Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © Elizabeth Day 2019

Elizabeth Day asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008327323

Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008327347

Version: 2019-11-12

Dedication

For my godchildren: Imogen, Tabitha, Thomas, Walt, Billy, Uma, Eliza, Elsa, Joe and Gallia.

Epigraph

‘Failure is the condiment that gives success its ﬂavour’

Truman Capote

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

How to Fail at Fitting In

How to Fail at Tests

How to Fail at Your Twenties

How to Fail at Dating

How to Fail at Sport

How to Fail at Relationships

How to Fail at Being Gwyneth Paltrow

How to Fail at Work

How to Fail at Friendship

How to Fail at Babies

How to Fail at Families

How to Fail at Anger

How to Fail at Success

Afterword

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Elizabeth Day

About the Publisher

Introduction

One of my earliest memories is of failure.

I am three years old, and my sister is ill. She has chicken pox and is lying in her bedroom upstairs, hot and crying, the duvet twisted around her small limbs, while my mother tries to soothe her by placing a hand on her forehead. My mother has cool palms that feel good against your skin when you’re sick.

I am not used to seeing my older sister like this. There are four years between us and she has always struck me as the epitome of wisdom. She is someone I adore and admire in equal measure, the person who looks after me and allows me to sit on her back while she crawls around on all fours pretending to be a horse. The person who, before I was born, told our parents firmly that she would like a sister, please, and could they get on with the business of producing one? Whenever my sister draws a picture or makes a castle out of Lego, it is always so much better than my own attempts, and I will lose my temper at this perceived injustice because I so desperately want us to be the same, her and me. My mother will have to remind me that I’m younger, and all I have to do is wait a few years to catch up. But I’m impatient and don’t want to wait. I want, as much as I’ve ever wanted anything, to be just like my sister.

Now, seeing her wet cheeks and pale face, I am upset and fretful. I don’t like her being in any sort of discomfort. My mother is asking my sister what she would like to make her feel better, and my sister wails ‘a hot-water bottle’ and I see a way that I can help. I know where my mother keeps the hot-water bottles, and I toddle off to the cupboard and pick out my favourite one, which has a furry cover made to look like a bear, with a black button nose. I know that a hot-water bottle must be filled, as the name implies, with hot water. I take the bear to the bathroom, a place I associate with the much-hated evenings my mother washes my hair and I fix my eyes on a crack in the ceiling until the unpleasant task is completed. The single thing I hate more than having my hair washed is having my toenails cut.

The only tap I can reach is the one in the bathtub rather than the basin. Leaning over the enamel lip, I stretch forwards to place the hot-water bottle under the nozzle and turn on the tap with the red circle, not the blue, because I’ve learned that blue means cold. But I do not know I need to wait for the hot water to heat up. I imagine it just comes out, automatically, at the requisite temperature.

When I try to put the cap back on, my stubby fingers cannot quite fasten it tightly enough. No matter, I think – the most important thing is to get this hot-water bottle to the invalid as quickly as I possibly can so that she can start feeling better, stop crying, and become my composed, calm and clever older sister again.

Back in the bedroom, I hand the hot-water bottle over to my sister whose tears stop at the sight of it. My mother looks surprised and I feel proud that I have done something she didn’t expect. But almost as soon as the hot-water bottle is in my sister’s grip, the cap loosens and cold water pours out all over her pyjamas. She wails and the sound is worse than the crying that came before it.

‘It’s c-c-c-cold!’ she stutters, glaring at me with incomprehension, and my mother starts stripping the sheets and telling her everything’s going to be fine, and they both forget that I’m standing there and I feel a swelling of acute shame in my chest and a terrible sense of having let down the person I love most in the world when I was only trying to help, and I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong but I know this probably isn’t, on reflection, how hot-water bottles are made.

My sister recovered from chicken pox, no thanks to me, and I learned in the fullness of time about boiling kettles and waiting a few seconds to pour the hot water carefully in through the rubberised neck, tightly winding the cap back on after you’d pressed out the excess air. I also learned that even if your intentions are good, the execution of a task can sometimes be lacking if you don’t have the necessary experience. This is one of the most vivid recollections of my childhood: clearly my failure to help when I most wanted to made a big impact on me.

