How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S5, Ep4 How to Fail: Francesca Segal

Episode Date: July 17, 2019

This week, my guest is the writer Francesca Segal whose recently published memoir, Mother Ship, details the birth of her twin daughters 10 weeks prematurely. Her first failure is, in Segal's own words, her failure 'to stay pregnant' and the feeling of shame that came from not having managed to provide the requisite 40-week gestation period. 'I felt I had failed at my first ever task of motherhood,' she explains. 'That my body could not be a safe space for them felt a spectacular failure.'She and her husband, Gabriel, were pitched into a nightmarish situation where they did not know whether their baby girls would survive. When they were born they weighed only 2lbs each. The girls could not do anything on their own and they suffered harrowing, life-threatening infections. Segal joins me to discuss what happened next.Even if you are not one of the 100,000 women in the UK who, every year, give birth to premature babies and even if, like me, you are not a parent at all, I promise that you will find Segal's insightful eloquence both enlightening and moving.We also talk about her failure to be a rebellious teenager, her conflicted attitude to social media and how, as a writer, she deals with the eternal nagging of her fractious internal critic. Listen, be moved and then order her wonderful book via the link below.* 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.*How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Chris Sharp and Naomi Mantin and sponsored by Teatulia. To contact us, email [e-mail]* Francesca Segal's memoir, Mother Ship, is out now and available to order here *If you were affected by any of the issues raised in this podcast, help is available via Bliss, the charity for babies born premature or sick.* Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayFrancesca Segal @francescasegalChris Sharp @chrissharpaudioNaomi Mantin @naomimantinTeatulia @TeatuliaUK         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, it's Elizabeth Day here. I have a fantastic and moving guest for you today. But just a little reminder before we start the episode that tickets for my tour are still on sale. I'm going around the country, six-state tour in October. I cannot wait to meet you all. And if you'd like to book tickets, there is a link in the show notes, or you can book via my website, elizabethdayonline.co.uk. Thank you.

This series of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day is sponsored by Tea Tulia, my favourite new bar in London's Covent Garden. It's actually a tea bar where you can also buy great organic teas. As something of a green tea snob myself, I have to say their jasmine has become a cupboard staple in my house this year. More importantly, they sell tea cocktails made with infusions from their tea which are very delicious and i might add very very strong there are books for sale too with selections by tilda swinton john ham lionel shriver and well me i picked 10 books that have been important to me and the whole list is for sale now they also have an excellent online shop and are giving 20% off everything to you lovely listeners. Just go to titulia bar.com that's t e a t u l i a b a r.com

and enter how to fail all one word at checkout. Thank you very much to T2lia. 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. Francesca Siegel is an award-winning writer, journalist, and mother of three. That latter label is a relevant one because two of those three children are identical twin girls born 10 weeks prematurely. This was a

life-changing experience that Siegel has written about in her startlingly beautiful new memoir, Mothership. Mothership tells of how she and her husband find themselves sitting vigil in the neonatal intensive care unit, watching in equal parts terror and love as their tiny daughters fight for their lives. Siegel's diary of her daughter's first 56 days pays tribute both to the other women she met along the way and to the extraordinary work of the NHS. As well as being sublime and tender, it also somehow manages to be funny. Adam Kay has already called it heart-wrenching, heartwarming and heartfelt. Mothership is her first foray into non-fiction.

Siegel's debut novel, The Innocents, won the 2012 Costa First Novel Award. Her second, The Awkward Age, counted Nick Hornby among its admirers. She always wanted to be a writer, dictating novels to an imaginary friend at the age of three. Now 38, she was recently asked what she wished she'd known at the start of her career and replied that the self-doubt and anxiety never go away, and so to try and metabolise and understand them as part of the process. Francesca Siegel, what a delight to have you on the podcast. You are also, I should say, one of my dearest friends, but I am entirely objective when I say that Mothership is one of my books of the year. Now, that quote about anxiety and

self-doubt, are you one of those authors who feels that every book is a failure until it's written? Or maybe even then? Yeah, I think I feel that every working day is a failure. I think three or four hours of exquisite agony and self-doubt slash self-loathing is I've now come to see is almost an essential part of creating any kind of fiction for me. Unfortunately, I wish I was somebody who skipped to the page, scribbled something and then went off for a latte. page, scribbled something and then went off for a latte. Was the nonfiction an easier process? I sort of hesitate to use that word because what you're talking about in Mothership is extremely difficult at points. It was an easier process. The thinking about it in advance, I sort of contorted myself about whether ethically I felt comfortable writing about my children, about whether I felt ready to write about these experiences. But once I actually started in earnest, and I started trying to write this book twice, the second time when I really was ready, it was much easier than fiction. Writing fiction,

