How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S5 BONUS EPISODE! How to Fail: Philippa Perry and Sadie Jones

Episode Date: August 21, 2019

A live recording of a one-off How To Fail With Elizabeth Day special with authors Philippa Perry (The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read) and Sadie Jones (The Snakes) about How To Fail...At Families.Recorded in front of a live audience at Foyle's bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London.This episode is sponsored by Penguin Life, which publishes books by experts who share a passion for living well.*Philippa Perry's The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read is available to order here.Sadie Jones's The Snakes is available to order here.*I am thrilled to be taking How To Fail on tour around the UK in October, sharing my failure manifesto with the help of some very special guests. These events are not recorded as podcasts so the only way to be there is to book tickets via www.faneproductions.com/howtofail* The Sunday Times Top 5 bestselling book of the podcast, How To Fail: Everything I've Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong by Elizabeth Day, is out now and is available here.*This bonus episode of How To Fail With Elizabeth Day was hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Chris Sharp and Naomi Mantin and sponsored by Penguin Life. To contact us, email [e-mail]* Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdaySadie Jones @thatsadiejonesPhilippa Perry @philippa_perryChris Sharp @chrissharpaudioNaomi Mantin @naomimantin  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 car and 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. This live episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day is sponsored by publishers Penguin Life. Launched in 2016, Penguin Life publishes books by experts who share a passion for living well. Books such as The Stress Solution by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, Ruby Wax's How to Be Human, Dr. Megan Rossi's Eat Yourself Healthy, published in September, and of course, Philippa Perry's The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read. Penguin Life has a vision to make the world a better place with real credible advice that will improve the lives of its readers for many years to come. Thank you very much to Penguin Life. So hello and welcome to this very

special live recording of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day. We're here in Foyle's Bookshop in Charing Cross Road, London, which is quite possibly my favourite bookshop ever since they did a spectacular window display for the publication of How to Fail. Never let it be said that I'm not easily won over by flattery. Tonight we're doing something slightly different with the podcast and welcoming two fantastic authors on stage to discuss how to fail at families. Philippa Perry is a psychotherapist and Red Magazine's resident agony aunt, whose most recent non-fiction work, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did, was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. Despite not being a parent myself, I found it enlightening

and reassuring, and it bears the notable distinction of being one of the only books I've ever read that made me cry on the tube. In a good way. Sadie Jones is, in my opinion, one of our greatest living novelists. Her first novel, The Outcast, won a Costa Award in 2008. Her latest book, The Snakes, is a riveting and chilling account of the corrosive effects of money, power, and parenthood. Trust me, once you've read it, you will never forget the ending. I cannot think of two better qualified guests to join me to talk about how to fail at families. Please welcome Philippa Perry and Sadie Jones. So can I start by asking you both actually the same question? Because I know that you

come at families from different places. Philippa, you're a psychotherapist and you write non-fiction but what drew you both to exploring the family unit in the first place? Philippa, can I start with you? You can. I suppose it was my disaster of a family of origin which from the outside would not look like a disaster, would look like a very secure, happy family unit. But of course, it had its fair share of dysfunction and corrosive effects and ways of, instead of fertilising the flowers of the children, kind of putting a lot of weeds around them so they had to struggle for light and air. And do you think from the clients that you've seen and from the people who write to you in Red Magazine, do you feel that most people's issues start with the family? I think most people's

issues start with either being able to make relationships or getting stuck and failing in some way in how they make relationships because we are pack animals and we need relationships like we need food and if we somehow seem to get them wrong a lot of the time then we get into trouble and then we have problems we might not realize that our problems are relationship-based, but they usually are. And Sadie, what's about you? What attracted you to the very dysfunctional family that you talk about in The Snakes? Well, I didn't set out to write a book about family. I set out to write a political book and a morality tale. But the best way to do that,

to write about this very sick and dysfunctional society that I wanted to tell was to really make it small and make the family really a metaphor for the society that I'm describing. So the family unit, the patriarch, who is a fairly corrupt creature, the mother who is needy and controlling, the daughter who's struggling to be good in an extremely toxic situation. As you were talking about a springboard into life, she's desperately trying to separate herself from that. And I found myself writing a domestic story or a family story because that was how to make it intimate and how to make it as intense and painful as it needed to be.

