gone? No, I think I was working at the Poetry Society and I started writing it there. It was in fits and starts. I'd wanted to be a poet very much until that time. And I was going to

evening classes given by the Irish-American poet Michael Donaghy, who was an absolutely brilliant teacher. And so I was writing a lot of poetry and I did get a few things published in quite small poetry magazines. And then what happened was that I went to stay with a friend of mine for the weekend and his mother was what we would now call upgrading. And she was getting rid of really old Macintosh. You know those really old ones that are sort of built like a brick, very solid. And it was sitting by the front door. I don't know what she was going to do.

And I walked past it a couple of times and I plucked up the courage and I said to her, could I have it or I borrow it just for a bit and she said yes sure you know I'm getting rid of it take it so I took it and actually I took it home and that night I have a really strong memory I was living in this quite manky house in Camden that had a rat in the kitchen and lots of infestation of slugs it wasn't the best house and I just remember opening up and I started writing prose for the first time and I'd written a bit of prose I had prose in notebooks and various things. And I had written two paragraphs of something when I was coming back from Hong Kong. I came back over land and I was actually in Moscow. And I had written two things about a mirror that I'd seen in Tolstoy's house.

And I remember digging those out and writing them. And then I just started writing after you'd gone. And those two paragraphs still exist. It's really weird. I wrote them in 1994, several years before I even started writing the book. But I remember digging them out of that notebook and they survived. It's really weird. They're still there right at the beginning of the final part

about a woman looking into a mirror and not seeing the reflections she wants to see. And so that was it. And I never really wrote poetry again. And it was something about having a keyboard and a screen and I just completely fell for the long form prose medium of a novel and it was like suddenly finding I possessed wings and I'd never known they were there underneath my skin and I got them out and I flexed them and I thought yes this is what I meant to do this is what I to do. So much to be grateful to your ex for, or to your ex's mother. Thanks goodness she was upgrading.

I should send her a card one day. Your third failure is about the various physical failures that have resulted from that childhood illness we talked about. So tell us about those. from that childhood illness we talked about. So tell us about those. I got encephalitis when I was eight. And I woke up one day at the end of my summer holidays with a terrible headache, a headache. I've never felt a headache like it.

And pretty rapidly by the end of that week, I had lost all control of my voluntary functions. So I couldn't stand, I couldn't lift my hand, I couldn't hold a pen and I shook uncontrollably and I had a taxi. So very rapidly, I was't stand, I couldn't lift my hand, I couldn't hold a pen and I shook uncontrollably and I had a taxi. So very rapidly I was in hospital, clearly taken to the main national hospital in Cardiff and I spent a long time there. And the doctors said at the time, well, first they thought I would die and then when I didn't, they said I would never walk again, I'd be in a wheelchair, I'd need to go to a special assistance school and I wouldn't ever

be able to hold a pen or pick up a book or anything at all and it's only actually thanks to the incredible efforts and determination of physiotherapists that I am ambulatory today and I can hold a pen. My parents still have lots and sheets of paper with my efforts to learn to write again so you can see you know a sort of a year later I was forming letters that were maybe the size of saucers, and then they got a bit smaller and a bit smaller, a bit more controlled. And so for a long time, I was registered disabled and was in a wheelchair. But gradually, I did find my feet again, quite literally and figuratively. And I moved to Scotland when I was 13. I do remember saying to my mum at that time, I don't want anybody at my

new school to know, you know, I don't, I suddenly realised that I could reinvent myself. I do remember saying to my mum at that time, I don't want anybody at my new school to know. I suddenly realised that I could reinvent myself. I didn't have to be this girl who had been in a wheelchair, who'd been disabled. I could be somebody who was just clumsy and bad at sport. So at that point, I said, right, that's it. We're not going to tell anybody enough. And so I thought I can leave it all behind. I can be somebody else else and I think I did cling to that illusion for quite a long time but of course you never can be you always take yourself with you so I still to this day I mean you know I should probably preface this by saying that I do realize that I am incredibly lucky that not only did I not die but I got out of the loophole of leading a dependent life in a wheelchair and I can hold a pen and I lead an independent life

into all intents and purposes people would never know that I had I'm reluctant to use the word disability because I don't really have a disability anymore I did it's very mild there's a lot of things that I hide and a lot of things that I conceal and so the thing that I really hate actually is an overcrowded table so if I ever go to it's particularly kind of smart dinners where there are lots of particularly glasses wine glasses are an absolute nightmare to people who have slight motor control problems that I do they're terrible things you know it's so difficult to grip and so easy to knock over and lots and lots of cutlery when I go to a dinner like that I barely eat anything and I keep my hands on my lap because

