How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S3, Ep7 How to Fail: Sharmaine Lovegrove

Episode Date: February 13, 2019

This week on How To Fail With Elizabeth Day, my guest is the brilliant Sharmaine Lovegrove. Sharmaine is a champion of stories. As a publisher, she heads up her own imprint, Dialogue Books, at Little, Brown and has been instrumental in bringing more diverse voices into print.But Sharmaine is also one of the most dynamic and inspiring women I've ever had the privilege of meeting. This is a woman who survived a challenging childhood and ended up living on the streets while studying for her A-Levels. This is a woman who, through sheer force of will, began selling second-hand books under the arches of Waterloo Bridge before rising through the ranks to head up her own publishing imprint. This is a woman who, despite the myriad obstacles she faced along the way, set up the first English language bookshop in Berlin and became literary editor of Elle magazine. This is a woman who says, quite candidly, that books saved her life. We talk about failure to be a child, failure to conform and failure to be a perfectionist (and I discover you can Deliveroo pizza to a park. MIND. BLOWN.)You might not have heard of Sharmaine before this podcast episode, but after listening to her story, you will quite possibly become her biggest fan. How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Chris Sharp and sponsored by 4th Estate Books The book of the podcast, How To Fail: Everything I've Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong by Elizabeth Day is available to pre-order here. Be sure to check out the forthcoming titles from Dialogue Books ! Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdaySharmaine Lovegrove: @sharloveDialogue Books @dialoguebooks Chris Sharp @chrissharpaudio4th Estate Books @4thEstateBooks   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

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. The word powerhouse is often overused, but in the case of Charmaine Lovegrove, I can't think of a more accurate description. This is a woman who left home at 16, endured a spell living on the streets, ended up selling second-hand books under the arches of Waterloo Bridge, and rose to head up her own publishing imprint at Little Brown. Along the way, she set up the first English-language bookshop in Berlin, co-founded a scouting company to find adaptable books for film and TV, co-founded a scouting company to find adaptable books for film and TV, and became literary editor of Elle magazine. Now as the head of Dialogue Books, Lovegrove focuses on telling stories

that have often been excluded by traditional white, Oxbridge-dominated publishing houses. When she was announced as the industry's person of the year, the editor of the bookseller magazine, said of Lovegrove, in an industry that can be small-c conservative, Charmaine is a big R revolutionary. And as for the woman herself, I am driven by the knowledge that my slave ancestors kept themselves alive through storytelling, she wrote in a piece for The Observer in 2018. And no matter how much we are kept down, our stories will rise. Charmaine, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. That's really weird that you're talking about me when you say all of those things. Do you feel like a big R revolutionary? You know, I just feel as though I'm just doing things in my way. And now I have a platform from which to do

that from. So people are paying attention in a way that they hadn't before. But actually, anyone that's known me, and I have a lot of friends that I've had since I was five years old, then they will just say, you've always been like this. So it doesn't feel revolutionary. It's just that I can't imagine another way of living this life. So Charmaine and I are friends, full disclosure. And I fell in platonic love with this woman when we found ourselves at a dinner for Elle magazine and Charmaine launched into the most impassioned and brilliant defence of Beyonce's Lemonade album I have ever heard before or since. You always strike me as someone who is fully comfortable in her own skin and who knows herself. And I mean that as the highest compliment I can give really. Have you always

had that self-knowledge? Absolutely not. As you said earlier in my introduction, I left home when I was 16 and it took me a really long time to understand what was happening to me in my home, to understand that my family weren't treating me the way in which people should be treated and people that are loved are treated. It took me a really long time to understand that I would be deserving of that love. It was really important that I left in order to find my voice. I just didn't have it before, or at least it was there, but I didn't know what it would turn into. So this whole journey has been really unexpected. One of your failures is particularly poignant. It is the failure to be a child. Can you explain what you meant by that? I suppose the way that I see it is that

when I left home when I was 16, I didn't realise that I would never go back. And I didn't realise that my parents would completely disown me and not talk to me and see me in the street and cross the road. Or I just didn't realise that I'd be completely abandoned by them and I don't know if that would have changed how I lived my life and if I would have left had I had known you know there's these moments where things are happening like sitting here talking to you and the introduction that you read where I'm like I've done so much and it's really odd to me that I don't have these parents that I can share that with and that I don't have these people sort of rooting for me other than my husband and my grandma, who are my family and my sisters. No one that made me, the people that made me are not rooting for me to be the very best person that I am.