And I noticed that because we've spoken in the past about how female authors, when they write about families, are often pigeonholed as, quote unquote, domestic writers, whereas someone like Jonathan Franzen can do it and it's suddenly a state of the nation novel. Has that been something that you personally have felt when you've been writing? It's something I'm very aware of as a reader. And I think with this book particularly because I wanted it to have scale and it came you know from the tradition of Greek tragedy or it has a lot of those sort of big base notes to it. I was less anxious about this being seen as a domestic story because you know everybody's in a family you know Oedipus.

Yeah. It was a consideration, it is a consideration. I was more concerned with keeping it intimate than worrying about it being too intimate. And can I ask you both what your relationship is with failure more generally? So, Philippa, are you scared of failure or have you learnt to embrace it as something that builds up a kind of emotional resilience? I've certainly got used to it. I think you can't do anything without

failing. If you go on a walk, you'll go up a wrong way and think, oh, let me look at the map. Oh no, I've gone wrong. And you'll turn around and you'll find the way to go. I think life is a, I call it in my book, rupture and repair. We make mistakes, we go, oops, and then we try and correct the mistake and then we make another mistake. And even though it's a series of mistakes, we sort of get there in the end. And mistakes are failures, are they not? They are. This is so speaking my language, rupture and repair. And I think what you make clear in your book, which is such a fantastic read, is that it's never too late to repair a rupture. Well, it's never too late to attempt to repair a rupture.

I mean, if you've been stabbed, it's sort of like, oh, let me pull that knife out. Whoops, let me sew that up. You know, there's still some damage being done. But saying I shouldn't have done that rather, that was your fault that you got stabbed. Even that can help a bit. God, it just reminds me of Love Island. I don't know how many of you are watching Love Island.

Love Island sounds better this year. I must watch. There's a whole thing at the moment in Love Island where a man has broken up with a woman. Michael's broken up with Amber, but he's blaming her for having the temerities like make him break up with her. And it's a classic distraction technique. Anyway, I digress. Sadie, what about you? Because you said to me in an email this tremendously funny

thing that for years when you Googled your name, the first article that came up was Sadie Jones and 15 years worth of failure. And the next one was Sadie Jones and 15 years worth of failure. And the next one was Sadie Jones' 18-year-old porn star. Is that a porn star called Sadie Jones? There was this porn star. You've had a very, very career. I had an ambition. My main ambition as a writer was to bump that Sadie Jones off the sort of page one of Google. Yeah, because my first book was published when I was 40.

So I had been trying to be a screenwriter, being an unproduced screenwriter from when I was 20. And I'd met my husband and had children, but I'd been toiling away and going through agents and going through things nearly being made. And the relationship with failure, the intimacy, intimate relationship with failure. So when I did get published and I got,

and that book did incredibly well and it had a lot of luck. So what are they going to interview you about? Oh, you know, housewife writes book. And it was, I was described as a housewife in one of the interviews, which is nice. But the headline was, Sadie Jones on her 15 years of failure. And the book did well, so that article had a lot.

And there it was, and it was just there for the next 10 years. Did you feel like a failure during those years? Yes. Yeah, completely. It's trying to reframe that, this discussion, trying to say, well's we all fear falling over we all fear pain we all want to be loved we want to be accepted so it's it's a horrible thing to be continually you know unproven and to have that to you it very, very easy to go, oh, well, here I go again. You know, and I'm a failure. And that becomes this horrible, comfortable, negative, reinforced thing where it's actually,

when I did become very successful very suddenly, which then you find out is an up and down process and failure comes back a lot. But that moment of suddenly being successful was the most uncomfortable I'd been in my adult life. I didn't know what to do with it because I was very used to armoring myself and battling and girding and sitting down at the desk again. But I wasn't used to, didn't you do well? And I find that really, really hard.

