How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S17, Ep6 Diana Evans: the bestselling author on writing routines, dealing with her inner critic and living life to the fullest

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

TW: SuicideDiana Evans is the award-winning, bestselling author of A House for Alice, Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a. Her third novel, Ordinary People, was one of my favourites of the year when it was published in 2018 - and it was shortlisted for the Women's Prize. Now, she's written a critically acclaimed follow-up, A House for Alice, set against the backdrop of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. Diana joins me to discuss how she writes (and manages failure in her writing), the curse of perfectionism, the importance of tackling social justice in fiction and her abject inability to complete her list of '10 Things To Do Before I'm 50' in time. She also talks movingly about the death of her twin sister by suicide and how this forever shapes the life she now lives.Thank you Diana, for opening up to me and for the magical words you put on the page.--A House for Alice by Diana Evans is out now.--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 @howtofailpodDiana Evans @dianaevansop 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. Diana Evans is one of my favourite contemporary novelists, the award-winning, best-selling author of the novels Ordinary People, The Wonder, 26A, and A House for Alice, which was published in April. Her work is acutely observed, lyrically expressed, and threaded through with the kind of profound cleverness that also makes itself accessible. Her books are personal stories interwoven with political counterpoints, studded with occasional excursions into the supernatural. I love her writing with acute fervour. And you don't just need to take my word for it.

Her prize nominations include the Guardian and Commonwealth Best First Book Awards, Ordinary People received the Southbank Sky Arts Award and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Evans grew up in Neasden, North West London, one of six sisters raised by a Nigerian mother and a Yorkshire-born father. After university, she became a dancer before choosing to pursue writing. She started out in magazine journalism and completed her debut, 26A, on the creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia. I'm always hoping that I'll offer something that will help someone who is feeling lost or unseen or desperate, she has said. I think literature has a power. It can rescue people at the right time. Diana Evans, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you, Elizabeth. It's wonderful to be here. I actually can't

believe you're sitting here in front of me because your words have taken me on such magnificent journeys. And they are those rare novels, I can always remember exactly where I was when I was reading them. And ordinary people accompanied me on a solo retreat to Mexico, I was writing a travel piece. And I was at this yoga retreat with lots of very elderly people. And ordinary people, it was like you were my friend with me. And I just if I haven't made it clear already in the introduction, I love your writing so much. I was so joyful when a proof of A House for Alice landed in my hands. And I suppose I wanted to start by asking you, just picking up on that quote that I ended on, whether literature rescued you at the right time. Literature always rescues me, actually. I think reading is an essential part of me. It's like food to me.

If I'm not reading or if I don't have time to read of a day, I feel bereft or a sense of loss of a day. But there are certain books that have really helped me. When I was in my 20s, I read Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast, which is a book about the death of his partner to HIV and I read that at a time when I had lost somebody close to me and there's such a beauty in his writing and I really got lost in the beauty and found it very comforting that such beauty could come out of such pain that was a really really meaningful realisation to me. I think when I'm writing, I'm always trying to pull out, to create something beautiful in order to honour something painful. I think that's really at the heart of my writing.

It's at the heart of this podcast too. So you're in the right place, that idea of beauty and learning and growth from pain what's the first book you can ever remember reading as a child I mean were books part of your childhood were you in a house surrounded by books I wasn't actually I mean we had the Britannica encyclopedias and my dad's DIY books and really boring we didn't really have literature in the house it wasn't a writerly household at all and I remember reading John Fowle's The Magus that was when I was I was a teenager I was about 13 or 14 and I was sitting on a bean bag I remember sitting there for the whole weekend and I couldn't put this book down and I would just get up to go to the loo or eat or something. But I was just amazed that I was

just completely immersed in the world of this book and the mystery of it. It was really magical. And I think that feeling of being completely captured by a book, that really stayed with me. And that's something that I find so powerful about writing. When you're actually writing, you yourself are immersed in the world of it. But to be able to take somebody else away in that way, it feels me up as the reader. And you combine that with these acute observations and insights about what's going on in individual characters' minds. And you do it so fluidly. And I wanted to ask you, because I had no idea that you started out as a dancer but whether you think that informs how you write those sort of rhythms and that fluidity of dance is that how your

writing is also shaped yeah I think that the dancer me is in the words as well and when I was a dancer I was in my early 20s. At that time, I was already writing poetry. And I was trying to write fiction. And at some point, I came to a decision that I had to basically make a decision about what I was going to do with my career, whether I was going to write or whether I was going to dance. And I decided that I had more to give to the world through words, through writing. But I think I've always been looking for the sense of movement that I've lost from dance in the work, in the writing. I think the poetry is very important in my prose

