How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong. Elizabeth Day
career in the media or management consultancy.
In my imagination, after the success of my university years, this was going to be a halcyon period of my young adulthood. I had been an inveterate fan of the 1990s TV drama This Life, which followed the lives and loves of twenty-something lawyers who sported cool hair and cracked jokes like pistachio shells. On This Life, everyone slept with each other and drank together and smoked in their house with the windows closed because there was no one to tell them not to.
I thought my twenties were going to be spent in similarly low-lit bedrooms, where I would burn a perfectly judged stick of soft jasmine incense and have a great piece of contemporary art casually slung on the wall. In the mornings, I would be hungover from the wild night before, but hungover in a messily attractive way, like a girl in a music video with tousled hair.
I would get up and make myself an espresso even though I didn’t really like espresso and I would sit at the communal kitchen table and laugh throatily at some clever comment made by one of my handsome male house-mates, who was probably in love with me but couldn’t admit it yet.
I would scrawl witty reminders of our weekly house dinners on Post-it notes that I would stick on the fridge, which would only ever contain bottles of champagne, vodka, gel eye masks and a tub of low-fat cottage cheese and then I would leave for work, wearing high heels and a silk blouse and a tailored skirt, and probably designer shades because I could afford them now that I’d paid off my student loan and, besides, it was going to be perpetually sunny in my twenties.
That, at least, was the plan.
The reality didn’t quite match up.
The house in Clapham was lovely, as were my house-mates (one girl and two boys, none of whom was in love with me, unforgivably) and the rent was absurdly low. My room was on the top floor and had a sloping ceiling and a window looking onto the back gardens of the next-door street. I felt like James Stewart in my favourite film, Rear Window. Except without a cast on my leg. And without witnessing a murder. Apart from that, though, totally the same.
In other ways, my twenties did not live up to the hype. I had envisaged an age of carefree light-spiritedness, in which I would finally be able to do what I wanted in both work and play. All the hard stuff – exams, finals, student foam parties – was over, I thought. Now I’d finally be able to forge my own path and spend my own money, free of the chafing restrictions of family, school or university.
But what actually happened was that I had a hard time balancing all the various aspects of my life and my identity, which (although I didn’t realise it at the time) was still very much in the process of forming. My twenties were a constant juggle between adult responsibility and youthful impulse and often I felt as though I was failing in both areas.
The house-share, for instance, should have been fun. And sometimes it was. But I spent too much time worrying about trying to be a grown-up. I had a long-term boyfriend, and he frequently stayed over and ate absurd amounts of food, so that soon I had to factor him into my grocery shopping. This being the heyday of Jamie Oliver, I decided I would be the kind of person who was good at cooking, so at weekends, I made roast lunches but would generally put far too much salt and oil on everything in the mistaken belief that made it somehow ‘Mediterranean’. In the spirit of improvisation, I once roasted a tray of broccoli florets. They emerged from the oven desiccated and sad-looking, and when we ate them, they tasted of charred grass and I realised there was a reason no one had done this before.
That was the thing about my twenties: it was meant to be a decade of experimentation, but sometimes the experiments taught you nothing other than that you shouldn’t have done it in the first place. Yet all around me, everyone else seemed to be having a wild time experimenting with drink, drugs and sexual partners, and I felt I should be doing the same. There was a pressure to conform to the tidal wave of non-conformity.
But the thing was, I had a full-time job to be getting on with.
I was lucky enough to have graduated with a job offer in place from the Evening Standard, where I had a spot on the Londoner’s Diary, a gossip column that liked to pretend it wasn’t really a gossip column by carrying acerbically hilarious items about politicians and Radio 4 presenters and big-name novelists rather than the TV celebrities they perceived to be more low-rent. A lot of my job involved going to parties and sidling up to famous people I’d never met before, then asking them an impertinent question designed to make an entertaining titbit for the next day’s paper.
‘Oh how fun,’ people would generally say when I told them. And I would reply that yes, yes it was and then I’d regale them with the time I met Stephen Fry at the Cannes Film Festival or the occasion on which I’d told Kate Winslet my house-mate kept rewinding the bits in her biopic of Iris Murdoch where she went swimming naked in the river (she looked taken aback, which is understandable given that the film is an emotionally draining tale of one of our finest modern writers’ descent into the ravages of Alzheimer’s. The naked swimming was very much an incidental thing).
But although I got to go to extraordinary parties and premieres and meet famous people, my job wasn’t actually that fun. For one thing, I’m a natural introvert and walking into glamorous parties on my own, not knowing anyone but feeling totally convinced everyone else knew each other, was pretty nerve-wracking. I’d have to psych myself up beforehand, and remind myself of my mother’s wise words that ‘no one is looking at you as much as you think they are’. I’d grab a glass of champagne as soon as I could so that I’d look like I was doing something, and then I’d skulk by the wall trying to seem as if I were expecting my date to turn up momentarily.
My friends also charitably assumed I was constantly being propositioned by famous people.
‘I bet it’s a total shag-fest,’ one of my house-mates said when I fell through the front door at 2 a.m. on a weeknight, having just been to the Lord of the Rings premiere where it was impossible to get to Orlando Bloom through the fire-breathing dwarves dressed like hobbits.
‘It really isn’t,’ I said but I think everyone believed I was being terribly discreet. In truth, I never slept with anyone I met through work and no one I’ve ever interviewed has tried to come on to me, except maybe once, many years later, when the flirtation was conducted over email. The famous actor in question was filming on Australia’s Gold Coast (good tax breaks, apparently) and would regale me with long anecdotes involving running along the beach and quoting T. S. Eliot to himself. Nothing ever came of it. You simply can’t date a man who tells you all about his exercise regime in excruciating detail and then quotes post-modern poetry in the same sentence.
Anyway, at parties, I’m one of those people whose resting face assumes an unwittingly haughty expression. During the Londoner’s Diary phase, this meant no one ever approached me.
Eventually, I’d spot someone who bore a passing resemblance to a man who might or might not have been the reality TV star who tried to survive for a year on a remote Scottish island or a woman who might or might not have been the It-girl daughter of a famous father who did something in construction, and I would take a deep breath and bowl over and ask them who they thought was going to be the next James Bond. This was my fail-safe question, because the British are incomprehensibly obsessed with who is going to be the next James Bond and whatever anyone said was deemed newsworthy.
Most of the time, celebrities were nice to me. Pierce Brosnan and his wife were absolutely lovely when I met them at a film awards ceremony and I have never forgotten it, even though the entirety of our exchange ran something like this:
Me: ‘So, Pierce, can I ask – who do you think will be the next James Bond?’
Pierce: ‘Oh, you can’t ask me that!’
Pierce Brosnan’s wife: ‘I like your tuxedo.’
Me: ‘OHMIGOD THANK YOU SO MUCH THAT’S SO NICE OF YOU.’
Others were less patient. At a red-carpet film premiere in Leicester Square, I commented on the suaveness of a male actor’s suit as he walked past.
‘I’m here promoting my film and all you can ask about