How do you find it now when people say, didn't you do well? Awful. So much better than the other thing. And Philippa, you were saying that your first book, you wrote when you were 51, is that right? Yes. How wonderful. I think that's so good for people to hear.

But actually, I think a lot of people who come on the podcast talk about feeling lost in their 20s and that they don't feel that they're nailing their career in quite the right way and everyone else seems to have a sort of certain path but actually I think what this shows is that it can take you a while to accumulate the necessary wisdom and experience to write the thing that you want to write. Yeah because when I was in my 20s anyway I sort of didn't know how it was going to all turn out so that made it very difficult to write a book or to imagine what an ending would look like.

Having said that, some people in their 20s write amazing books. So I'm not saying it's a rule. It was just a rule for me because I was a bit backward and behind. And what about managing failure in terms of writing the book itself? So I met Sadie when I interviewed her for your third novel, I think it was. And I remember you telling me this brilliant phrase that I use a lot, which is that as a writer, you set out to construct a beautiful cathedral. And by the end of your first draft, you've got a perfectly serviceable garden shed. So I want to ask both of you about your failure in terms of the writing process and how you manage your expectations. Sadie, do you still feel you're building garden sheds?

Yes, I think there's this, as a novelist, whether or not you plan ahead, there's some people who just make it up as they go. There are people who plan ahead and have this perfect notion of the thing they're going to make. And before there's a word on the page, it's perfect. It's beautiful. And it's the platonic version. And then the moment there's a first sentence, it's a, you know, it's a sentence.

What are you going to use? Then you've got a book. So that's an ongoing thing. And I think the more I write or the more books I write, the more part of the job is silencing the inner critic and taking the risk because you have the editing voice and the critic voice who's going you know that's okay that's maybe a b plus but you could do better you're not as excited as you were about it yesterday where when you do it first it's all terrifying it's all exciting so it's

keeping her quiet and that is basically a fear of failure, that voice. And taking the risk on the page. Yeah. That's the thing, isn't it? Peyton, it's happening. We're finally being recognized for being very online. It's about damn time. I mean, it's hard work being this opinionated. And correct. You're such a Leo. All the time. So if you're looking for a home for your worst opinions. If you're a hater 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

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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. medieval from history hits. Do you have an inner critic, Philippa, when you're writing? Oh dear, I've got a football team of them. Awful, awful. I've actually got a bit in my book about how to calm your inner critic.

I should really read it. I have to fight. It almost feels like a physical fight to keep going. You talked about a first sentence. I have got so many first sentences. I've got a book of first sentences. It's the second sentence and the one after that I find really difficult. I do find it really difficult. I feel a bit like that sketch that Paul Whitehouse did, it's the hardest job in the world. Do you write the first sentence first? Well, I write a first sentence first, but it won't be the one that is the first sentence. In your novels, do you write your first sentence first? Sometimes, but more often I go back and rewrite the entire first chapter probably.

Because once you know where the story's gone. I can never get it's a truth universally acknowledged out of my head. I mean, that is just, I can't top that. It's so annoying. I can never get the every family, every, well, I can obviously get it out of my mind because I fail to remember it. There we go.

The Tolstoy one. Yeah, that one. Every happy family is boring, essentially, I paraphrase. But let's get on to you. So you've both been kind enough to give me specific family-based failures. Philippa, I'd love to come to you on this one first. And it's about your relationship with your father. I never managed to impress him. I never managed to actually influence him about anything at all. He was a real proper grown-up in the world and knew absolutely everything about everything.