I know that if I try and pick something I'm going to knock over everything or smoke people in wine and I have a balance issue so I can't say walk in the dark if I get out of bed at night I have to crawl and I have to leave a light on because I can't I need to be able to see so what I've got is a difficulty with proprioception I don't know where my body is in relation to space and I can't balance so occasionally if I'm having a bad day with my perception I sometimes open know where my body is in relation to space and I can't balance so occasionally if I'm having a bad day with my perception I sometimes open my eyes and everything looks upside down and I will turn my head and it's as if my brain is still looking the other way so the room will pivot won't pivot or it will pivot or it'll pivot too much and sometimes the room moves too much and

but I have these conversations with my husband and I'll say to him is the floor shaking and he'll say no I'll say is it just me or is the light really bright is everything glimmering he'll say no that's just you so there are things that I don't even know are unusual or not the thing I have real trouble with is my left and right so if I'm holding say something for the rubbish bin in my right hand and say a gold bracelet in my left hand I've got to approach the bin and think okay I really need to put in left hand rubbish left hand rubbish but inevitably I will chuck the diamond bracelet in the bin not that I have a diamond bracelet but uh not anymore you've put it in the bin yes God the thing I had to be really careful with was when I was holding a baby and maybe something

I used to think okay don't put the baby down on the table put the cup down on the table the cup the cup the cup and what's it like for you on a plane plane is fine basically I feel like I'm on a plane most of the time anyway right because the floor does lurch and tip sometimes and you know I've always got to look down and see where so I can't look up I need to look down if I'm climbing stairs I've got to really make sure I'm looking down at my feet no one should ever talk to me or address an interesting remark to me while I'm climbing stairs because I probably fall no that doesn't bother me and I can you know I can ride a bike and it just sort of varies and there are days when particularly if I've been writing or I'm pushing myself physically I have to do yoga and exercise and physio every day to make sure that my because my musculoskeletal structure isn't very strong

and I've got to make sure that ticks over but it happens about three times a year maybe I just have a complete neurological meltdown and my brain just gives up and I get out of bed in the morning and I think actually I can't walk across the room and I usually just have to spend the day in bed or so and my husband just says to me you've just overdone it haven't you and I say yeah and he says okay just stay there but you know small price to pay yeah by the way not coming across at all as ungrateful that is loud and clear that you feel very lucky but can I ask about the impact that your illness had on your family your childhood family I don't know if you have siblings but I imagine it was a very traumatic period of time for all of you.

Yeah, I think it was. I mean, in a sense, I think I was at the time, certainly I was probably the one least affected by it. You know, I was at the eye of the hurricane in a way and I was in hospital. And I think it must have been, I've got two sisters, one older, one younger. I think it must have been awful for them, actually, because we lived 30 or 40 miles away from the hospital. And so my parents would come in and see me as obviously as much as they could and now when I think about that I think well god who's looking I mean I'm sure somebody was but the idea that their lives were disrupted and my parents were away and probably incredibly worried and frightened and I think it must have been very hard I mean I think my younger sister was five at the time I remember her being

quite matter of fact about it and actually being desperate to have rides in my wheelchair I remember that but I think it must have been harder for my older sister certainly if she was if I was eight she would have been 10 or 11 so yes you must have been a lot more aware of the stress and the anxiety of it I think I mean just the terror of being okay one day and then everything changing the next is a profoundly life-altering and life-shaking experience so do you feel like there was a life that you lived before the age of eight and then there was a life that you lived afterwards and there's sort of different lives a bit I mean actually I was so young that my sense of who I was before being ill is quite misty I do have a sense of being in motion you know know, and being very sure

of my body. But of course, at the time, you don't think about those things. It just is, particularly as a child, it just is what it is. And I remember not having that for quite a long time afterwards. Still not really now these days. So there is a kind of trace memory of it, but really it feels so fleeting. It just is who I am. And it's funny, someone asked me when I was talking about when I wrote my memoir and somebody asked me they said if you could take it away if you could change it and not have it happen to you would you if you had this kind of supernatural power which is a pretty strange question and actually I said no I wouldn't because it's just part of who I am I'll give thanks every day the fact that I survived and the fact that I am able-bodied now and ambulatory

but I wouldn't take it away it It's just part of who I am. I mean, that's really at the core of this entire podcast. So you brought us to the most beautiful ending, which is that we are the sum of all of our experiences, whether they were good ones at the time or life-altering ones or things that felt like failure. I'm so glad that you didn't do a PhD, Maggie O'Farrell, because you've gifted us with your beautiful books and your incredible prose and your art for metaphors. So I'm very glad for every single one of your failures. And

thank you so much for coming on How to Fail. That's my pleasure it was a really great thank you for having me. Today's episode of How To Fail is sponsored by Dame. Dame are on a mission to make periods positive for people and the planet. That's why their strap line is bleed red, think green. Their range of period products is aimed to make your period more comfortable and less impactful on you and the planet. Dame's famous reusable pads are made with their patent-pending Dame Dry Construction. Fast-wicking material. I love that word, fast wicking, designed to be thinner, drier, and far more comfortable than traditional pads. Having worn

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