And that's like kind of unbelievable that that's happened. And sometimes I have to constantly remind myself because my world otherwise feels, I feel very loved and included and part of people's families. And even when you saw me today, you know, you were giving me greetings from your family and your boyfriend. And, you know, that means so much to me because when I was younger, my grandma, I see my grandma every day and she would say, I'd always say to her, did my mum ask for me? So between the ages of 17 and 18, I was in Balham where my grandma lived and I didn't live with my grandma. I lived with debutantes on this opposite her, which was a very crazy time. But during that time, I would say to her, did my mum ask for me? And she would say, no. And as a mother, I just feel as though what my son would have to do for me to abandon him in the way that I was abandoned, and especially coming from a middle class educated family, was just, it's just hard for me to imagine what it is that she was thinking and what

she was going through and it makes me feel that I failed in not being able to be the daughter that she wanted to me to be although I'm aware that who I am is probably who she wants me to be. Can I ask you a bit about what was going on at home? So my mum had me when she was 18. She had the support of my grandma. My grandma was there at my birth. She cut my cord. And I think the relationship between my mother and father was really strained. They were really young and they never lived together. But he left her when I was a week old.

And I'd say my first nine years were really happy. But as I sort of got into secondary school and I started asking questions about the world, I think my education, my knowledge, my love for Marx and Nirvana and sort of alternative ways of living was sort of too much for my mum. So she was really physically and mentally abusive towards me. And it just got to a point where I didn't want to be beaten anymore. And I didn't want to be told that I was stupid. And so I refused to allow that to happen. And I left. And when you left, where did you go? So I went to my friend's house, who also lived in Balham on the same road as my grandma,

and her parents took me in and they were really amazing and I think they were quite surprised that my parents never got in touch. I think they always thought they knew my mum, they knew that she worked with children, that she had a quite a high-powered job working with young people and I think they just thought that she would respond to them or at least call out to me. And she didn't. So I was there for a year and I did my GCSEs and then I was living with these debutantes. for most people that just means going to university and for me that meant that I had to figure out what my life was gonna look like and whether or not I could after finishing my A-levels whether or not I could go to university and I knew that I couldn't because I didn't you needed to be funded and you needed money from your parents I went to live in some hostels and you know the hostels were really rough you, it was really rough

living in central London, living around Soho. When I'm walking past some of these places today, they're now big office blocks and really shiny. But I remember them being places that were full of heroin addicts and being full of prostitutes. And I was just a very, quite an innocent little girl. And the one thing that was really hard for me was that I didn't have a child and I was just a very, quite an innocent little girl. And the one thing that was really hard for me was that I didn't have a child and I didn't have an addiction. So they didn't really understand. And I had a well-spoken accent.

So they were like, we don't really understand what you're doing here. You just need to go home. You don't belong here. But obviously I couldn't go home. So that's how I ended up sleeping rough because it just became harder because I no longer had the status of a

child and one of the things that the government does is that if you're in full-time education then you're not allowed to have housing benefit because education is seen as a job so I met scores of young people who couldn't go to school so it's because I was from the background that I was from I had an understanding of where I wanted to be whereas I met hundreds of people who I still see now when I'm walking through the streets of Soho who are now adults like myself but they're still on the street. Were you still going to school when you were living in hostels? Yeah I still went to school I didn't really tell my school what was happening but I just knew that education was my only way out and that if I didn't get an

education then I didn't really know where I'd end up and because I met so many people where they didn't believe in reading and they didn't believe in books and it's so interesting now as a publisher that the way in which people roll their eyes like my colleagues in the wider industry roll their eyes or are very disparaging about people who don't read. I really deeply understand how people don't understand that or don't recognise that books are for them. And I think that's something that drives me is sort of knowing what education means. It's sort of much bigger than the fact that I loved Mallory Towers or that my mum was a big reader. You know, it's something much deeper at the core that books literally saved my life. Talk to me about sleeping on the streets.