because that to me is a form of dance because it's rhythm focused and pace focused. And so there is an element of, I think, choreography almost when I'm writing, not just within the sentences and the rhythm of the sentences, like one sentence leads on from another sentence. The rhythm is very important, but also the rhythm of the whole book, the pattern it makes. It's almost like you're positioning a series of elements into a pattern that works and is coherent. So I guess I am thinking in a dancerly way when I'm writing. It's almost like I'm dancing with the pen. Oh, that's so good. So let's talk about A House for Alice because A House for Alice picks up on characters that we

met in Ordinary People. So Melissa and Michael, who are no longer together, who do have this yearning for what their relationship once was. Michael's new partner, Nicole, who's one of the best characters I've ever read on the page. Thank you. Oh my gosh, I'm obsessed with her. She's got such strength of character. And she's also got this feeling of just slight disappointment that she's not Beverly Knight. She's a singer. She's a sort of job slight disappointment that she's not Beverly Knight she's a singer she's a jobbing singer and she's sort of fabulous but even as a reader you get the impression life should be more for her because she is so fabulous yeah I want more for her yes I want a whole novel on Nicole but we'll come back to that I'd love to do that oh my gosh I yeah I enjoyed her company

so much and Alice the titular Alice is the matriarchal figure so she's Melissa's mother and she's also the mother to these other two women and the book opens with her ex-husband dying in a house fire and she is then presented with this opportunity of moving back to Nigeria she never feels like England's quite been home and you ask the question of what home really is and what it represents. And you do all of this against the backdrop of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. So Cornelius, Alice's ex-husband, dies in a house fire on the same night as Grenfell Tower goes up in flames. Why was that conjunction of events important for you? I wanted to try to write about Grenfell. I felt like I had a responsibility to,

just as a Londoner, as a writer, I do feel that writers have a call to record events, to remember and to try and not let people who've been wronged be forgotten in people's hearts. So it was very important to me to kind of mark Grenfell in the same way that I'd marked the election of Obama in Ordinary People. But at the same time, I wanted to go into the novel on a kind of a personal, more almost microscopic level as well in terms of Cornelius' situation. And I thought about placing the two fires at different times, like a week apart or something, but it didn't work. And I thought the extremity of having the two fires at the same time,

the Cornelius fire is a few hours earlier on the same evening. It was a way of really highlighting the horror of Grenfell because it was set against this other smaller fire. And I found that it was a lot to handle, the two fires, but it also gave me lots of space to really explore the impact of it in terms of London, the city of London, but also on a kind of a smaller, more intimate level in the lives of this particular family. Yes. Well, I think you do that very well, because I think that the sad truth is that when there is a tragedy of such scale as Grenfell, and lots of people die at once, and particularly if they're marginalised people in some way, there's a tendency to homogenize that story. And what you did very brilliantly was you depicted the horror of dying in a fire from an individual perspective. And so you brought that home to us. And it is one

of those things that you do repeatedly in your novels. So Barack Obama and actually the death of Michael Jackson in Ordinary People, Princess Diana in 26A. You're a political writer. You've been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. Is that something that you would label yourself as a political writer? My writing does have an enduring political backdrop. I mean, I'm most interested in the really personal psychologies and neuroses of my characters. That's what really interests me most and the dynamics between them and those small moments of personal transformation and revelation.

But I do love drama as well and I like accentuating these smaller neuroses against the backdrop of these huge sweeping events it's a kind of layering because it makes the the closer angle more powerful somehow it accentuates it and with Grenfell it was really important to me to name some of the people who'd died such as Khadija Say the artist and Zainab Shukair I mean it's a way of marking someone's existence and I think the writing is political because it has a desire to give something to the world I always feel like I want my writing to have some kind of social value, some kind of social purpose. That's always been really important to me. And I think recording events, recording people's lives at a particular

historical moment, that's really central. And I mean, I'm very much influenced by the Tolstoy project in War and Peace and Anna Karenina actually but the recording of a particular group of society and in his case it was a Russian aristocracy in my case it's the black British middle class at particular historical moments so I'm really driven by that premise. And it's a premise that has been shockingly underexplored, I would say, the black British middle class. Definitely. Yeah, definitely. I still think there's a real dearth of books, fiction, on screen material as well, that is just about everyday life in black Britain. I mean, I think there are so many more books that need to be written. I always thought I would write

maybe four books. But I feel now that I've got to the end of four books, I feel like there's so many more stories that I need to tell that just aren't out there. And there are so many more black writers now writing and being published, which is wonderful, but I think we have so much work to do in terms of balancing the playing fields and filling in the gaps. If you stop writing at four books, I will take to the streets in protest.