I find every sentence painful. And I'm almost unable to silence my inner critic, or if I can, she shuts up for about 12 minutes at a time whereas with this I really I found the writing of it a joy. And I love that idea that you expressed so beautifully of self-doubt and anxiety being part of the process in what way do you think it is part of the process is it almost like you need to allow yourself time not doing anything to allow creativity to be stimulated? I think so I think it's a combination of that I think it's a combination of that. I think it's a combination of requiring that sort of intellectual downtime almost. It's almost, I mean, it's kind of like worry beads,

but the opposite, sort of torturous, self-punishing worry beads. And it's also just time away from whatever you're thinking about. But it's also, I think, being humble and accepting that whatever you're writing isn't going to be perfect the first time and that actually it might crap actually the first time, but that doesn't matter because you'll go back and make it better. I would worry if I got to the end of the first draft and thought it was brilliant. I always remember talking to the novelist Sadie Jones and her saying that when she sets out to write a new book, she has a vision of a cathedral. And what ends up on the page is a very serviceable garden shed.

A beach hut was what I was thinking when you started with that. A beach hut. Perfectly fine beach hut. Yeah. But I mean, there's a lot to be said for a beach hut. Exactly. Or a garden shed, for that matter. Yeah, I think that's perfect.

That sort of encapsulates how most of us feel. I'm so delighted to have you on the podcast. We've been wanting to do this for ages. And Mothership is just such a staggeringly good book. And if you haven't read it or ordered it already, you really must rush out and do it. And it is not a book that is just for mothers. And I speak as one who is not a mother, but I just found it so profoundly moving and beautifully tender. And it brings us onto your first failure, which is one that we've never had on the podcast before, which is your failure to stay pregnant. That's how you express it. So tell us a bit about that and why you perceived it to be a failure. So first of all, I should preface this by saying I never thought I

would write a memoir. I never thought I would write anything personal in this way. And obviously fiction is personal in a different way. But the idea that I would sort of deliberately set out to expose something so painful that I'd been through just would have been a complete anathema to me. But what happened was I was 35, pregnant with identical twins. It was my first pregnancy. And I was a combination of sort of naive and arrogant really and I knew that I was a geriatric mother quote unquote and I knew that identical twins in particular are a high-risk pregnancy. That's what the NHS calls mothers over the age of 35 isn't it? Geriatric. Yeah and lovely. Amazing, it always makes you feel good.

Great when you see that on the notes and I'm a natural worrier and a natural pessimist but I thought everything would be fine in this case unusually for me and I just was getting on with things and I was going to Pilates and I was going to the library every day and I had backache but generally felt great and was probably completely revolting and smug and And I had as textbook and easier twin pregnancy as it's possible to have until 29 weeks when I woke up at five o'clock in the morning and thought, oh shit, I've wet myself. The pelvic floor was gone. It was bound to happen one day. There's two babies in there. And then I turned the light on and actually it was blood. I had a partial

placental abruption, which is when the placenta, just for reasons they don't know, detaches from the wall of the uterus. And so the babies were delivered within 24 hours of that. The main thing I was feeling was terror for these babies. I felt like a desperate failure. I don't think I really understood that they'd have to spend so long in hospital. I had absolutely no idea. I knew nothing about babies and not really that much about pregnancy. But I felt like I had let them down the very first time they'd asked something of me,

that all I needed was just to stay pregnant and give them the time that they deserved to ready themselves to come into the world. And I hadn't been able to give it to them. And what happens when twin girls are born that prematurely? Because the narrative of that birth must be so different from a straightforward one because you can't hold your babies. So what happens in the immediate aftermath of them being born? They disappeared. That was what happened in my experience of them was that I had an emergency C-section and then a very quiet final third of the final half of the surgery because the babies were whisked out of the room.

So I lay in the operation theatre with absolutely no idea where they were or what was happening to them. And meanwhile, there was a team of maybe 12 in a room next door trying to stabilise them and save their lives. And then they go to the neonatal intensive care unit and you're taken to recovery. And you kind of have to go and find them when you're well enough to do it.

And in my case, I had a C-section at 5pm, lots and lots of drugs, and I find them when you're well enough to do it. And in my case, you know, I had a C-section at 5pm, lots and lots of drugs, and I didn't wake up till 4am the next morning. So the day my children were born, I didn't see them. The first time you saw them, what was that like? I don't think I really understood that they were mine. I needed permission to touch them. I didn't know whether it was safe for me to touch them. I didn't know how to touch them. You certainly can't pick them up. I didn't hold them for days. And I needed a nurse to explain sort of almost everything about them, all the tubes and wires and stickers and jaundice lamps. So it was terrifying, really. I mean, they were two pounds each when they were born,

kilo each. I'd never seen anything that looked so small. How small is that for someone who only did a single science GCSE? How small is it physically in combination to your hand, for instance? They're about the length of my hand, a little bit, maybe sort of a little bit longer than my hand. Their limbs were about the thickness of my forefinger. And so I was terrified to touch them. Their skin isn't really finished when they're so little. They look red and you can almost watch their circulation. They don't look ready because they're not.