How do you do it? Where do you go? So you need to find a couple of people that you can trust because it's really dangerous. And so this is circa 1999, early millennium. And so Cardboard City was no longer a thing and the South Bank was starting so you know it was a very different era as whereas before in the 80s and 90s the whole of the South Bank was Cardboard City and it was just miles and miles of homeless people all over between Blackfriars to Waterloo Bridge and Hungerford Bridge. And,

you know, it was so dangerous. It was so dangerous. So you had to find people who you could trust, who could look after you. And it was really important for me that they were neither people that wanted to have sex with me or wanted to sell me drugs, because I just watched so many girls, especially either get into prostitution or get into drugs really quickly. And then you had to just work out where no one would find you. So there was this one place that I slept a few times, which was behind where Barclays Bank

and Capital Radio are near Leicester Square. And there's some bins and it's still there now. And I walk past it now and I'm usually on the way to some meeting about something to do with the kind of work I do but there's this moment where I'm like yeah I slept there or I go past Capital Connections which is by St Martin's in the Field and I see people queuing up and you know now in London it's so much worse it's got so much worse and I'm got so much worse. And I'm seeing people queuing again.

And I haven't seen these kinds of queues for food and for shelter in the way that I had 15, 20 years ago. And it would be indulgent for me to say that it was triggering because I'm in such a different position. But I'm very aware of what they're going through and I'm very aware of the failings of our government to allow this to happen when actually we'd gone for a long period of not having such numbers in homelessness. And what are the practicalities of sleeping rough? So I did a piece quite a few years ago now about rough sleepers in Exeter and I remember talking to these men many of whom were ex-servicemen and they said the worst thing is not the cold it's the rain because it soaks through

all of your possessions and it's impossible if you're a rough sleeper to get dry yeah did you have experiences like that like what were you sleeping on so I had sleeping bags and I had there's a time when there's lots of duffel coats and bomber jackets. It was like Oasis heyday. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And sort of big parkas. So I had lots of layers and I always had places I could go during the day to keep warm. And whether those were sort of friends' houses where their parents were not in their home during the day. I think because I'm from London, and again, from sort of central part of London, then there was just lots of my friends that wanted to see me. I was also going to school. So during the day, I could keep warm, I could keep stuff dry. But at night, I don't know, this really interesting thing happens where the pacing of the

city changes. And I will always say that the worst time to be out is between three o'clock in the morning and 5.30 in the morning, because that's where people should not be out on the street, because the most dangerous people in our society, people who are looking for trouble, are out. So the main thing for me was not keeping warm, but just keeping safe and keeping out of the way of people. What was the scariest thing that ever happened to you during that time? I think the scariest thing was living in a hostel and the person in the next room to me dying of a heroin overdose. Like that was pretty horrific. You know, what was really hard was just being me. And so it's like I'd left home in order to find my voice and then but I was in this

situation where I was homeless and no one wanted to hear my voice because I just sounded so differently to them and I behaved so differently and my life experience was already so different and it would really shake a lot of people up so I would often help people with their filling out their benefits because there's a lot of people who couldn't read and write. So on the days I didn't have to go to school, I would sit at one of the centres in central London, and I would help fill out benefit forms for people. And so then they started viewing me as a member of staff and not as them. And then it meant that the staff, in turn, didn't really help me so much because they just couldn't