And I also had a view on the world and I would have absolutely loved it if I could have influenced him about one thing even if it was as insignificant as who I was I'm this person no I think you'll find you're that person so my relationship with my father it only ever worked when we both agreed that that race at Aintree was brilliant. Or we both agreed on this television actor's good, this one isn't. Then those were moments of joy and meeting. But it was never that I managed to persuade him to my point of view. Or even that he could see that even if he

kept his own point of view mine was equally valid I was never equally valid and I always felt very less than and I always looked up to him and would have wanted his good opinion or at least his apology right until the end but I never got it he dead now. And he had a view of me that he liked to hold on to. And he was quite proud of that view of me, but I just didn't recognize who he was talking about. He was talking about his vision as me. I never felt seen by him. And I could never be seen by him but having said that it's probably why I write books because I want to be seen I want to be heard and the book you wish your parents had read is largely about will you please look at me dad just look at me once obviously I don't write it like that and it's a very grown-up book. But that may be,

I'm just thinking about this on the spot now, that may be what's underneath it is that I really wish he had known that he could be impacted by his kids. He could not lose his own vision of the world, but he could accept theirs and it wouldn't have annihilated him. And how much do

you think that was as a result of your position in the family of being a younger sibling oh he didn't listen to my sister either we were equal in that in that sort of like you know there we were age 55 and 51 we're still referred to as the children and were expected to have a child amount to contribute which was nothing and where was your mother in all of this hello hi lovely would you like some more she She was very nice. Do you think knowing what you know now and expressing what you've just expressed about the motivation for writing books, would you have wanted to redraw your relationship with your father if you could, knowing that he had given you this drive? I mean, yes, I would. I really would. It would have meant so much to me. Because as you said, I didn't write my first book till I was 51. If I had more confidence in myself as who I was, which I think I would have got if he'd said you're all right much earlier on, I think I could have been creative earlier.

And what do you think that particular failure has taught you? Well, I certainly think it's inspired the book you wish your parents had read, because I really wish you'd read that book and learnt that mutual impact, allowing someone to influence you, isn't a sign of weakness. I really would have liked him to know that. And I think that would have helped him in all his relationships as well. There's a dynamic I talk about in the book which is doer and done to. Rather than a sort of equal when we just have an interchange, there's like someone who just receives and someone who just tells it like it is

or does stuff to you. And I think had he known about that dynamic and realised that he could step out of it and have a dialogue and exchange, all his relationships might have been a bit richer and the ones with his children as well. So I really wish he'd read the book. Yeah. My final question on this particular topic is, do you think that your experience with your father has made you into a better, more aware parent? I'm not sure about better. No, I think because when you reinvent yourself as a parent thinking, I'm not going to do that pattern, you've always got this sort of voice, this sort of fall back emergency mode that is like automatic instinctual because it was how you were

brought up and so I think that under stress I fall back into being my father or my mother you'll be all right bless her bless them both actually because they both did as well as they could I don't want to be angry with either of them. They did as they were done to. Women must be nice and accommodating at all times. Men must be in charge of everything and know everything. I mean, that's the culture that they were brought up in, and they were doing their best with that.

I don't want to blame them or be angry with them. Obviously, the filial bond is there and I love them very much but we didn't like each other very much and you were trapped in your roles yeah very much trapped in the roles of child father mother sister yeah I can't remember the question no you answered it that's fine neither can I say do your failure in family is also to do with parenting or rather an attempt to pretend to be a specific kind of parent. Parenting, I think, is automatic failure anyway.