Okay, I'll do it for you, Elizabeth. Thank you. Why did you decide to revisit your characters from Ordinary People in A House for Alice? So I'm trying to work... So Ordinary People was 2018, wasn't it? So it's been... How many years is that? Five years.

Five years, yes. Okay. Why did you decide to revisit them? They were talking in my head. And I was working on a children's novel. And I wasn't really feeling it. It wasn't working for me. And there was all this Grenfell happened.

And Windrush scandal happened. You know, Grenfell has killed like 72 people. Windrush has killed 26 people so far. And the whole kind of dishonour and just political disgrace that we've been dealing with from the British government. I was so appalled by everything and felt this desire to record it in the same way that I've recorded previous events. And the characters were still there.

Nicole was actually quite loud in my head and I'd never kind of met her before. And sometimes that happens. A character will just appear on the strength of other characters that are already existing. And Nicole just appeared. She was just this firework. And it occurred to me that Michael was married,

and that was who she was. And when I realized that, that was the spark where I thought, okay, I have another novel here. So that's when I realised that that was the spark where I thought okay I have another novel here so that's when I started working on it. You describe them almost as ghosts characters which I find interesting because there are ghosts in your novels sometimes or supernatural elements but does it actually feel like that that someone just appears one day you're like oh nice to meet you Nicole it's like being haunted yes they don't talk to me they they talk to each other I mean I don't really agree with this idea of characters doing things

by themselves I do think the author is very much in control of them but they do live in your own head but they're definitely alive and I always find myself having to write things down that they're saying I keep post-its with me wherever I go in the house there's post-its and there's a notebook in my bag because when something is spoken in my head between characters I have to record it because that is the book talking to me you know the author is in dialogue with their book constantly while I'm in the throes of a novel it's almost like being possessed. Wow the book is talking to you I've never heard someone say that and how do you then actually write so you've got these post-it notes this notebook and you're being haunted by your characters your sentences are so exquisite that I just wonder how much work they take it also reads

as if it's just pouring out of you, that fluidity again. I want to know more. I want to drill down into how you actually write and how much of it is reworking or whether there is any reworking at all. Yeah, I'm quite a slow writer. It takes me a long time and I want it to feel like it's fluid. I wanted to have this natural feel to it, but it's really hard to achieve that. I remember when I was writing 26A and I had been working on it for a couple of years, it wasn't really working. I changed the structure, went back to the beginning of the story chronologically and

wrote from beginning to end. But trying to write the beginning was so difficult, trying to get the sentences to work. I didn't know where I was going so I let the sentences follow one another so I write a sentence and it's the right sentence and then the next sentence leads on naturally from it but it's got to feel right each sentence has to feel right and the direction has to feel right and I remember sitting for hours and days trying to get the first few paragraphs of 26A written. And it was so difficult. I think I got to about 300 words and thought, I just can't do this, because it was like I'd started something and it was right, but I couldn't kind of sustain it. So it's really painful, actually, trying to get the rhythm right and trying to get the forward

motion. And this sense of naturalness is difficult to achieve on a sustained kind of novel length basis and I have found that the more books I write I think the language has changed I think there is slightly less emphasis on the language than there was in 26a and I think I've surrendered a little bit to plot, whereas I used to think that you just didn't need a plot. You know, the language is enough. The language can be the story. I don't entirely believe that anymore.

I mean, I'm always in conflict with plot, actually. I find it quite overbearing, the need to kind of have a narrative structure, because I'm really interested in language but you do need the plot so the plot kind of facilitates the ability to have freedom with the language it's a difficult balance yes and that idea of getting the sentence right do you find that if you haven't got the sentence right then the next sentence doesn't follow and that's how you know okay yeah exactly okay or the next sentence won't come

if the sentence before isn't right wow it's just riveting I find it so it's so rare that you get the chance I feel so lucky that I get the chance to interview one of my literary heroes and just be like peer into your brain let me part the sides you wouldn't want to be in my brain I am very aware that 26a was based on a tragic personal experience and I want to be respectful of your grief around that but I also don't want to ignore it and so I'm just going to ask you whether you feel comfortable telling us what that was and then we can move on knowing that we've paid honour to it and it will inform our conversation but I don't want to make you talk about something that's too painful. No I'm fine with talking about it actually this month is the 25th anniversary of the death of my twin, she died by suicide when we were 26.