see why I was in the situation as I said earlier and one time this guy just got so angry with me because he was like you're not like a black woman you're unlike anyone this is not real to you you can just go home you're obviously from money like what are you doing here why are you taking up time and he punched me in the face I mean he was high and he was angry and he just yeah and so that was like that was the worst thing that ever happened to me it's just really interesting because now I'm in this situation where I'm having these conversations every day with people who are quite similar to each other and, you know, very critical about the engagement of my industry with society. I think it's impossible for them to imagine that I've got this sort of,

it's not just because I'm a black woman that I have this different perspective. It's just because I've been through so much, I've done so much. And so I mean it. And when I say I'm not here for you, I mean I'm absolutely not here for you. The fight is so much bigger because there are so many potential Charmaines that have been ignored and I'm not going to have it. I'm not going to be silenced because I need to find those voices.

It's so extraordinary listening to you speak and also knowing you as I do because you are someone so open and loving towards the world and I would expect many people who had gone through your experiences myself included might have developed a sort of bitter guarded shell against the stuff that was happening to them how How did you avoid that? Was it books that kept your heart open? Yeah, as you were saying that, I was thinking, it's the stories. It sounds really cliched, but, you know, one of my favourite books, which I just gave to our former CEO, Tim Healy-Hutchinson, who's been my mentor recently, I just gave him my favourite book, which is called This Blinding

Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jaloum. And in this book, you have five male prisoners in a underground cell in Morocco, and they have a sliver of light and each man has their own trick or there's something that they excel at. So one person's really good at telling the time and another person has got really great memories. But there's this one man who's just, his father owned a bookshop in Cairo and he tells these stories and he tells the stories of Arabian nights

and it just sort of weaves through this novella. And when you read stories like that and you think about the world from a greater perspective like nothing like that's ever happened to me but it has happened to other people and I don't think that there's very much in sort of narrative fiction that happens which doesn't occur to people and so the fact that so many story arcs are about personal tragedy and people trying to find their way and sometimes they don't make it then I can't feel sorry for myself and I've just think I've just read I've read way too much to ever think that my case is isolated and I've also met so many amazing people I haven't

been lucky because that would mean that you you know, I'm not an observer. Yeah, exactly. I'm not an observer in my life. Like I have created it, but I am incredibly fortunate that I can tell my story and I can also change the narrative of what's happening for other people. Peyton, it's happening. We're finally being recognized for being very online. We'll see you next time. first and a lover of pop culture second. Then join me, Hunter Harris. And me, Peyton Dix, the host of Wondery's newest podcast, Let Me Say This. As beacons of truth and connoisseurs of mess, we are scouring the depths of the internet so you don't have to. We're obviously talking about the biggest gossip and celebrity news. Like, it's not a question of if Drake got his body done, but when.

You are so messy for that, but we will be giving you the B-sides. Don't you worry. The deep cuts, the niche, the obscure. Like that one photo of Nicole Kidman after she finalized her divorce from Tom Cruise. Mother. A mother to many. Follow Let Me Say This on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Watch new episodes on YouTube or listen to Let Me Say This ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? This is a time of great foreboding. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago, these words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago, set in motion a chain of gruesome events and sparked cult-like devotion across the world.

I'm Matt Lewis. Join us as we unwrap the enigma and get to the heart of what really happened to Thomas Beckett by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. So we'll get on to your second failure shortly, but I'm just really interested in how you got from sleeping rough on the South Bank to selling books underneath the arches of Waterloo Bridge on the South Bank. Yeah, so I used to go there a lot when I was homeless to the secondhand stalls. And I just got talking to various different stallholders. And I don't know, it's just somewhere that I'd

hang out a lot. And I loved it so much, and Adam, who's a good friend of mine, still runs a stall there. It just seemed like a really good idea that I would just run a stall, and at the time I was living on a boat between Chelsea and Vauxhall Bridge, so I started living in Hackney. I'd met someone, and we had a relationship when I was living in Hackney, and then when we split up a relationship and I was living in Hackney and then when we split up because this is the thing is that if you have an address you can get a job and because I had an education then I could get a job what I needed what was holding me back was having an address so I met someone at a squat party in Crystal Palace I mean it was just love's young dream right and our first date after the squat