I mean, I think it just is. But I think we're three younger siblings and I think that's an automatic position of failure anyway. We can never catch up. We can never catch up. That's why we're desperate for everyone here to like us. Please like us. So, yes, among my failings as a parent

were that having always been a slight outsider, quite shy, a bit of a loner, your basic writer character, and didn't do very well at school and was never really a team player. I took that into being a parent. I would be late at the school gates on purpose so that I didn't have to see the other mothers. And my mother would always say, when I was growing up, she'd go, I'm not a proper mother, I'm not one of those other mothers. And my mother would always say when I was growing up, she'd go,

I'm not a proper mother. I'm not one of those proper mothers. And I related to it and I liked it and I got it, but it was sort of reinforced our outsiderhood. I did the same thing. As you were saying, I did the same thing. I go, I'm not a proper mother. I'm not one of those. And I began to beat myself up about this to such a degree that the proper mothers were baking things and the proper mothers were turning up on time and chatting and forming these great relationships and playing tennis with each other what they were doing so I kind of built up this thing and my kids when they were five and six started at a school that was a new school that was just starting up and they needed they needed someone to run the parents association and I just thought this is my chance I'm going to be a proper mother

now I can do this I can say hi to people and not fall over and no one's going to think I'm mad I can cook which I really can't I mean I can cook but I can't bake I really can't bake and I would I'd make these cakes of sort of dragons and caves and whatever but they'll be really not very cooked on the inside and I was so frightened I was going to give all these kids salmonella I it wasonella. But I forced myself with my very good friend Amanda, and we ran the Parents Association, and we did the fundraising and the ringing people up and the you only have to have the special numbers and who's on the top of the list,

and meetings and coffee and bringing things and trying to suppress your rage. People come round and you've made tea and you've got tea and you've baked the thing and they turn up going, oh, no, I've got a skinny latte on the way. And, oh, have you got any soy milk? And I was so angry all the time. But I was fine, I did it.

And it got to the end of the year and was shafted by someone who really wanted to do it and I realized that I had not written a word I hadn't been myself or written a word or had a thought I'd been so busy squashing myself into this person my children they didn't notice they had no idea they It was completely not for them, as it turned out. It was for me. And it sounds again like... And I hated it. Yeah, it sounds like a very stressful year.

It was horrible. But it sounds again as if you were trying to cut off your edges and fit yourself into this allotted role and this space that as a woman you were meant to occupy. And be acceptable. But it's very nerve-wracking. And just not being yourself is not good. Being acceptable is a habit, though, isn't it?

If we're in the habit of being accepted, it's not something we even teeter on the outside of. So I, too, have this thing about being acceptable, even though my baking is exemplary and I would bake so many cakes for these occasions and then I'd look at the career mums of which I was not one at the time and I'd feel terrible envy and less than so I think the pattern is feeling less than, feeling inadequate. And it doesn't really matter what we're doing.

We've just got that dynamic of pattern. At least you could bake. You really need to hold on to that, because I was failing, failing, failing as a writer, and then I was making these poisonous cakes. You were the president of the Parents Association. I never reached those giddy heights. Guys, I've never done either. I'm not a good baker and I've never done the PTA,

so I don't know where that leaves me. We're so impressed. I think you're okay. How innate, then, is the desire to people-please in women? Do you think it is a gendered thing? In me, it's shocking. I've never really got over it. I hear people say, I don't care what people think and I people say it on Twitter I don't care what anyone thinks I so care what

everybody thinks yeah and I can't get out of that and if I get you know 10 good reviews on our an Amazon and one four star one that that goes, I liked it a bit. I go, oh! Oh, yeah. Failure. So wait, for you, a four-star review on Amazon isn't a good one? How dare you? What I wouldn't do for a four-star review. Oh, shut up.

We can have a great game of who's the worst now. What about you, Sadie? Do you think people-pleasing is gendered? I assume it is, but maybe we just talk about it more. There are different ways of going about it and they don't articulate it, but they must be the same. We need to ask some. Maybe in the Q&A.