And that was the catalyst really for writing 26A. I wanted to build a monument to the fact that she'd existed and to try and encapsulate what it felt like to be a twin and to lose a twin and to become a lone twin. And that's an ongoing journey, you know, 25 years later. it felt like to be a twin and to lose a twin and to become a lone twin. And that's an ongoing journey, you know, 25 years later. It's still a shock to me that she is not here anymore. And I think almost as time goes on, maybe the loss increases because you've lost the potential for, I don't know, like she never knew my kids, they never met her, we didn't turn 50 together.

The kind of loss increases in a way, so there's more to regret. I think when it first happened, I could think of it in a more positive way in terms of, well, we had a quarter of a century together and I'm grateful for that. But now it's like we've lost a quarter of a century. So, you know now it's like we've lost a quarter of a century so you know it's tricky I still feel a sense of duality that she's somehow within me that's where the supernatural element in 26a came from the feeling that I had that she was within me and existing and breathing inside me I still have that feeling quite strongly I'm so sorry for your loss and thank you for talking about that so beautifully. You wrote an extraordinary piece for The Guardian about Paula, your sister, and I will link to it in the show notes for anyone who might have experienced a similar kind of loss. But yes,

it strikes me very much that what you experienced, it makes sense that you feel there's that porous line between our physical avatars and the souls of your characters or your beloved sister still being within you. Yes, I mean, because I feel that I'm connected to something beyond reality because of my sister. In terms of storytelling as well, I've always been really fascinated by what may exist beyond us. And that element of the supernatural is a really important part of my writing because it gives me a space to play, really, and to really delve into psychologies and memory. There's the same element in science fiction, the idea that there's another world, and there's another world of possibility, and things can happen there that you can explore

in a way that you can't in something that's fully realistic. It's like realism isn't enough for me. I love realism. I want my characters and the world of the book to feel real, which is partly why I use the political events as well to ground it in reality. But there also has to be a beyond that where the story can seep into.

Yes, realism is not the full story. Yeah. Before we move on to your failures, there is a buried trauma at the heart of a house for Alice and I think you write it very well because you don't write it in a way so you write around it and you imply and it's a bit like going to a fantastic horror movie where you don't ever see the monster. And was that a deliberate decision to not show too much? Yeah, it was. I wanted to focus more on the impact of it on a woman's life

and to think about the way lots of women I know go through their lives with either memory or a possibility or fear of violence. We walk with this threat and that's a very real aspect of being a woman so that felt like it was important to mark and to to flag yes even if it hasn't happened to us we know so well that the possibility the probability is that it will or might or is around every corner yeah and that is that is terrifying and so unjust do you think this is an inelegant question but do you think you're more interested in

in writing women than writing men no I love writing men you're very good at writing men she said from her it gives me a break from being a woman I love being in a man's head I love putting my own new roses into a man. That's really interesting. I've done that with Damien. Huh. Yeah, I love swapping genders in my writing. Has your mother read the book? No, she hasn't. Will she?

Yeah. Okay. Because you said that the character of Alice is slightly based on her. Yeah, it's drawn from her. She's the beginning of Alice. What do you think she'll think of it? I hope she'll like it. I don't know if she's read all of my books.

She's not much of a reader, so she might read like a couple of chapters. I think it would take her many years to read it. I think of the whole book as Alice's voice. It's very much in dedication to my mum and to the generation of immigrants to this country who came in their 60s and 50s and didn't necessarily intend on staying but have found themselves here

and faced with really difficult questions about where to be and where your family is. Is it here? Is it over there? Where do you die? And the impact that those questions have on on the entire family you know it's really profound and I think destabilizing as well so yeah I wanted to explore that you do sibling relationships very well as well that thing of sort of texting the other sibling behind the third siblings back being like what's she on about um and you are

before we get onto your failures I just want to ask you about being one of six yeah and growing up and how difficult was it if it was to find your own voice within that to find your own identity within that it was really difficult actually I didn't really find my own identity until I left home I think that's often the case isn't it that the family shrouds who you are in a way I used to be called dandelion when I was a kid or I was called dopey Diana because I was always a bit slow on the uptake with things and and I was a bit weedy and runty and I was kind of like the weaker twin but in a kind of very jokey way we had lots of fun me and my sisters we were a whole house really we protected one another so I think growing up in that house of femaleness and womanhood has

really impacted on who I am but at the same time I had to leave that house in order to kind of really discover myself and I think that's why I liked books. I retreated into myself into writing. I kept a journal and I think from when I was about 14, same time when I really got into reading was when I was about 14. So yeah I think I did retreat a little bit into the world of words and language but I didn't ever really think of myself as a writer until much later. 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.