And their vulnerability was really driven home to me seeing them like that. And that's when I just thought all these machines and wires, I should be doing that. And I'm not, I've let them down. There's this amazing bit in the book where one of the consultants, I think it is, tells you about the incredible machinery and how much it's worth. And the fact that a woman just does that naturally is a sort of rather shocking and wonderful realisation for you. Right. I mean, that's what your body should be doing if all goes well. You talk there about the failure of physically staying pregnant, but how much was it also a failure of the narrative you had told yourself about

what the first days of motherhood would be like? Oh enormously I think because particularly now because we're all meant to be you know we're all so hyper educated about skin to skin and about those early bonding and about trying to breastfeed immediately and all these things that are amazing aspirations and very powerful bonding mechanisms between mothers and babies but for an awful lot of women, actually not just women whose babies come prematurely, but for lots of reasons, women who have traumatic births of other sorts, those early moments aren't possible. And they are so cherished in this narrative we have of what's owed to these babies that you immediately feel like you have damaged your children in some way.

What will their attachment look like if I haven't held them skin to skin within the first half an hour, or in my case, the first three days? And I think an awful lot of women are left feeling guilty and anxious about the sort of those lacks because that narrative is so pervasive. But actually, you're incredibly lucky if you get to hold your baby immediately after birth and there's no intervention at all when your birth went swimmingly and you feel comfortable and there's an awful lot of women who don't have that. I think there's also this pervasive narrative about how you feel an overwhelming rush of love

for your baby as soon as your baby is born and I know that not everyone feels that because friends who've had children have been honest with me about that. But what was that like for you, given, as you say, that you couldn't hold your babies immediately and given that you first saw them for a full day after they'd entered the world? Did you feel an overwhelming rush of love? Because they were so fragile as well. And again, not looking like the baby is meant to look in a romantic comedy. Yeah. How did that feel? I think in some ways I did, perhaps even more than if sort of a big fat bouncing, you know, romantic comedy baby had been plopped onto my lap smiling because I felt so desperately protective and worried for them.

There was just a sort of big soup of hormones and worry, terror and love and fear and guilt, enormous amounts of guilt, that we'd sort of found ourselves there. And perhaps if I hadn't walked up the stairs at quite such a speed the day before, and God knows what, you know, nobody knows why it happened. So I was left free to construct narratives in which it was always my fault. You call them Ayla and and B-let in the book. Why did you call them that? We hadn't even started thinking about names. And the hospital called them twin one and twin two. So it seemed much more sort of intimate to call them A and B for some reason. And then that became A-let and B-let. And then that was so sweet and became really their names. But we kind of didn't get around to giving them names for ages.

And it was only when our very lovely consultant threatened to call social services that we finally decided to bust out the name books and give them proper names. It seemed less important than keeping them alive in truth. I think if we'd had names for them before they came it would have been different but having not even started there was something very superstitious about it. Will you tell us about the mirror and what happened with the mirror yeah so the first time I held one of them I held a lot and it's not a straightforward thing holding a premature baby you need sometimes a nurse sometimes two

one to lift the baby and one to lift this amazing salad of wires that this kind of spaghetti junction that comes off them and they've got this paper fine skin so you can't tug on any of these cables that are attached to them so you have to lie back in a chair and have this nurse have a nurse deliver the baby to your chest and then you can't really move them once they're there and so it was the most incredible overwhelming experience having this baby on my chest I couldn't really see her she was tiny and she was tucked up under my chin and it's really not done to talk to the other mothers on the other parents on the ward you're in very close proximity but you're

having such intimate moments with your babies and such painful things happening that you really there's no eye contact or communication at all whilst you're tending to your babies on the ward but I was saying to Gabe over and over I can't see her I can't see her and one of the other mothers Sophie who then became one of my most precious friends on the ward and since sent her husband over and gave me a hand mirror and that's how you look at your baby's face when you're holding a premature baby on your on your chest it's one of the most moving moments of the book I found and I'm welling up now even thinking of it because it's such a beautiful moment of solidarity between two women in a traumatic and similar situation that you can't possibly

understand unless you've been through it and as I mentioned at the beginning mothership is also testament to the friendships that you forged on that ward and I wanted to ask you why you called it Mothership. Well, I can't take credit for the title. That was a lovely friend of mine, Nat, who came up with it. And I think it's brilliant. And as soon as she suggested it, I thought, that's it. That has to be. I mean, you turned down some of my suggestions, just FYI.

They were excellent. They were excellent. I can't remember any of them, but I'm sure they were excellent. I'm so probably right not to choose a deeply unmemorable title. But please feel well done that well done that with mothership. Please continue. Yeah, well, what I really wanted to write was it was threefold, really, my ambitions in writing this book. One was to write a love letter to my daughters, but also to write a love letter to the NHS and ultimately to the other women, to the mothers of this ward, because that comradeship really was what saved me. And I just think it's an extraordinary example,

an extraordinary environment in which women are free to support one another, as we have always done in an atmosphere that is, it was, nobody spoke on the wards, but you were endlessly expressing breast milk for these babies who can't eat orally. They're fed by nasogastric tubes. So we were in what we call the milking shed, endlessly. This little room with all the breast pumps. And you're sitting in a circle, tits out, completely exposed to one another in almost every way. And that was really where these incredible friendships began very, very quickly.