Get some nice men to confide. I think that we have... Maybe it's putting on a costume more, a different costume anyway, of trying to be, you know, soothing and accommodating and all of those things. And how do you both deal as writers and feeling and creative people? You have to have a kind of, if not a thin skin, a breathable skin. I describe it in how to fail as a bit like gore text like you've got to let some things in in order to have the

creative impulse but how do you protect yourselves against that kind of criticism or someone being nasty on twitter do you have strategies philippa no i haven't really i'm really good with the mute and the block buttons on Twitter. So any neggy stuff on Twitter at all, that is the last comment I'll see from them. And that makes me feel quite good because it's an act of aggression, muting or blocking. I realise blocking gives people a thrill, so I only mute because blocking is like attention if they notice it. So I mute a lot on Twitter and that makes me feel quite good.

Another rule I've now got is don't look below the line. So don't read the reviews, just count them. And that has helped me a lot. Sadie, do you have strategies? I, yes, because I'm so bad at, so sensitive and ridiculous.

Yes, I haven't looked at Amazon for two books i not even once and i'm really proud of that is so impressive not even drunk and not even not even late at night when i'm feeling quite good about myself i haven't looked at all and it's not the opinions opinions matter a lot i read the printed, but it's just not worth it because I realise that I can't learn how to write better from looking at Amazon or, worse, Goodreads. It's just not helpful.

I learn how to suffer blows, but I'm pretty good at that anyway. So I just don't. I'm really disciplined about it. But I do think that, as you were saying, the writer's personality, we need to be sensitive. I think that's not to do with having a thick skin. I don't want to develop a thick skin. So that's why I don't look. I think it's important to be as uncomfortable in life in order to make stuff up, to be uncomfortable and to feel pain and all of those things. I just think that in terms of looking at reviews, it's not a helpful one. Can I ask you a bit about the creation of fictional families? Because it isn't just the

Adamson's in the snakes that you have been drawn to. Every single one of your books has some incredibly riveting core of dysfunction to it and I wonder when you're writing fictional families do they seem as real to you as your own and do you disappear into this fictional world during the day and then have to come back and bake badly? Yes I hope to disappear into it the hard I'm working to be at the point where it's hard to break out of it. And I'm in the dysfunction. I just assume everybody's like that. I met a friend of mine, actually a good friend of mine's wife. I sort of said to her, well, we all come from a difficult family or everybody has. And she said, no, no, I don't I said well you must have you know

an alcoholic in your family or a depressive or someone you know narcissist at the very least you know some bigamists and she said no nobody at all I said well everyone was divorced so she got divorced in the family there was nothing I don was nothing. I don't believe her. I don't believe her. I went on for like 10 minutes just quizzing her. I go, well, what about your cousin? There was nothing. And she's a happy, sunny person, and her life is good. She'll never make a novelist. She's the exception that proves the rule, I think,

that virtually everybody comes from. There's damage everywhere, and that doesn't mean broken, and it doesn't mean bad, and it doesn't mean wrong, but it's, you know, we all have these cracks. Most of us have these cracks. I'm fascinated, Philippa, by the idea of roles, the roles that are allotted to us, not baked roles, don't worry. The roles that are allotted to us within families

and how pervasive they are yeah we tend to go when we've got like three children jimmy's the joker catherine's the quiet studious one and rocky's the baby in and which is great when maybe when they're two four and six when they're 22 24 and 26 these roles can be very restricting if nobody manages to convince anyone else that they've changed and they're different. And I think it's a really bad idea to put a label, any label, even if it's a positive label, on a child, because we're all organic and we all get impacted by other people all the time and other ideas and things and we change and we grow all the time and so to label someone as the quiet one

went oh you gave a speech you shouldn't have done that that's not you that's what how people tend to react to people if they put a role on them. So it feels quite constricting and it can be quite difficult to break out of. We give ourselves roles as well. We might call ourselves a failure so that when somebody says to us, you've done really well, you've written a bestseller, you've written a book that was adapted into a drama. You're brilliant. We just don't know. We haven't got any practice about how to take that in. And then we get to things that if they're not familiar, they're wrong. We confuse familiar with being true and right because it