It wasn’t actually a big failure, or an exceptional one, but then failures don’t have to be notable to be meaningful. As I got older, I would experience greater failures, which were harder to come back from. I failed exams and a driving test.

I failed to make the boy I liked fancy me back.

I failed to fit in at school.

I failed to get to know myself properly in my twenties, existing in a succession of long-term relationships where I outsourced my sense of self to another person.

I failed to understand, at the time, that people-pleasing was never going to be a fulfilling way to live. That in pleasing others, you end up failing to please yourself. That in doing so, you are trying to shore up your dwindling internal confidence by collecting the positive opinions of others, without realising that this never works; that it is the equivalent of ignoring a fire-breathing dragon by lighting a candle from its flame.

I failed at a marriage and was divorced by thirty-six.

I failed to have the children I always thought I wanted.

I failed, over and over again, at playing tennis with any degree of confidence.

I failed to acknowledge big, difficult feelings such as anger and grief, preferring instead to mask them with easier, more pliable emotions like sadness.

I failed by caring too much about the unimportant stuff and things I could never hope to control.

I failed to speak up and find my voice when I was being taken advantage of at work and in my intimate relationships.

I failed to love my own body. I fail still. That is a constant work in progress, but I love my body more than I used to and I am grateful, now, for the honour of inhabiting this miraculous, functioning thing.

Self-acceptance is, I believe, a quietly revolutionary act but for years I failed even at that.

Along the way, I loved and I lost. I had my heart shattered. I changed jobs. I moved houses and countries. I made new friends and shed old ones. I endured breakdowns and break-ups.

I grew older. I came to understand myself better. I finally understood the importance of spending money on wheeled suitcases and winter coats. As I write this, I’m approaching my fortieth birthday, which is older than my mother would have been in that early memory of hot-water bottles and sisterly devotion. And if I have learned one thing from this shockingly beautiful venture called life, it is this: failure has taught me lessons I would never otherwise have understood. I have evolved more as a result of things going wrong than when everything seemed to be going right. Out of crisis has come clarity, and sometimes even catharsis.

In October 2017, a serious relationship ended. The break-up was unexpected and brutally sudden. I was about to turn thirty-nine. Two years earlier, I had got divorced. It was not an age at which I had anticipated being single, childless and facing an uncertain personal future. I needed, in the language of modern self-help culture, to heal.

So I went to Los Angeles, a city I return to again and again to recharge and write. It is a place where I breathe more easily in the certain knowledge that the sun will probably shine again tomorrow and the eight-hour time difference means blessedly few emails after 2 p.m. I was ghostwriting a memoir for a political activist at the time, and although I felt vulnerable and flayed of a layer of skin, I would spend my days assuming the voice of a strong woman who knew exactly what she thought. It was an interesting dichotomy, returning to my own uncertain self after a day at the laptop, giving expression to this woman’s forceful and eloquent beliefs. But it helped. Gradually, I began to feel stronger as myself too.

It was while I was in LA that I first had the idea for the How To Fail With Elizabeth Day podcast. I’d been downloading a lot of podcasts, because listening to music post break-up made me feel sad, but listening to nothing made me feel alone. One of the podcasts I subscribed to was the renowned relationship therapist Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin? in which anonymous couples agreed to be recorded as they discussed their issues. Perel would prompt and cajole and sensitively offer her insights, and I was gripped by the way in which her clients would reveal their most vulnerable and intimate selves. At the same time, I was having conversations with my friends about heartbreak and loss and tapping into their stores of accumulated wisdom.

I began to think about what it would be like to do a series of interviews with people about what they had learned from things going wrong. If I examined my life, I knew that the lessons bequeathed by episodes of failure were ineffably more profound than anything I had gleaned from its slippery shadow-twin, success. What if other people felt the same way but were too afraid to talk openly about it for fear of humiliation? But what if this was a conversation we needed to have, in order to feel better about ourselves and less isolated when life didn’t go according to plan?

We live in an age of curated perfection. On Instagram, our daily posts are filtered and framed to shape the impression we want to give. We are assailed by a constant stream of celebrities sharing their bikini-body selfies, of self-styled clean-eating gurus telling us which quinoa grain to eat, of politicians posting pictures of all the great things they’re doing in their constituencies, and it can feel overwhelming. In this bubble of smiling, happy people, littered with laughing face emojis and showering heart gifs, there is scant space for meaningful reflection.