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Listen and follow Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Well, that brings us on to your first failure, which is becoming the writer you want to be yes tell us what kind of writer you want to be and why you think you're failing at it yeah it's tricky because I do feel like I'm at the beginning of something with my writing that there's so much more to discover and that I think it was Margaret Dravel I remember her saying once

in an interview that after four books she felt like that's when she really started writing well after she'd written three or four books and that really strikes a chord with me I feel like the the four novels has been a process of learning and also quite restricting. I feel like maybe I'm more suited to short stories. I don't know. I do feel an element of being like a failed poet. I want to write more poetry. But I feel the need to go through some process of learning

where I'm just really playing with stories because I have started so many short stories that I can't finish and lots of my favorite writers are short story writers and I have this real desire to master the short story and I haven't been able to do that yet and I think it might be because I've been trapped in novels so yeah I feel this sense of freedom now that I want to go off and explore and discover something in my writing. Interesting. I didn't think you were going to say that. I thought you mentioned Tolstoy earlier, and I know that he's an influence for you.

And the bookseller wrote accurately that A House for Alice does recall those sort of 19th century novels where there's this panoramic sweep of what is happening in wider society and then the personal story is set against that and there is a slight sense of a narrator type eye I mean I know there isn't one but there's that kind of all-seeingness to your prose in this novel and I thought that's what you were going to say that you want to be Tolstoy oh no definitely not okay good much to my relief no I feel like with this with this book I did want a larger canvas and I wanted this big host of characters and I wanted it to be more expansive and I I feel like I achieved that but I feel like there's something that I haven't achieved and it's something that requires kind of going back to the grindstone and really studying

spending lots of time reading and just trying ideas taking risks with ideas and trying to work in another form and are you that kind of person that when you feel you have acquired the necessary skill set whether it be writing a novel or executing a yoga pose or that you want to move on because you want the stimulation of learning something new and putting yourself in a slightly uncomfortable situation yeah I do feel that I you big weirdo yeah I feel like I'm being challenged and then I'm always growing okay always moving forward and I have this huge desire to achieve all the time achieve achieve achieve and that goes you know to every aspect of my life so I guess with the writing I feel like there's more novels to come but I want to achieve in other areas of writing and to focus less on the

finished product of a novel and have the courage to work on something that might bring less rewards but something that really needs to be tried and to be kind of investigated what do you mean by rewards do you mean sort of literary prizes or do you mean the sense of achievement well I think there's a lot more commercial respect for novels. I don't think short stories are, well, in this country anyway, I think in America they're celebrated a lot more. But I think there's such beauty in the short story form. And I think my love of poetry as well is connected to the desire to master the short story because you can do so much with it.

I think I find it so difficult because it's almost like you need to build the world of a novel in order to make a story work totally that's why I find them so hard and then you need to leave the novel off the page and just concentrate on the distillation the essence of the character in the story you mentioned that some of your favorite writers are short story writers who are they oh god so many grace paley i love her stories she's one of sadie smith's favorite writers as well yeah lucia berlin as well i love her stories roman carver i'm reading sarah hall's stories at the moment i'm reading sudden traveler which is great james baldwin's short stories Langston Hughes I like Zadie Smith's short stories as well actually a Jamaican American writer called Alexia Arthur's great book and Jonathan

Escoffery who's just published his collection I love that book when you say that you have a drive to achieve where do you think that comes from for lots of people it comes from a need to prove themselves to someone or something that didn't appreciate them or include them in their childhood but I wonder where your drive comes from I think it does come from childhood it's partly because I'm a Virgo I think I'm a classic Virgo because we have high standards everything has to be neat and organized and clean and I think we can be quite hard on ourselves so there's that aspect of it but I think it also does come from childhood because I didn't have the happiest of childhoods and I wasn't made to feel that I was worth a lot and I think I've always had this

drive to prove yeah to prove myself really and to push myself and I think it's a positive thing because it does make me work really hard I've always been a really hard worker because I feel like I can't fail because then I won't be worth anything so I think hard work gives me confidence and that that kind of sense of achievement that I need the negative side of it is that it means that it's very difficult to chill out you know to relax yeah because I feel like I'm always I always have to even in the evenings I'm like I find it hard to just sit down and watch tv because I could be working on on a novel or I could be reading I've taken lately to play in the guitar in the evenings

which is really nice actually and that's helping me learn how to just spend time doing something that makes you feel you know relaxed and makes you feel good I love singing you know using the voice so yeah but I'm not very good at just being at home and relaxing. And I think that's to do with the childhood environment that I grew up in. My childhood home was a difficult place to relax in. And I don't remember relaxing very much when I was a kid. And I think that's carried through to adulthood. So that feeling of worthlessness, was that a feeling that you had at home rather than at school or in the outside world? No, it was more at home. It came mostly from my father,

who was quite a domineering, quite a tyrannical presence in the household. And the house had to be neat and clean when he got home from work. And he had quite a temper and we were all scared that he was going to get angry so it was about making sure that everything was as he would like it and that really dominated my childhood so yeah it comes from that but the outside world I had my sisters they were really my main kind of friendship group I think we got a lot of strength from each other. And also I had a really strong childhood friends that I still have today. And we used to hang out a lot together and I really enjoyed school. So it was more in the home.