In parallel with sort of lifelong lasting friendships, also just really powerful human encounters that might only last an hour because you might never see that woman again, but you would talk incredibly frankly to one another. And my experience there was that it was just an incredibly supportive and almost kind of deliberately nurturing place. It felt to me as though everyone who came in understood that this was not a place

for competition. This was not a place for discussions of, you know, well, how many days your baby was on a ventilator and how many days your, you know, it was a source of such tremendous strength for me. There's a really interesting subplot to the book, which is about you finding your voice in that particular situation. So that when you started out as this new mother, you were still in the situation of being a people pleaser and a good girl and the one who didn't bother the doctors. And it was actually the other women who taught you that you had to stand up for your own children. So did it feel like that, that you were finding your voice through that process? Very much. I can't speak for anybody else, but I did not become a mother

the moment my children were sort of lifted from me. I had to learn. That's so interesting, I think. You had to learn. I had to learn. And I was slow. And I learned by study, careful, rational study of other people around me. You know, Sophie taught me by spying on her really across the ward that I should be singing to them. It didn't cross my mind. I didn't know. Of course you sing to babies.

That's what babies need. They crave your voice. It's the only familiar thing they have. But it was watching Sophie that taught me that I should be singing to these babies in their incubators. And similarly, it was, you know, other friends whose robust interactions with the doctors and their bravery in taking hold of their children's medical care and understanding it and asking questions that made me realise the NHS is incredible, the doctors and nurses are incredible,

but the only person who's there every day is you. The only person who saw what happened yesterday and will see what happens tomorrow is other parents. But it wasn't overnight. And I'm going to ask you probably a slightly impossible question, which is, at what stage did you feel that you saw personalities, the personalities of your babies develop? Or maybe it was there from the off? It probably was there from the off. And I didn't know to look for it. Well, maybe that's not true. I mean, premature babies sleep almost all the time. So I think it would maybe be pushing a point to say that there were personalities there. The best nurses discussed them as people. And Amelia, who was one of my beloved nurses later on,

was very clear on which one she thought was the cheeky one and which one and it was so healing to have them spoken about as small people particularly because a lot of the time at the beginning I couldn't really see they were babies in boxes and I loved them with my heart and soul but if you mix them up with all the other premature babies on the ward let alone with each other I wasn't completely convinced I could pick them out of a lineup they all sort of look quite similar. So it was very healing to have someone see them as people. And I would often take up other people's interpretations of their behavior and think, OK, well, that's a relief.

Or, you know, maybe she is the cheeky one. How do you cope with that incredibly thin and fragile line between life and death in those first 56 days to cope with that combination of terror and love. How did you do it? I don't know. You just sort of, I think that suggests there was volition, I think, and some heroism. And I don't think I can lay claim to any of that because we were just people it happened to. And so you have to get on with it. You have no choice but to love your children and risk losing them. But I do think that probably is why we didn't name them for a while. For us, it was so frightening to humanise them in that way when those first days were sort of felt to be so touch and go.

How old are your twins now? They're three and a half. So when I finished reading A Proof of Mothershiphip I was so unbelievably moved that the first thing I did was facetime Francesca and I made her send me a photo of her twin girls because I was like I just need to see them now I need to see them now being happy and and it was just such a beautiful realization to to see that they are these wonderful little girls but does the anxiety and the terror of those first few days ever subside? Do you feel that you have a relationship with your twins, which is extremely protective because of

what they went through? It probably is. I mean, I should say that those 56 days, it was long and there were lots of ups and downs. It wasn't life and death for 56 days. There's a lot of time at the end when you are in special care, just trying to teach them to breathe without that last trickle of oxygen or trying to teach them to suck rather than relying on their, they get very lazy. They do like their NG tubes. I sort of see their point. I would quite like to be able to sleep while someone fed me. It's the dream. It's the dream. It's kind of the dream. When they came out of hospital, I was mad. I was absolutely mad. It was flu season and I was deranged about hygiene. 70% of that was rational because when you have babies who have compromised lungs, then a cold or flu is very dangerous. And there was a percentage

of it that was just post-traumatic stress, I think. But the flip side of it also has been for me that I'm very laid back now about lots of other things that I think I probably would have been up tight about if I didn't have perspective. I just want them to be healthy and happy and of course that's what every parent wants but I rather suspect in another life I would have been anxious about whether it was better for them long term to take up the flute or the bassoon or which would look better on a UCAS form or that sort of and I just can't tell you how much I don't care and that's been a lasting change in how I think I've parented. So going back to the notion of this having been a failure for you what do you think your failure to quote-unquote stay pregnant has ended up teaching you because