That is changing: nowadays on social media, it is easier to find those admirable people who are endeavouring to be open about their struggles with everything from body image to mental health. But sometimes that can feel just as manipulated as the rest of it, as if honesty has become simply another hashtag.

And then there are the opinions. Endless, noisy opinions, generated at the click of a Tweet button. As a former journalist for the Guardian Media Group, which was one of the first newspaper organisations to allow online comments that were not kept behind a paywall, I can personally testify to the amount of aggressively opinionated internet bile that exists out there. During my eight years as a feature writer at the Observer, I was accused of everything from having sand in my vagina to not understanding the difference between misogyny and misandry, and being employed just because I was a woman or had some shadowy nepotistic connection to the powers that be (I didn’t). If I ever got something even slightly wrong – because I am human and occasionally, writing to deadline, an error might slip in that was not spotted by sub-editors – there would be a baying rush towards instant condemnation. Of course I should have got my facts right, every journalist should – but the outcry felt disproportionate to the offence.

In this climate, it becomes increasingly difficult to try new things or take risks for fear of immediate public opprobrium. A good friend of mine, Jim, was a civil rights lawyer in America in the 1960s, when he took on cases that he had no hope of winning because it was morally the right thing to do. Lately, he has been dispirited to see that the newly qualified lawyers he mentors are too scared to fight cases that are not guaranteed a successful verdict.

‘And I say to them: take a shot, at least! You’ve got to fail to figure out what to do right,’ Jim said to me one evening over dinner. ‘Who cares what other people think? When you’re on a desert island and you’re on your own, struggling to survive, will you give a fuck what someone else thinks? No! You’ll be too busy trying to make a fire with a magnifying glass and waving down a passing ship so you don’t die.’

But Jim’s students have grown up in an era where failure is viewed as the end point, not a necessary staging post on a journey towards greater success, and in a culture where everyone is entitled and encouraged to form knee-jerk hot takes and offer multi-platform critiques. At just the point when success has become the all-consuming aspiration, shame is now a public condition. No wonder these students felt hamstrung. No wonder we want to shy away from admitting to our mistakes or our wrong decisions.

And yet the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to pay tribute to my failures for making me who I am. Although going through negative experiences is never pleasant, I’m grateful for it because in retrospect, I can see that I have made different, better decisions because of them. I can see that I have become stronger.

That was the genesis of How To Fail With Elizabeth Day, a podcast where I asked ‘successful’ people about what they’d learned from failure. The premise was simple: I would ask each interviewee to provide me with three instances where they believed they had failed. They could choose anything from bad dates and failed driving tests to job losses and divorce. The beauty of this was that the interviewees were in control of what they chose to discuss, and as a result would hopefully be less reticent to open up. I was also aware that the choices each guest made would, in themselves, be revealing.

After seventeen years spent interviewing celebrities for newspapers and magazines, I felt a thrilling liberation at the prospect of not having to write the encounter up at the behest of a particular editor who wanted a particular angle. I would record as live, for about forty-five minutes to an hour, and I would let the interview stand on its own: as an honest conversation about subjects that don’t often get a lot of airplay.

When the first episode of the podcast went live, it attracted thousands of listeners overnight. The second saw it catapult to number three in the iTunes chart – above My Dad Wrote a Porno, Serial and Desert Island Discs. By the end of eight episodes, I had somehow accumulated 200,000 downloads and a book deal. I was receiving dozens of messages every day from extraordinary people going through difficult things, saying how much the podcast had helped them.

The woman who had been told at fifteen she would never be able to have children.

The advertising executive signed off work with chronic fatigue.

The person I had once interviewed for a newspaper who got in touch to tell me that his mother was in intensive care after a stem cell transplant and nine days of chemotherapy and that she could barely breathe or talk, but she listened to my podcast because it calmed her down. ‘It makes things so much better,’ he wrote and I read his message while making toast and burst into tears. The toast burned.

The university professor who said it brought home to him the realities of female infertility and that he was now able to understand his wife and daughters more fully.

The twenty-something student who messaged to ask if she could help in any way that I needed because she believed in the idea so much.

The ones who told me they felt less alone, less ashamed, less sad, less exposed.

The ones who told me they felt more able to cope, more positive, more understood.

The ones who told me about suicidal thoughts in the past; who confided in me about episodes of depression; who spoke to me about their lives with an honesty I was honoured to be thought worthy of.