party was to go to the Serpentine Gallery oh because that's where I used to go and you know I just always had this sort of yin and yang of my life did you get a levels yeah yeah it's so impressive I know I know now I'm just like how because I feel like it's so hard to juggle everything I just think how did I how did I do that when I didn't even really have a computer but I think the thing that happened was that for a lot of my friends they were able to go to Thailand and have a gap year and I just really needed to work and I knew that I had to find a different path and so I thought I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker because obviously I'm interested in people's stories but then the more I spent time with books and I was really good at selling these

books under the bridge and it was all cash and I was just so proud to be able to sell just the volume of books I could to all these tourists and the chat was amazing and I met so many brilliant and interesting people. And I just absolutely loved it. But it was really romantic. You know, I lived on a boat, this guy, Bob would have a little boat that would come past and he would drop me to, he would drop me to Waterloo Bridge. And it was before there were river boats. So I would climb up and then climb over and then just start my day. I mean, it was just really crazy. So that job eventually led to a job in Foyle's bookshop, and then eventually to the London Review bookshop. And then you got to a stage where you were applying for internships in the

publishing industry. And your second failure is, as you put it, your failure to contort yourself to make others comfortable. So refusing to compromise to fit into people's perceptions of you. And I wonder if that plays into the fact that at that time you were failing to get an internship. Yeah, I mean, it was so hard. And my industry should be embarrassed that it was so hard for me. Because by this time, I had worked in Otikers in Claffam junction from 16 i had run a stall under waterloo bridge i'd worked for the london review bookshop for five years and i couldn't get a job as an intern working as a publicist do you know what i mean like i wanted i knew that i liked doing something that was about people and being really chatty i didn't think i wanted to be i had the stamina to sort of sit still and be an editor, but I knew that I could sell a book to anyone. And that's

really what publicity is, like selling the ideas of a book to our national pay-to-visit critics. And so the idea that I, as Charmaine, as a young woman who had all of this experience, a young woman who had all of this experience couldn't get an internship was just unfathomable to me and so obviously because I was applying whilst I was working at the LRB bookshop then I would then meet these publicists because we did so many events and I would meet people and I'd say oh how long have you been working at x publishing house and like oh I've just started and it's so amazing and I'm like what did you do and they'd never worked in a bookshop and they had no experience but invariably they knew somebody and they had an aunt and it was so outrageous it was so outrageous and so I just thought it doesn't matter because it's not a reflection of you it's not even anything personal I didn't take

it personally and it was only later that we can now see the stats and look at race and look at class and look at all of these things in more detail. Whereas before no one was collating this information, it was all kind of anecdotal. aren't really in publishing anymore, but the hangover is that because it is so women heavy and it is so middle class, then everybody feels sort of really alienated. I talk to women about this all the time and they all feel as though they're not this particular type of person. And then if they are that particular type of person, they also feel as alienated. So we just, the idea that that could happen within publishing which is all about storytelling and embracing difference of ideas is just astounding to me how else do you think you've failed to conform to other people's perceptions of you more recently I think it's things like being interested in things outside of what people expect me to be. I'm very much an intersectional

feminist and people expect me to be fully right on about women, about everything. And I'm like, no, just because you're a woman, it doesn't mean you're right. Or just because you're black, it doesn't mean you're right. Just because you're a person of colour or because you're queer, it doesn't mean that I'm always going to agree with everything that you say. And I get into quite heated debates with people about this because I believe in the individual and I believe in us being able to do great despite being a white middle-class man that went to Oxford. And I also believe that a woman from Uganda who works in the market also has the ability to be great and that we hold our own personal standards up to everybody else

without really thinking about the nuances of the individual and so as a black woman I was brought up by black people telling me that I wasn't black enough and I'm like I don't really understand what that means because I like classical music because I like reading books and I like literature and very literary titles then I've never not for a second of my life been a black woman and the same from white people who expect me to be kind of really straight or something and I'm like I'm really into hip-hop I'm really into all of these but I'm also also like a complex individual who likes to navigate the world. And so when people want me to be this one thing, it disappoints them, I think.