you've had another baby since and I wonder whether it's taught you something integral about motherhood in a way. One lesson which I probably shouldn't have needed to learn is just how bloody fragile it all is. It's all going well until it isn't, and it is so frightening but also so common. There's an awful lot of people who are parenting outside of the mainstream, and there are so many of them, but that's not necessarily the visible narrative. I think it must be very excluding for an awful lot of people that the dominant narrative of new motherhood is healthy mother, healthy big fat baby coming home

the same day. So I think it's taught me to see quite how many people don't have an experience like that and compassion and empathy for that huge number of people whose narrative is different. Do you think it's taught you how strong you are? I don't know that's it's that's a really interesting question that I adore because it implies that I'm strong but that's not the way it felt I just responded to things that happened I think that's the way I experienced it was that this was something that happened and I did what everyone else would do which was to get up in the morning go to the hospital every day. I learned how to be strong.

Watching the other women on the ward taught me. That might be something that's come out of this, is that I am much, much braver. I'm completely unembarrassable now. And embarrassment used to be a real weakness for me. I used to be so... Karaoke, for example, was something that just made me feel... It made me actually want to curl up and die, the idea of doing karaoke. Singing in public was just my room 101,

and I can't tell you why. I think it was a fear of looking stupid. But now I'd stand at the top of Nelson's column and sing with a megaphone because it just doesn't matter. Now you're singing karaoke every morning. Every morning, every night. You can't keep me away. I so know what you mean about karaoke, though,

and I think it's because I love singing it's a bit like tennis I love singing and I'm terrible at it but always on a karaoke night there's one person who'll get up who'll be some amazing singer and will be sort of self-deprecating in a way that is wholly unconvincing and then they'll deliver a sort of Whitney Houston performance and you just can't compete with that. Well you see the interesting thing is I don't know, because I've never been on a karaoke night, because such was my phobia that I would not even attend such events out of fear that someone would make me participate. We should do karaoke together. We should. Because I've also realised that now what I can do is rap. I do rap karaoke, because that is just a question of saying out words rhythmically and quickly. And I can do that.

I think we should actually start a band. That's where you're driving. I think we should start a band. That's a whole different podcast. Before we get on to your second failure, I wanted to ask about your husband, because mothership, as the name implies, is very much about what it is to be a mother. But what was it like being a father in that role? Did he feel the failure as well? I think he felt an enormous pressure not to let anybody down, not to let us down, not to let the children down, not to let his work down. I really pitied the fathers. I found they did not have anything like the support networks that we had.

Well, they had nothing at all, really, quite apart from the fact that most, if not all, of the men had to go back to work after two weeks. They didn't have the milking shed. And they had no means of connecting with anyone else who was there, apart from just making a random overture to somebody who was washing their hands at the sinks as they came in with you. So I would come out and I would say,

ward rounds at 10 o'clock in our room, and the doctor that we want to be, you know, we really want to try and catch this doctor, and, you know, actually this medication means whatever. And Gabe would say to me, how on earth do you know any of that stuff? And it was all from other mothers on the ward and it was all from the milking shed. He really talked to nobody. He knew nobody who was going through what we were going through

and had no opportunities to make any connections with anyone there. And I think it would have been really valuable. And we moved hospitals at one point. When the girls were stabilised, we were sent to our local hospital and that was where we did our longest stint. And very much towards the end of that period of time, there was a father who had had a premature baby in intensive care before who started saying sort of three words more than hello to Gabe

at the sink in the morning. And it was actually really sort of powerful for him. And he would come in and tell me these conversations that they had. I don't think they ever found out each other's names. But I think the men are really woefully under supported, actually. And are you all still friends with the women that you met in the milking shed? There's four of us on a WhatsApp group who are still very much in touch. And we had a play date three weeks ago where we got all the kids together and it's really startling we've been incredibly incredibly lucky the four of us that our children are all doing really well

I'm very aware that we are the lucky ones but it's unbelievable to see these little munchkins running around the garden together wow what a sight how beautiful and watching children running around together and talking about your inability to do karaoke does bring us onto your second failure, which is about you as a child being extremely sensible to the extent that you never once rebelled. So your second failure is literally failing to be a teenager. Yeah. Yeah, it does link directly to the karaoke thing, because I just was so incredibly uptight. I mean, there'll be friends of mine listening to this laughing because they probably would say I am still incredibly uptight.

But I'm better than I was. Everything's relative and I'm better than I was. I don't think you're uptight at all. Really? Oh, fantastic. Okay, good. I fooled you. I mean, you're not sort of shooting up heroin every now and then. So how did your failure to be a teenager manifest itself?