All these people listened. All these people connected with the idea, so elegantly expressed by Arthur Russell in the chorus of ‘Love Comes Back’ that ‘being sad is not a crime’ and that failure contains more meaningful lessons than straightforward success.

It was overwhelming and emotional. I was moved and also quietly surprised at what a chord it seemed to be striking. I had long believed that being honest about one’s vulnerability was the root of real strength, but that message was resonating in a way I had never imagined it would.

The podcast is, without doubt, the single most successful thing I have ever done. I’m aware of the irony. Other people were too. One of my friends started prefacing each text to me with ‘Noted failure, Elizabeth Day’. There were some commentators who argued that having a succession of famous people on the podcast to bemoan lost cricket matches (Sebastian Faulks) or embarrassing one-night stands (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) was an egregious form of humble-bragging.

Their argument seemed to be that if a person ended up successful, then they couldn’t possibly have experienced real, all-consuming failure. Why didn’t I have guests on the podcast who were in the grip of current failure? Or why couldn’t I just leave everyone alone to fail in their own way, without being made to feel bad about the fact that they weren’t failing as well as they could be? Wasn’t failure just something to get on and deal with rather than talk about?

To which my response is, it’s not that I’m actively advocating failure. It’s that we will all experience it at some juncture in our lives and that instead of fearing failure as a calamity from which it is impossible to recover, maybe we can build up the muscle of our emotional resilience by learning from others. That way, the next time something goes wrong, we are better equipped to deal with it. When you hear a successful person – someone who, from afar, might seem to have everything – be open about their failures, it is inclusive, not exclusive. Especially when you hear these people talk about depression or about their careers taking wrong turns or about failed relationships, because so many of us will go through the same things and worry that they will define us negatively.

Nor am I saying that all failures can be easily assimilated. There are some things that one can never get over, let alone want to talk about. There are also many areas in which I have absolutely no first-hand knowledge. I’m acutely aware, as I write this book, that I am in no way an expert and cannot offer the reader anything other than my own lived experience. I am a privileged, white, middle-class woman in a world pockmarked by racism, inequality and poverty. I do not know what it is like to experience daily micro-aggressions or to be spat at in the street or passed over for a job promotion because of the colour of my skin. I have no idea what it is like to exist on the minimum wage, to be a refugee, to be disabled, to have serious health issues or to live in a dictatorship where freedom of speech is not allowed. I am not a parent or a man or a homeowner and cannot talk with confidence about any of these topics. For me to attempt to do so would be patronising and offensive, so for that reason, the following chapters are founded on personal understanding, with deep respect for my intersectional sisters and brothers. What follows is simply one version of failure. Maybe you can relate to some of it. Maybe you have your own. Maybe one day I’ll get to hear it.

I’ve learned a lot from doing the podcast, and from writing this book. One of the things that I found particularly interesting when I started approaching potential guests was how differently men and women viewed failure. All of the women immediately connected with the idea and all of them – bar one – claimed they had so many failures to choose from, they weren’t sure how to whittle it down to the requisite three.

‘Yes, I am very good at failing because I think I take risks and I push myself to try new things,’ said the political campaigner Gina Miller. ‘And when you do that, you open yourself up to failure, but it’s a way of really living life … In life we’re all going to fail, and my view is you’ve just got to get used to it. It’s going to happen, so you might as well have a strategy for how you deal with failure, and then once you’ve got that in your back pocket, you can go out in life and really take risks.’

Most of the men (but by no means all) would respond saying they weren’t sure they had failed and maybe they weren’t quite the right guest for this particular podcast.

There’s science behind this: the amygdalae, the brain’s primitive fear centres which help to process emotional memory and respond to stressful situations, have been shown to be activated more easily in reaction to negative emotional stimuli in women than in men. As a result, this suggests that women are more likely than men to form strong emotional memories of negative events or to ruminate more over things that have gone wrong in the past. The anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that helps us recognise errors and weigh options, is also larger in women.

The knock-on effect of this, according to Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in their book The Confidence Code, is that women routinely fall victim to their own self-doubt: ‘Compared with men, women don’t consider themselves as ready for promotions; they predict they’ll do worse on tests, and they generally underestimate their abilities.’