That is so interesting because I totally agree that I think there's a form of hyper wokeness that becomes its own prejudice. And that tallies with that idea that particularly women can only ever be one characteristic. And now there's all this like chat about unlikable quote unquote characters in film and on TV. But I feel that that becomes almost a box in itself. It's like you can be an unlikable woman, but you can't be a woman who's sometimes unlikable and sometimes likable. Sometimes like classical music and sometimes likes dr j like it's that thing is the multifariousness of women that get sidelined i think absolutely and but also i think of people you know again being intersectional the idea that

i'm not going to raise my son thinking that he has to be one thing or that it would greatly disappoint me if when he's older he gets into the world and is himself and then he is told that just by virtue of being a man that's a bad thing like it's unbelievable the way in which people talk about this and what they don't realize is that they're just mirroring what's happened before and that's where it gets really dangerous. There was a poster for the Women's March this weekend that said if we had voted for Hillary then we'd all be having brunch now. As an intersectional feminist that is so offensive, that is so offensive because it just says absolutely everything about only my issue in the world, i.e. being a white woman. You know, it's important to dismantle the patriarchy, but you don't want to talk about race.

And we're not done yet. Like, we're not done on any of these subjects. And we have huge issues with men and mental health. We have huge issues in the Me Too crisis. We have huge issues in the me too crisis we have huge issues with race and the rise of the right and this idea that you're gonna just follow one cause in today's political climate it's just unbelievable to me and to see the volume of people who are prepared to take to the streets on something in their own self-interest you know which is why the best poster from the previous year of the women's march was like we'll see you nice white ladies at black lives matter yeah you know it's like because you're not yeah and if it's not intersectional if it's not about providing and creating a society for everybody then I'm not interested I think people are quite surprised by how passionately I feel that but I'm very proud of being married to my husband who I love deeply

and I am so excited for the future of my child who is a boy but if we're not brave enough as intersectional feminists to stand up and say, I stand with you as men, then I don't really know what kind of, it's not a future that I want to be part of. I love this conversation so much, it's making my heart beat faster. That's good. It is so everything you need to hear. That's good. It is so everything you need to hear. Does the task in hand, you know, one of the things, again, that I think is so admirable about you is that you are constantly, I'm going to say enthusiastic, but it's more nuanced than that. You've got an incredible energy to you.

But does the task in hand ever feel overwhelming? And do you ever feel like a solitary voice? And is that difficult to handle? No, I don't feel by myself at all. I look around and there are just schools of people who I think are really incredible in this country and America all over the world. You know, it is very hard for me to be in a big company. My voice is heard within the company, but there's also a sort of a given that, of course, you're going to be brilliant, or of course, a sort of a given that of course you're going to be brilliant or of course you won that award or of course you did that thing and that's really difficult because what it means is that very few people acknowledge that I might have worked for it

it's like well of course because you're brilliant and I'm like but you don't know why I'm brilliant yeah like you don't know why I'm brilliant because I not really spoken about what we spoke about earlier of what the experience of my life was like you don't really know how hard that this journey has been and so the idea that it wasn't a given to me that I could come out this far and that's quite overwhelming and part of the reason I wanted to move to Bristol was to get away from a sort of certain monoculture that just looks at what's new and fresh and shiny and to be somewhere that where activism and like the depth of culture is sort of ingrained in the city in a way that London forgot how to do that. And that's not the London that I grew up in. You know, we really were an activist art city where to be you, to be fighting for what is important and not just for yourself, but for those around you was absolutely at the core of your being as a Londoner.

And we've totally lost that for shiny new capitalism. And then that sort of extends to how people treat you, where it's just a given that you will be who you are because that's how they know you. And again, there's just no space for that nuance. It's very complicated for me to kind of surround myself with that. So, yeah, I'd say in not working for myself, then I needed to carve out my own space so that I could do my job better. I should say that Charmaine is constantly trying to persuade me to move to Bristol and that if there is such a thing as the Bristol Tourist Board they should basically co-opt you to be their face. This is the most convincing arguments I've ever heard.