feels so good. And that's what happens if we get given a role or we adopt a role and we think that's us it really restricts us because a judgment or a role is like a full stop there's nowhere to go after you've been given a role after you've been told you're the quiet one you feel like you're betraying everybody if you open your mouth and so don't let's judge ourselves or each other and put ourselves into roles and say oh i'm this sort of person or he's that sort of person because then we just get stuck there so that's so fascinating and so it was amazing the idea of a role being a full stop and therefore you can't continue to write your own sentence is phenomenal but for instance christmas which is a flashpoint for so many families how do you what are your practical tips for australia's nice well if your family live in australia so long as you haven't got any family out there

but what i mean when you are going back home for christmas let's say it's very difficult and i speak from personal, it's very difficult. And I speak from personal experience, it's so difficult to break out of the role that's been allotted to you. How do you do it? Well, luckily, my role is cook, so I can just hide in the kitchen. Sorry, that's where I am. I'm just in the kitchen. That's what I'm doing. But even that is really restricted. I'm the cook. I'm cooking in the kitchen. That's me. It's like, no, I can watch television. I don't know. Can we have a ready meal? No. How do you do it? Well, you can't, because they're not going to listen. Sort of like, I know you think of me as this sort of person and everything, but actually, I've written a book. Oh, yes, everybody writing a book these days, aren't they?

Somebody actually did say that to me and my family. I wrote my first book and I was so proud. And I was still in the younger sister role then, so I was still going, look what I've done. And my older cousin said to me, yes, everybody's writing a book these days, aren't they? Oh, wow. That's very sad are you asking me for advice obviously I haven't obviously I haven't handled it very well I'm not there yet

I think what we want to do is educate other people about ourselves but I think maybe it might be just better to role model learning about them. And what do you mean by that? Give up. No, you don't. You don't mean that. What do you actually mean? No, I do think if you've tried to show your family who you are and they're still reflecting back to you a person you don't recognise, who they insist is you, it's a good idea not to keep

knocking, not to keep wanting that approval because it looks like you aren't going to get it. So it might be a better idea to switch the focus onto tell me about your year. And to remain stable in your own power. Stable in your own power and I find Facebook's quite handy. How's your Christmas been? Oh my God, look where you're sleeping tonight underneath the gym machine. Those things are great.

Sadie, which fictional family, either one that you've written or one that you've read, has stayed with you the most, do you think? Oh, Salinger's family. The Franny and Zooey family the Glass family I just love them what about them I've never read that book oh god it's wonderful I think where I'm trying to now remember exactly their family I don't can't remember how many

siblings there's Franny and Zooey and there's two others I think think, the older one. Anyway, they were a family of child geniuses who were on a TV show. And they're a family of New York intellectuals who are on this TV show, but that's not the book. That's just their sort of lurking in the background. I haven't read it for a while, and there are people in the audience going, what the hell are you talking about? But as I recall it, it's a book which is basically a conversation between Franny and Zoe.

And she's come back from college and she's lying in the bath smoking. And you get everything about them. He also wrote about that family in other books. They're wonderfully sexually dysfunctional. They're neurotic. They're smart. They have this endless quipping. And I just love them.

What's it like for your real life family reading your books about fictional families who behave badly to each other? So when I wrote my first novel, Sister's Paper Stone, which is also about dysfunctional family and I remember my mother reading it for the first time and going very, very pale and very, very quiet.

I was like, what did you think? And her first words were, are you very, very dark? She was just very worried that I was incredibly twisted. Well, that's really sweet. I thought you were going to say, is that me? No, no. She didn't do that. She didn't do that.

Although I did dedicate it to my parents saying they're nothing like the parents in the book because I felt that was important. Because I think sometimes it's quite difficult for people who know you and love you to read your fictional creations I can safely say and my family are wonderful my parents are wonderful they've never said and that you know there's there's quite a lot of dark stuff they seem entirely unsurprised they They're just like, oh, yeah, you know, the self-harm, the alcoholism, the death. It just hasn't crossed their minds, I think, either to ask or maybe it just always shone off me.