If women felt more able to own their failures, I suspect this would change. I certainly had my own mind blown when the author Sebastian Faulks told me that failure was all a matter of perception. Before our podcast interview, he sent me a playful email outlining his failures as:

‘… the time my friend Simon and I lost the final of the over-40s doubles and had to be content with the runner-up glassware.

‘At cricket, I remember once getting out when I had made 98 and chipped a return catch to the bowler …

‘One of my books was shortlisted for the Bancarella, a big prize in Italy, but did not win (the prize to the brother-in-law of the chairman of judges).

‘And of course there was an embarrassing setback when my famous soufflé à la nage d’homard rose a mere 288mm instead of the desiderated 290.’

He was joking, of course, and when I did interview him for the podcast he spoke eloquently about his periods of depression and feeling as if he didn’t fit in at school. The point he had been trying to make was a serious one, however: it was that failure was all a matter of how you looked at it. On coming second in the Italian literary prize, for instance, he said: ‘Is that a failure? I mean, I wouldn’t have thought so, I thought it was rather a success to be going to Milan to be celebrated in a country not your own for a book with no Italian connection.’

The author James Frey had a similar take, despite the fact that he was publicly outed for fabricating parts of his 2003 debut, A Million Little Pieces. The book, which had originally been marketed as a memoir, did not suffer from his notoriety and became a global bestseller.

‘I don’t look at things that other people might consider failures as failures, it’s just a process, right?’ he said. ‘And you can either handle it or you can’t. If you can’t, get out. But I don’t look at all the books that I tried to write before A Million Little Pieces that I threw away that were no good, as failures, I just look at them as part of the process.’

To this day, Frey said, his mantra is: ‘Fail fast. Fail often.’ It’s a mantra that holds great weight in the (male-dominated) entrepreneurial world too, where risks have to be taken in order to think differently. In this sphere, failure is not only accepted but sometimes even celebrated. There are certain venture capitalists who won’t even think of parting with their cash unless an entrepreneur has failed with a start-up company at least once – the idea being that the entrepreneur will have learned from that failure, will have got all the mistakes out of their system, and will therefore present a sounder investment. Thomas Edison, after all, went through thousands of prototypes before perfecting his light bulb. Bill Gates’ first company was a failure. Over his career in major-league baseball, Babe Ruth set a new record for striking out 1,330 times but also set the record for home runs, hitting 714.

When asked about his batting technique, Babe Ruth replied: ‘I swing as hard as I can … I swing big, with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.’

What Babe Ruth was essentially saying was this: that in order to succeed on a grand scale, you have to be willing to fail on an equally grand scale too. Often the former relies on the latter, which is why failure can be integral to success, not just on the baseball field, but in life too.

What does it mean to fail? I think all it means is that we’re living life to its fullest. We’re experiencing it in several dimensions, rather than simply contenting ourselves with the flatness of a single, consistent emotion.

We are living in technicolour, not black and white.

We are learning as we go.

And for all the challenges that come our way, I can’t help but continue to think: it really is an incredible ride.

How to Fail at Fitting In

When I was four, my family moved to Northern Ireland. It was 1982 and the height of the Troubles. Bombs routinely exploded in shopping centres and hotel lobbies. On the school run, my mother would be stopped at checkpoints manned by soldiers in camouflage with machine guns strapped around their chests. At night, the television news would dub over the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams’s voice, which always seemed bizarre to me, even as a child.

When I did hear his voice, several years later, it was something of a disappointment. I’d built him up in my head to sound like a less friendly Darth Vader. As it was, he had the air of a geography teacher unable to keep control of the troublemakers at the back of the class.

I, meanwhile, spoke with a precise, received pronunciation English accent and stood out from the first day of school. I had been born in Epsom, in the comparative safety of suburban Surrey. Every year, the Derby took place on the Downs next to our house and my mother would have a picnic to which she would invite a large number of family friends. I once saw the legendary jockey Lester Piggott fall off his horse and watched him being stretchered off, his face as white as plaster. I was struck by how small he was, even though I was pretty small myself back then.

In Ireland, there were no picnics and no family friends. It was an isolating experience for all of us, but particularly for my mother who did not have a job through which she could meet new people. My father had moved us for his work, and was taking up a new position as a consultant surgeon at Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry. It was a place where he would treat a lot of knee-cappings.