But beyond that, there was lots to counteract it. I think that's what helped me survive, really, the presence of other women in my life. It's so important to me. Yeah, that feeling of treading on eggshells and trying to determine what someone else's mood might be. You become so attuned to someone else's dynamic. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Thank you for talking about that because I know that a lot of listeners will hugely relate to that sense of internalising your lack of worth and then having this intense drive to prove it for the rest of your life. And you're right that it does, that it provides motivation and drive and look at all the amazing things that you have done. But yeah, you need to find ways to relax. Have you tried The Real Housewives, Diana? ways to relax have you tried the real housewives diana watching no i haven't the real housewives i think is that like you might not from desperate

housewives yes it's totally different i haven't heard of that one it's a reality tv franchise but the reason i think you'd love it is the reason i love it it's groups of women and how they interact and often they are groups of women in their 50s or 60s who you don't frequently see on primetime television unless the scripted drama is making them into a victim in some way. And I find it sort of deliriously entertaining and camp, but also has real heart. I would suggest you start with The Real Housewives of... Well, New York is my favourite, but I think you might love Potomac.

Yes. Oh, my my gosh you're writing it down yeah okay good good good good definitely look at that i'll watch on a friday night friday night i tend to slump in front of the tv please do yeah i'm good at relaxing on friday nights okay good because of the week's over though yeah that makes me happy exactly and then you've got too hot and actually they're talking about introducing a four-day week so are they yes apparently it's really good for productivity yeah it's a good idea i think it's inhumane the five-day week it is and actually we should all be working smarter not harder yeah definitely we don't need to be flat out nine to five five days a week it's too much I remember when I used to work full-time at Pride

magazine and that's the only time that I've worked full-time in my life and I just found it just so impressive because you squeeze your life into the weekend and then you just have nothing left no energy left to actually enjoy life it's totally yeah but the thing is that once I got out of full-time work I still felt this imperative to keep that framework yeah you know so I still feel like I'm exactly five days a week yeah and there's this terrible guilt attached if you're not doing it like you're lazy but the thing is is that you're a writer so actually you need those fallow periods to be creative you really do yeah you do because you've got children as well, haven't you? Yes, I have two kids, yeah. Okay, yeah. So you have a full-on life.

I do. Yeah, I'm flat out. And I think when you have kids, that's also a time when you realise you have to unlearn things and practices. Like, I've realised that it's not healthy to have this workaholic attitude towards life and that it's important to show your kids

that you can enjoy life and that you can important to show your kids that you can enjoy life and that you can relax you have to be really careful with what messages you're sending them in in the way you behave you know you can't hide from your kids yes yeah I always remember talking this is slightly on a tangent I always remember talking to someone who I know who was a books presenter on tv and radio and she was having to read so many books all the time and would get sent so many every single week that she had to read for work that her love of reading turned into this thing that she had to do and her children witnessed that and don't like reading books as a result oh that's really sad that's what I mean

yeah they will learn things by osmosis it will just seep into them yeah the real housewives you're going to influence them in the best possible way yeah i'm definitely gonna watch that on friday your second failure is connected to this which is conquering your inner critic and your tendency to perfectionism yeah well that's basically the story of my life and that is connected to my work and to what we were just talking about not being able to relax and I think it affects even the way I write what we were talking about before with sentences this this need for every sentence to be perfect I think sometimes that can really hold you back and it can really slow you down and I

think the perfect image that you have in your head for something for in my case for a creative piece of work isn't actually achievable and I've had to learn that it's not a real thing and reality is a different kind of sphere and you can only achieve a semblance of what you have in your head I think the process of creating something and making something is a form of capitulation you have to accept that it's not going to be this perfect shimmering gem that's in your head and there's something comforting about that and I've learned that through writing and that has seeped into other areas of my life so I don't necessarily feel like that everything has to be perfect all the time but you know it's a