Your third failure and I'm really glad you chose this because there are so many people who have come on this podcast who've said the opposite so your third failure is failure to be a perfectionist whereas a lot of my previous guests have spoken about the fact that they are perfectionists and that being an exhausting mechanism by which you fail to control your life but you want to talk about the opposite so how do you fail to be a perfectionist so there's one part of it where as a black woman, you're brought up knowing that you have to do better. You just know that from, I don't even know when I was first told, but I can't remember a time where I didn't know I had to work harder. That's a narrative that a lot of black women talk about and a lot of black men are aware of, but it's been harder for them because of our society.

Does that come from within your family as well yeah absolutely yeah absolutely I mean it's nobody is going to make this for you nobody and you know that has been my experience nobody is going to make it for me nobody is going to everything that I do has to come from myself and so the option of failing is not an option I suppose a way of seeing it is that failing would have meant that I'd still be on the street and that wasn't an option and so what it's meant the way to get out of all these things for me and the way to move forward is to not sweat the small stuff I just don't sweat the small. And so it means that I have an understanding that even if something's unfinished, even if I haven't achieved everything that I want to achieve with

something, then I kind of have to know when I'm done. I think about this all the time because I actually lived in Bristol when I was 18 for six months because I wanted to work in production. So I sort of moved around. I must have been 21. But I moved to Bristol for six months because I thought I wanted to work in production and there weren't enough production companies. So I moved back, but there were these little shops that I worked in that are still there, the sort of independent clothes shops. Sometimes I walk past them now and I just say, how did you know you weren't supposed to be there? You could still be working there. Or sometimes I go to bookshops that I've worked in, there are still people that work there. And I was like, how did you know that you could have propelled forward and I think because I'm not a perfectionist I sort of know

when something's done so I'm able to let go and I don't sweat the small stuff and I just keep moving forward but then you have this whole celebration around perfectionism and I like, I am so far from that. I am so far from being capable of perfection. And does that make itself felt in your home life as well? Like being a mother, there's that sort of famous, famous scene in the Alison Pearson novel, I don't know how she does it, where she just buys like mince pies from the supermarket and scatters icing on it and pretends that they're homemade. I mean, that is a specific, talking about middle class white privilege that's a specific demographic and it's a trivial example but do you acknowledge that some things have to give in either work or home yeah absolutely and I've never made my son a cake my mother-in-law's really

good at it so she's made his birthday cakes and I have been known to be the mum that's had caterers meet her outside of the bake sale because I'm just like concert everyone loves a conditoring cook cake and I don't have time or inclination to be able to make that and so yeah like don't at me do you know what I mean I just like but don't at me. Do you know what I mean? I just like, but don't you really appreciate it? They deliver to the school gates? Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, because it's an address. So you can get it delivered. And so, you know, and I have been known, it's how we discovered that you can get delivery to the park. And, you know, I'm just like, I am here. But if you want me here, then that means that I can't do that bit that the catering bit I have had picnics or I've picked up massive hampers from Dalesford it's like I come correct but I'm not

going to do the actual work I'm so happy to work out what my forte is wait you can deliveroo to the park yes this is going to change my life you didn't know you can deliveroo to the park you sat in the park and you're like okay we need pizza or wagon mama whatever and then they just have to they can deliver it and you're like i'm here because this is the dot it's like oh my gosh before christmas i did delivery of baked potato and i'm still happy with that life choice i actually couldn't believe you did that um but i'm not judging i just couldn't believe it but I've had to work out what it is that I can do and what I can't do and it definitely is apparent one of the things that makes me feel bad is that I'm aware that I'm really good at organizing what

we're doing I'm really good at coming up with the ideas and then my husband tends to execute because he's around more and I think that is really hard for me because I recognize that obviously my son doesn't know that when it's a holiday it's usually me that decides sort of comes up with the I not decides we decide together we decide everything together but it's like where we're going then I'm just an ideas person and so I have a million ideas about things we should do to make us happy. But my husband's the one that picks up and drops off and is the one that will get my son to wherever we need to be. And so I hope for my son, it doesn't feel like I'm not participating. And if there's anything that I do feel bad about is sort of not being able to be as present because