I don't know. We've spoken about how to fail at families, but I wonder if you both have successes that you can own. wonder if you both have successes that you can own like do you do you feel that there's something that you've done well within your family unit philippa is making delightful faces and i'm worried to come to you first but i feel from reading your book that you um are a very good mother and you've given space to your daughter to be able to express how she's feeling at every single juncture. I know it's a hard thing to say, but do you think you've been a good parent? I don't really like adjectives good and bad when it comes to parents because we're talking about a relationship. So you don't think, I don't think after this encounter that we've had tonight and our little friendlinesses in the green room

do you think I was a good person with with with Elizabeth and Sadie you know I don't these are relationships what we have with our children is relationships and I don't think it's very helpful to evaluate ourselves in terms of good and bad sometimes me and my daughter manage to resonate with each other and we're on the same page and we get each other and sometimes we miss and I don't think we're bad when we're missing we're trying and failing but when we fail we try again and then hopefully we get back on the same page again so the idea of being good or bad, I don't like the question. Well, I love that you said that, and I do like the answer.

And do you think the same of other relationships? For instance, marriages. People are often talking about good or unhappy marriages. Do you think the same thing, that you can't evaluate? I think being a good wife doesn't sound much fun. What, you clear up all the wee around the bottom of the loo and you never say anything is that what a good wife is it doesn't sound much fun so I don't think we should be so wrapped up in being good or bad I think we should be ourselves and be open and be open to the other person and be open to be impacted by them and

hopefully they're also therefore take on us as well I think that's the best we can hope for Sadie do you think you've been a good parent no I'm joking that's not the question is there anything within your family life that you feel well done that you can own is I'm at a difficult point with them because both my children have just left home or are in the middle of leaving home, which is, I aspire to the mature, you know, it's a process and everything you said,

but there's a terrible end of exam. Your results come as a parent at that point. Do you think those are your results? Oh, they're fine. In that case, I'm a brilliant parent because my kid got great results. There you go. Now, I don't think that. I think she got those.

No, no, I don't mean the academic ones. I mean just like there's nothing more I can do. Yeah. I feel like there's a lot more I can do as a relationship with them as an adult. But that's the best bit. There's just this feeling of, well, I wish I'd done that. I wish I'd been more. I wish I'd read aloud more.

This awful sort of... What's the word? Regret? That. Yeah. None of us read aloud enough. None of us read aloud enough. None of us read aloud enough. We can all regret that.

So it just, it depends. When they're happy, I think I did a great job. When they're not happy, less so. But it's a difficult time because you can't help but give yourself a bit of an assessment. You can't be happy all the time. No one can be happy all the time. Anything that has the power to give us happiness has the power to make

us sad. So if you get them a puppy and they're happy, then the old dog dies and they're sad. But do you think conversely that anything that has the power to make us sad also has within it the power to make us happy? You'll have to be more specific. You'll have to give me an example. But yes, I suppose so. We're talking mathematically. Yeah. I just wanted to end on an upbeat note.

I was just trying desperately. Oh, God, I've killed the puppy! Oh, no, no. You know, we've been left with dead dogs and... Close with a dead dog, then. Yeah. Close the dead dog, because we're all too unhappy to close with a dead dog. We can't close with a dead dog. There's always dead dog. No, I'm too unhappy to close with a dead dog.

Can't close with a dead dog. There's always hope. We can end on a happy note because there's always hope. Because however bad, I'm doing quote marks, however bad we think we are, we can always say to our kids, my bad, I should have read to you aloud more. And they went, no, I like my story tapes,

don't worry about it. You know, don't let's worry about it. Don't let's worry about it. Sadie Jones and Philippa Perry, you have been an utter delight. Thank you so, so much for coming on How To Fail. Thank you. if you enjoyed this episode of how to fail with elizabeth day i would so appreciate it if you could rate review and subscribe apparently it helps other people know that we exist