constant learning for me because it's so deeply ingrained within me I don't feel like I'll ever conquer it it's about learning how to kind of manage it yes and I often think that the thing that you think is imperfect because you've put it together you've created it you're so aware of all of the things that don't stitch together and the sentences that aren't as fluid as you had imagined but someone else reading that will think it's perfect it's perfect to them yeah that's the sort of beauty of it I always remember and I quote this to myself very often I interviewed the novelist Sadie Jones years ago and she later became a friend and she said that in this interview I set out to build a cathedral when I

start a novel I set out to build a cathedral and I end up with a perfectly serviceable garden shed and there's beauty to the shed yes and the garden shed might be exactly what someone needs at any given moment but it's not the cathedral that you had in your mind and I thought that was such a good I think that's exactly that's exactly the thing I mean sometimes I open one of my books and I just think oh god that's awful it's I find it really hard to look at my book sometimes because you realize how it's just not what you wanted it to be yeah but you have to accept that. I think another thing is from dancing you know when you're on stage well when I used to be on stage dancing and I'd be aware of every hiccup and every step that I got wrong but then afterwards you realize that the audience isn't actually aware as you are of what

went wrong you know exactly people aren't watching you to trip you up and to point out your failures or what you got wrong you know that's not what humanity is like and I think there's that perfectionism there's an element of feeling like it's a kind of misanthropy it's assuming that people are critical or are naturally going to be critical in the same way that you're critical towards yourself but I think actually that's not the case and I think people are much kinder than you might think and that people need something that you can give them you know whether it's through a performance or through a book and that they will receive what you offer to them in a way that is much kinder than you imagined it could be yeah it's not really

about you it's about them and what they might need at that point in time and is that how you manage it on a daily basis so if you're sitting down I, I don't know, do you write on a laptop? Yeah, I do. I've got two computers, one that's connected to the internet and one that's not. And I write on the one that's not. Okay. So, and then you rely yourself a lunch break looking at Twitter or something. Yeah.

Yeah, basically. I try to keep social media out of my study. Yeah. Because it's just so public, isn't it? It feels like writing in the middle of Victoria Station or something. Yes. I can't just pop onto Twitter when like writing in the middle of Victoria Station or something. Yes. I can't just pop onto Twitter when I'm in the middle of a sentence series. So you're writing at your laptop and your inner critic surfaces and says, oh, that's the worst sentence ever written.

You are a terrible writer. I can't believe you're going to embarrass yourself by putting this in the public domain. This is what happens to me. So how do you deal with that in that moment I force myself onwards and I have an American friend Jennifer Cabot who when she is writing she told me this as a method once which is really helpful before she sits down to write she has a conversation with her inner critic and says you know I'm going to do some work now you just go out for a walk for a little bit and we'll go shopping or something I'll see you later she

does this whole role play and and I found that really helpful you know sometimes I'll actually physically open the door and say goodbye and close the door so it's just me in the room without the critic so I have this really strong commitment to not allowing the critical voice to enter into the writing sometimes it's not possible you know but I am aware that the critic is there and that's what's changed over time I think I wasn't as able back then when I was writing 20 to say to make a separation between myself and the critic so I thought the critic was myself so I think separating the two has been really really really helpful for me not just with writing but with with everything fascinating because so often the inner critic is a voice or it's assumed the voice of someone who judged you in your childhood but also your inner critic is something that your

child developed in order to mitigate that to prevent that judgment falling on you so there's that sense as your friend wisely says that when you acknowledge the inner critic slash the inner child who's trying its best to protect you like these are the things that it has at their disposal, acknowledging that and saying, it's okay, I've got this, can be profoundly helpful. Yeah, exactly. And acknowledging that the inner critic isn't necessarily you, it's somebody else.

Yes. It's somebody else's voice. You know, that's the crucial thing. I think that we come into this world with an essential self and during childhood that can get derailed and our task going forward in order to save ourselves is to try and manifest who we are outside of that voice or that derailment and that takes a certain you know a separation within the self and I think when you can recognize that and achieve that it's enormously helpful is your inner critic

male or female do you know male I think yeah mine's female which I wouldn't have expected why is yours female where does it come from female where does it come from I don't know I had a literal critic in mind when I first started writing my novel which was different from my inner critic but the form that she assumed was one of an actual literary critic I mean I'm very very literal so it was actually someone that I knew who reviewed books and was very sort of sharp and intelligent and I kept thinking of her and what she would make of every sentence it was horrendous and she sometimes pops up do you read your reviews I do sometimes but I try not to because it just puts me in the an unhelpful place to write yes it's like derailing again yeah exactly yeah you know

bad reviews can be upsetting and then good reviews can be distracting you know so I think it's best to stay away to stay away from them let's get on to your third failure which is such a good one doing all the things on my list of 10 things to do before you're 50 and three quarters. So how old are you now? I'm 51. Okay. I wouldn't ever have believed that. But so you have an actual list that you brought with you.