I was highly anxious, I think. And I did as I was told, which is actually not what teenagers are meant to do. It's meant to be a time of testing boundaries and pushing and trying to work out who you are and what's okay and what isn't and taking risks within reason. And I failed entirely to do all of those things. What was the naughtiest thing that you ever did as a teenager? There's a look of complete incomprehension on Francesca's face. She's shaking her head into this abyss of silence. I'm straining to come up with something and I

actually can't. You know, from the moment I passed my driving test, I was everybody's designated driver. I used to drive into Soho on a Saturday night. Who does that and why? You were the well behaved one. Yeah. And why do you think you were like that? What was going on to make you like that? My father was very ill during those years. He'd been ill really most of my life. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease when I was 18 months old and had been well and functioning for a long, long time, an improbably long period of time. But I think my teenage years coincided with a very difficult period in his illness. I was the oldest child. I think sibling order is quite a powerful thing. I feel like very much an oldest child,

a sort of cliche of an oldest child. And I felt a responsibility to be responsible, I think. That combined with living up close with a degenerative neurological disease gave me this profound rage with and antipathy to drugs. I connected them with people being arrogant with their own neurological health, which made me a whale of a time at a party, let me tell you. That makes such sense um it felt to me that everyone around me and an awful lot of people at these parties were taking lots of things I took offense at all of them I felt like it was an insult to me it's probably sort of a cod psychological thing to say but how much of it do you think you were trying to impose control on the

uncontrollable oh hugely it's not cod's not cod psychology, I think it was. I remain a control freak, and I'm sure that's why. There was so much that was out of control. And what's the age gap between you and your younger sister? She's eight and a half years younger than me. And so was she rebellious? No, neither. Neither of us were, actually. I don't think she was as sort of dementedly uptight as I was.

She's much more normal, my sister, but she definitely didn't go very far off the rails. And did you ever have a patch of rebellion, a sort of late-onset rebellion? I like to hope it's still ahead of me, actually, because I haven't, but I don't want to give up hope. I had a long discussion recently, although maybe this suggests I am beyond hope, but one of my dearest girlfriends has just recovered last year from thyroid cancer. And she and I were discussing our total lack of teenage rebellion and then decided that now was the time we were going to smoke a spliff. And then there followed maybe three to four weeks of WhatsApp discussions

about where one would procure such a thing, who would roll it, where we would go. And we have still failed to execute this plan, which suggests to me that it's probably never going to happen. And also when you need to put quite so much planning into a single split, you're probably not the right person to be doing it. I was about to say it's a very controlled way of being uncontrollable. Very measured way of being wild. I think I need to find another channel. That one just was doomed to failure from the off. I just want to pay tribute to your father here, because for anyone who doesn't know, Eric Siegel wrote Love Story and was an eminent classicist and also a marathon runner and by all accounts sounds the most amazing man. And it strikes me as you're talking about what you went

through as a teenager, that a lot of our discussion is about the myths surrounding parenthood and family. And it's no surprise to me that that's the subject of your first two novels now. It makes a sort of sense that you're interested in telling the stories of families. Is that accurate? Yeah, I definitely think so. I mean, someone said to me, someone, an interviewer asked me when I was doing press for The Awkward Age, do you think your next novel will also be about families?

And I think I gave her a sort of similar blank look to the one I just gave you when you asked about being naughty as a teenager. I genuinely thought for a moment, well, what else is there? I can't think of mining a richer scene, really, than interpersonal relationships and particularly family dynamics. I find it endlessly fascinating.

I mean, I completely agree with you. You're knocking on an open door here. Because I tell this story in the How to Fail book about how I was at a literary festival on a panel with this incredibly cool hipster author who had given an interview that day saying, I'm just so sick of novels that just deal with small canvas things like families. And I was like, my novels exclusively deal with families and their dysfunction. And for me, it's the microcosm. I always get confused between microcosm and macrocosm. Basically, it's the microcosm that elucidates the macrocosm or the other way around. And everything starts with that unit. But do you think that female authors often get pigeonholed in a certain way when they

write quote unquote domestic novels, whereas when Jonathan Franzen does it, it's the state of a nation novel? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, but I mean, I think you can say small canvas, or you can talk about Austen's piece of ivory two inches wide. I think female novelists have been writing remarkable family portraits for decades, for hundreds of years, and Jonathan Franzen comes along and writes something. Or, you know, or Knausgaard, am I allowed to say that? Of course you are, yeah. Someone said recently Knausgaard would never be dismissed as a diarist. Because women are so often accused of having a lack of imagination and being navel-gazing and writing from their own life.

And men do it just as much, but somehow they get away with it. I just don't think a woman in Knausgaard's position would get away with saying, I wanted to experiment with boredom, and including within that the reader's boredom. I just, it just, I can't, I find it very hard to imagine. Yeah. I mentioned at the beginning as well about how you always wanted to be a writer and how you were sort of dispatching manuscripts to agents at the age of six. So obnoxious. But how much of that was because you grew up in an environment where that was what your father did and your mother as well as a book

editor was it to do with the environment I definitely think so I mean I think in experience in Martin Amis's memoir which I just is one of the most extraordinary memoirs I'm obsessed with that book he talks about sort of you know nothing I can't remember how he this I'm going to I'm about to misquote somebody else now but um he was talking about Kingsley and saying you know nothing feels more normal to you than what your father does for a living if that's the way the gas bills are paid in your house then it seems like a very normal thing to be doing and so I was incredibly privileged to see someone paying the gas bills by going up and sitting at a desk and making up stories and stories and narrative were so passionately valued in my house that it was really a kind of a combination of emulation and also