I can't do everything and so that's why I feel I failed at being a perfectionist because I'd probably be a bit better at it if I was a perfectionist because I would push myself to be there but I sort of really live in the moment I get done what needs to be done when it needs to be done I'm not an anxious person so I don't tie myself up about these things but it is definitely something. I'm not an anxious person, so I don't tie myself up about these things. But it is definitely something that I'm aware of, that if I was more of a perfectionist, then maybe I'd be a different type of mother. And maybe that would be more suited to my family. But I just am who I am. I mean, having seen you with your son, I don't think that's true at all. And

the flip side of what you're saying is that your son is being raised in an environment where he doesn't feel he has to be a perfectionist and he can feel freer yeah I don't think you should beat yourself up about that thanks I mean in terms of what he thinks about and how he is and what kind of person I mean he's just absolutely awesome and he's talking to us about intersectional feminism he's talking to us about intersectional feminism. He's talking to us about unconscious bias. How old is he? He's seven. The other day, we were looking at some shoes and my husband said, oh, these are women's shoes. And he was just like, Papa, that's not very feminist.

What if men wanted to wear them? You're excluding men from wearing these shoes. And I was just like, listen, you know what? You should be having that conversation. We should be thinking about why we have men's sections and women's sections. And if you're going to call it out, call it out. And I do recognise that that discourse, it's coming from him because it's in the right context. And I think context is really important to understanding, to gauge how much somebody understands. And I get that he does get it

from his own world. And I do recognise that some of that comes from me. But actually, if he wasn't interested, trust me, he wouldn't be talking about it. But he is very much on this beat with me. So final question, because you are the best person at giving book recommendations. And I know that there are lots of avid readers who listen to this podcast so I want you to give me one book from Dialogue your imprint that everyone should rush out and buy and one book that you're really looking forward to reading this year okay so the book from oh that is so unfair it's like choosing your favorite child but I've made you do it so okay can I do one book from last year and one book from this year you may okay so thank

you so the book from last year that I would urge everybody to go out and buy is The Leavers by Lisa Coe because I think a lot of the things that she's talking about in this book around being a parent being separated from your child being sort abandoned, that feeds into this conversation that we've been having of how I've felt with my family. And it also looks at American Chinese relations and integration. And it's just an absolutely incredible book. And then the book that I would most like you to pick up now is called Remembered by Yvonne Battle Felton. And again, I think this book is important to me, one, because it's the first book that's coming out this year, but also because it's about these reverberations of transatlantic slave trade. And I think that,

again, is sort of really important for this particular conversation, because, as you said from the top it's about the ancestors and my ancestors are always around me and sort of pushing me to be who I am and I do this for them so those two books I think are the most connected to this conversation. And what about a book from some other publisher that you're looking forward to this year? Well I'm looking forward to How to Fail. Oh my gosh it was almost like I set that up. And I didn't, I didn't. You didn't, you didn't. I am really looking forward to that

because I think, I just think you've done a really incredible job but sort of highlighting a very simple concept that we had failed to consider. And so it's all in there. And in this time of perfection and being your best and everything, I think it's really important to highlight and make us feel really uncomfortable and think about what it is that actually makes us who On the 4th of April, kids, pre-order on Amazon. No, thank you so much.

That means a lot to me, specifically coming from you, because we have had such great conversations over the last few years, and I cherish every single minute of every single one of them. Charmaine Lovegrove, you may not be a perfectionist, but you're perfect in my eyes. And thank you so, so much for agreeing to come on How To Fail. Thanks for having me.