Yeah, I brought it with me. Okay. Now, how many things are on it? So there's 10 things on it. And I can't read all of them because some of them are, you know, sensitive. Are they? But yeah, well, I read this National Trust list of there's 50 things that you should do before you're 11 and three quarters. And it's this scheme they have to encourage children to be in nature and encourage parents to take their children in nature to celebrate nature and all that.

So when I found that list, I thought, ah, I was about 40 at the time and I just wrote this list of all the things I wanted to do before I was 50 and three quarters instead of 11 and three quarters because I felt that there were so many things that I hadn't done yet and I didn't want to forget that I wanted to do them. So I wanted to do a reminder. So I made this list of 10 things and and put it on my wall so they're things like live abroad for two years do a US road trip travel in through South America

haven't done that join a band haven't done that these are so pure learn to speak another language fluently I haven't done that no I can speak Spanish a bit but you know not fluently go to Frida Kahlo's house in Mexico I have been to Mexico but I haven't been to the house have you done any of them I've done like okay well I've done maybe a couple of them but most of them I haven't done and that's just made me realize how unhelpful it is to make these kind of lists I'm a real list maker. I'm always making lists. And as time goes on, I'm seeing more and more that once you write something down on a list, it's an invitation not to do it.

Yes. It calcifies it. And I think that's partly why I'm resistant to New Year's resolutions. Because if I make a list, even if I don't write write it down I know that it exists or I'm telling myself I'm going to do something and then I'm not a rebellious person but maybe that's where my tiny filament of rebellion has to ignite I'm like no I'm not going to do that and then I don't do it and then I feel like I failed yeah it makes your life really instructional yes like you're constantly having to do something because it's been written down and you're as we've established you're really fluid in your prose

in the way that you are your life is porous it's creatively porous and so you don't want a list yeah you don't want a set of instructions yeah it's crazy and actually in my writing space that really is the space where I'm free and it's as if the other parts of my life that's where there is restriction so that's why writing is is such a relief for me it's partly because I have so much to think about now with work and children and family and relatives I feel like I'm spread so very thin that if I don't write things down and then I'll just forget them but it works against spontaneity which is awful but the busier you are I think the harder it is to be spontaneous do you see what I mean yes I do do you feel that you want to live more life for Paula so that you want to have experiences for her too

yeah I do I do feel that there's things that I would have liked to do with her that I still want to do almost together her being a part of it in a spiritual way like the US road trip that's something that we wanted to do together there are are things where I want to, yeah, celebrate her and celebrate us. I think what you should do is you should turn that list into 60 and three quarters. No, I don't want to do that. Then that's the same failure. That's the burglary. Because we're at a specific point in life where there are lots of demands on our time.

You have children aging relatives family responsibilities your work yeah by the time you're 60 your children will be a bit older so maybe there'll just be more time for you to introduce this rigid non-spontaneous into your life yeah i think that's true actually yeah i think once the kids don't need me as much there will be a lot more space for me and I will end up doing more of these things. I did climb the mountain, but we only got halfway up. We went up Snowdon.

Okay. So I can't actually take that off because I didn't actually get to the top. Why did you not? Was it just weather? It was really bad weather. It was sleet, snow, wind, rain. It was freezing cold and we just had to turn back

and I was really gutted. How old are your children now? My daughter's 18 and my son is 12. Do they like reading? Yeah, they do. They read at dinner time. They read when they're eating, which I find really weird. They have their cereal bowls and then there's a book arranged around the bowl

and they're just bent into the bowl and the book. And they do that with almost every meal. makes me happy yeah it makes me happy too have they read any of your well has your daughter read any of your books no she hasn't but she wants to okay now she's of age she can so can i end my asking you that awful question what you what are you writing next i'm working on essays at the moment selection of essays so it's I'm having a break from fiction will you do you think you might return to the characters that we met in ordinary people on the house for Alice again do you think you'll make it into a triptych I think I might do yeah I think there is still room for more investigation of what happens with Michael

and Melissa and I do have a feeling that um eight years from the end of Alice there may be a space for another novel because Alice begins eight years after the end of Ordinary People so I kind of see that on the horizon but I'm not I'm not entirely sure I have to see if they start talking to me again or talking in my head to each other then definitely I think I would like to revisit them but we'll see I can't wait as long as Nicole comes back I'm happy Diana Evans we love you and your inner critic thank you so much for gracing us with your work and gracing this podcast with your wisdom thank you so much for coming on how to fail thank you so much for having me

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.