probably wanting to please hugely that was sort of the way I had fun with my dad was that he told me stories and he took you seriously and he took me very seriously yeah I never remember being laughed at when I pressed pages into his hands age four how. But I remember wanting to be an author age four, which was bizarre because I didn't have any authors in my immediate family. And my father's a surgeon, and that never felt natural to me at all. So it's strange how these ideas can take hold. But I do feel that with my family, there were books constantly around. And again, stories were respected, and I was read to at bedtime, and books were something to love and cherish. And again, stories were respected and I was read to at bedtime and books were something to love and cherish. And it made me feel that it was possible as a career, which I think is so

important when you're raising children. Do you read to your daughters now? I do. I read endlessly to them. Luckily, so far, they've been very responsive to it. But it's one of the great pleasures, I think, of having small children is rediscovering. And also often, in many cases, being horrified by how politically incorrect lots of the things we were read to as children. But you know, reading and discovering amazing children's books is one of the joys of small children. And do they tell their own stories now, the three-year-olds? Yes, they're completely crackers. I don't know whether it's all twins, but they live in a constant state of alias. I always have to find out who they are before I start a conversation with them because they're almost never themselves they have a series of alternate personas that they embody. You said this beautiful thing to me once

which was actually rather sad at the same time which was that you as a mother have to accept the fact that you will not be the most important person in your twins' lives. They will be each other's most important person. I think twin mothers, when their twins are close, as mine are, learn that sort of painful separation of motherhood very early, because almost as soon as they could talk, it became clear that the most nurturing and sustaining relationship of their lives will be with one another. And that's an incredibly beautiful gift, because one of the greatest terrors of parenthood is the day you have to die and leave your children without you and so it's amazing to know that that will hopefully sustain them long beyond that but

it also means you get fewer of those years of being number one I think. Have you told them that you've written a book about them? No. No, I should probably. I should probably drop it in. But I know that that was a concern for you. You mentioned it at the beginning about whether ethically you were allowed to do this. And how do you feel about it now? We're actually speaking just before this book is published, but by the time you listen to this podcast, it will be out there. But in this kind of curious preamble stage of pre-publication anxiety, how are you feeling

about that? I've been reassured by the fact that lots of people who feature in the book and who have a vested emotional interest in the book have read it and feel like it was the right thing to do. I felt deeply anxious about whether it was the right thing to do to put anything out there about my children into the world before I did it that was part of my decision also it's a diary of 56 days and it ends the day that I walked out of the hospital with them and part of that was because that was where it sort of made sense and the narrative and part of that was also the way I reconciled myself with the degree of exposure that this necessarily entails for my children was to say that the day they came home was the day that they graduated into the kind of full baby privacy.

They returned to anonymity after their time in the spotlight. Precisely. They became recluses. Yes. Well, that sort of leads us on to your third and final failure, which is all to do with the boundaries between private and public, which is social media and the fact that you are, by your own admission, inept at it. And that you wrote to me in an email, my publishers would love me to be an engaging social media phenomenon with influence. I simply cannot navigate it. This is not an intellectual humble brag.

I don't think I'm too good for it. I'd love to understand it if it connected me with readers. I'm just inept. Francesca. But do you actually feel that conflict? Because I think some of the most wonderful and rational people are just not on social media at all. I wish I could be one of those people. Me too.

I wish I could. It's so much cooler. No, you don't. You're brilliant on social media. I I wish I could be one of those people I would love to be I wish I could it's so much no you don't you're brilliant on social media sick of myself oh no you're one of the people I wish I could emulate um that's a nice way of saying I'm deeply envious of I'll take it thanks yeah I wish I could say that I was not on any of these social medias and I constantly threatened to deactivate my Facebook account but what if one day I woke up and I had 100,000 followers and they all wanted to hear from me and I'd shut my Facebook page down what then why do you find it difficult what is it that yeah you find hard to navigate I don't know I don't know I remember sitting I did maths a level

and I remember the school I was at we were all made to sit for that. Which I still cannot believe by the way. The amount of novelists who have done maths A-level must be like a tiny tiny centre of a tiny Venn diagram. No I actually did further maths A-level but we won't talk about that but we were all made to do the maths Olympiad which was this sort of international competition thing and it's a different kind of I don't even know what kind of maths it is but it was one of the worst experiences of my life. I sat in this exam thinking I don't even know what kind of math it is, but it was one of the worst experiences of my life. I sat in this exam thinking, I don't know what these questions are, but this is not the way my brain works. And there was actually negative marking and I got minus 32 on that. And I feel the same way about social media. I cannot understand how to do it. It just isn't

the way my brain works and I have all the will in the world and I just don't get it and I'm a huge consumer of it I sit poking at Instagram for untold hours I cannot tell you how to generate content it might have a lot to do with the fact that I rarely leave the house not that much happens in my data document that may well be the answer and also if you're not wanting to post about your children that's the whole other thing because that's clearly a huge part of your life. Yeah, yeah, no, that's true. But I also, you know, I read a lot. I could be posting about what I'm reading. I just also kind of can't.

