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A review by annabelws23
How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong by Elizabeth Day
4.0
Elizabeth Day’s ‘How to Fail’ podcast has been beyond helpful this past year. The book accompaniment is essentially a longer version of the final episode of season 1, where Elizabeth turns the focus upon herself and explores her own failures. In this book she goes much deeper into these failures, and gives a memoir esque account of her life. (I say esque, because the book is not simply reducible to the category of ‘memoir’, nor can it be classified as ‘self-help’). She acknowledges that she lives a life of privilege and the failures in her life have been framed from this perspective. Her accounts on motherhood, fertility and a child free life I found particularly poignant. The book was a lot more feminist than I expected. Albeit feminist from a privileged perspective.
I would say that I prefer the format of the podcast, the conversational nature being one of its biggest assets. It’s the human connection between two people discussing the nitty gritty of their lives, being open and honest about their failures and how that has shaped them, which makes the podcast so special. While the book was conversational in tone, it naturally was not a dialogue in the same sense. The book does rely on revisiting the accounts of past guests to illustrate certain points, and parts of these podcasts are quoted verbatim (or if you listen to the audiobook, like me, you get the clips of the podcast played back to you.) This was a nice book to listen to while doing my lockdown embroidery, both of which gave me a reprieve from my anxiety. I found it useful to revisit some of the earlier episodes which I had forgotten bits of, and the book has got me back into listening to it as I had stopped for a while.
I would say that I prefer the format of the podcast, the conversational nature being one of its biggest assets. It’s the human connection between two people discussing the nitty gritty of their lives, being open and honest about their failures and how that has shaped them, which makes the podcast so special. While the book was conversational in tone, it naturally was not a dialogue in the same sense. The book does rely on revisiting the accounts of past guests to illustrate certain points, and parts of these podcasts are quoted verbatim (or if you listen to the audiobook, like me, you get the clips of the podcast played back to you.) This was a nice book to listen to while doing my lockdown embroidery, both of which gave me a reprieve from my anxiety. I found it useful to revisit some of the earlier episodes which I had forgotten bits of, and the book has got me back into listening to it as I had stopped for a while.