Why? Who knows? Does it feel like you're not being yourself or you don't have the space to be yourself when you're posting? If you were to post about a book that you loved, would you agonise over the caption? Oh, I would agonise for hours. I would waste loads of time faffing around with emojis. Like the fact that I don't even know if the plural is emojis or emoji tells you a huge amount. I just don't know how to construct and I would be aping somebody else whenever I did it

anyway. And are you worried about the reaction of doing it? Is that another thing that puts you off or is it just I haven't a clue what to do here? I just haven't got a clue and I'm really self-conscious about other people's reactions and I'm also a horrible what to do here. I just haven't got a clue and I'm really self-conscious about other people's reactions. And I'm also a horrible photographer, which is just another sort of... It's not great. It's not a great mixture of things. I think there probably is some subconscious snobbery about it

and thinking that it doesn't deserve my attention and I should just be naturally brilliant at it because it's not a serious thing, except it actually is a serious thing and the people who are good at it are excellent because A, they practice and B, they have a genuine skill of value. I think that makes me think of the time

I wrote an article about Mills and Boone and then tried to write a Mills and Boone novel and obviously it was rubbish because it actually is a very, very difficult thing to do and all the intellectual snobbery in the world doesn't actually mean that you can go away and write a good Mills and Boone novel. I think that's so interesting, because I completely understand that impulse, which is, as a writer, I often feel that

this is a narrative I tell myself, I'm not saying that it's actually true. But what I tell myself is I would be taken more seriously if I weren't on social media and if I were existing in a garret just surrounding myself with hefty tomes of literature and I really made an effort to improve my brain in that way and I do think that that's something a lot of people struggle with with social media because it is seen as this sort of superficial flibberty gibbet type thing but it's part of the way that we live now as well and so you're right not to dismiss it entirely. Well that's the thing I think it's so sort of you know it's like saying oh I never watched

television well I mean that's a sort of moronic posture because a huge amount of contemporary culture takes place on screens whether social media or on television and it leaves you disconnected from the zeitgeist basically but you say that that you consume social media so when you're on instagram and scrolling through the feed how does it make you feel are you also one of these people as so many listeners would relate to this who is made to feel anxious or less than or that your life is just not as perfect as all these other people? Oh yeah, absolutely. I know people who go through and block those accounts. And I don't, I just consume more of them and think, well, if only I were wearing that, drinking that beetroot matcha latte thing, and also on the beach in Costa Rica, everything would be fine.

And do you genuinely perceive this as a failure? Your failure to be good at social media? I really do actually, because I feel the opposite of your impulse that if of your sort of secret fear that if you were not on social media and were actually just at home reading weighty tomes I feel like I am sort of letting down the people who care for and nurture my books in the world by not offering this channel of sort of access I mean it has to be the case that being a success on social media helps your fiction reach more readers, doesn't it? I don't know. I don't think anyone knows, to be honest. I really don't. I mean, I think the key is to be as much a version of yourself as you can be, whilst not entirely denuding your privacy, in the hopes that people will respond to that authenticity and then perhaps be drawn to your

work. But I don't know how much terrible terminology click through there is when you're posting about a book, how engaged people are and whether they're engaged enough to go and buy something. It's an interesting quandary. And I basically think that publishers, a lot of them want to try everything that they can to make a book sell. So they will ask you to do everything as an author without quite knowing which one is the best one to pursue. I think that's true. I think going back to your question about whether I perceive it to be a genuine failure, I think if I'm being really honest, the reason why I perceive it to be a failure is because I care. If I didn't care and

I hadn't tried, then it wouldn't be a failure because it wouldn't be an area of engagement. But I would actually like to be better at it and like to actually engage on social media and just seem not to be very good at it and also you want people to read your books absolutely yeah that's the whole point of writing them in a way I once interviewed Elizabeth Jane Howard who is one of my favorite writers of all time she's a hero for both of us. I know. Yeah. And she said to me once that she felt that every novel she wrote disappeared into a great lake of silence. Isn't that so heartbreaking? Because those novels are just absolutely magnificent. They're incredible. And they had such an impact on so many people, the Caslet Chronicles particularly.

And just the thought that she felt that as one of the people that I would consider to be our greatest novelists of the last sort of century, that she felt that way. And I suppose what social media, when it's done well, can give you is a sense of you exist and your work is appreciated. Yeah, I think that's right. Well, Francesca Siegel, we shall have to live with this failure to be rubbish on social media because you're a wonderful interviewee. So swings and roundabouts. Thank you so, so much for coming on

How to Fail with Elizabeth Day. It's been a total pleasure. 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