I was aware of the civil unrest, and accepted it in that way that one does as a child. It simply became a way of life. The monsters under my bed were replaced by visions of balaclava-clad terrorists and I got used to the checkout ladies in the supermarket asking us suspiciously if we were ‘on holiday’ when we did the weekly shop. I hadn’t realised then that what we were actually being asked was whether we were there in connection with the British Army, but I do recall being scared that we’d be bombed by the IRA, to which my mother replied sensibly that my father ‘treats people from both sides’. That was true: he ministered to both Loyalists and Republicans. When a shattering bomb went off in Omagh in 1998, he rushed to help. My father went on to operate in many war zones with the charity Médecins Sans Frontières, including Chechnya, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. When, years later, I asked him which place had affected him most, he said Omagh and recounted in detail the scenes of carnage that he had witnessed.

There were moments of absurdity amidst it all. For the first year or so, my family and I lived up the road from a village called Muff. I did not think to question this extraordinary name until many decades later when my friend Cormac howled with laughter when I mentioned it.

‘Muff?’ he guffawed. ‘You might as well have lived somewhere called Vagina.’

The village was a few minutes’ drive away from our house in the north of Ireland, and yet it was across the border in County Donegal, which was part of the south. My mother used to drive me and my sister to Muff for our Irish dancing lessons (all part of an effort to help us belong) and it baffled me that an entirely different country existed down the road from us. It seemed so arbitrary and, of course, it was. I couldn’t fathom, aged four, that it was all because of this map-drawn border that people were killing each other.

The Irish dancing wasn’t the only way our family tried to fit in. When we moved from near Muff deeper into the countryside around Claudy, my father bought a donkey, a red-and-blue-painted cart and four sheep to keep in the raised hillock at the back of our house which we called, without my knowing why, ‘The Rath’.

The donkey, Bessie, soon spawned a foal, christened with dazzling imagination Little Bess. We were better at naming the sheep, who we called things like Lamborghini and Lambada. Each summer, my parents would heroically attempt to shear the sheep by hand using what looked to me like a huge pair of scissors. My sister and I were required to act as sheepdogs in order to round up the bleating animals, and we had varying degrees of success.

For breeding season, rams would be borrowed from local farmers to impregnate our ladies. One of them dropped dead while on the job. We notified the farmer and then my father dug a pit to bury the ram. The ram was heavy and the only way my father could manoeuvre it into place was on its back, with its legs facing up to the sky. Mysteriously, when it came to replacing the earth, there was no longer enough of it to cover the ram in the pit, and his legs stuck out of the ground. For months, those legs poked out of the grass like spooky totem poles and I learned to avoid that particular area.

Periodically, the lambs too would disappear and I never thought to question these sudden absences. It was only some time later that I put two and two together and realised that every time a lamb was removed from The Rath, more bags of meat would appear in the freezer.

‘Is … this … Lambkin?’ I would stutter at the Sunday lunch table, looking at a roast joint served up with potatoes and a jar of mint sauce.

After a while, my parents started giving the sheep numbers so that I became less emotionally attached to them. I’m not sure it worked. To this day, I far prefer roast chicken.

Since this was the pre-internet, pre-Netflix era, when we weren’t herding sheep, my sister and I had to make our own entertainment. My idea of a good time was disappearing into the vast network of rhododendron bushes in our garden to read a Nancy Drew mystery or playing by the River Faughan which ran parallel to our house and which when uttered in a Northern Irish accent, sounded like an expletive. I papered the attic with cut-out magazine pages because I’d read somewhere that Anne Frank had done the same thing while hiding from the Nazis. I was oddly obsessed with the Second World War. Possibly, now that I think about it, it’s because I was living in a place shaped by political conflict.

For the most part, the terrorist attacks happened outside my immediate world. My primary school was a nice place, with good teachers and children who seemed to accept me as I was. The Troubles impinged on our consciousness in a way that was simultaneously familiar and abstract. Everyone seemed inured. In the 70s, when bombs and booby-traps and gun battles were an almost daily occurrence in parts of the Province, local doctors took to prescribing ‘nerve tablets’ and tranquilliser use was higher here than anywhere else in the UK. According to Patrick Radden Keefe’s book, Say Nothing, ‘Doctors found, paradoxically, that the people most prone to this type of anxiety were not the active combatants, who were out on the street and had a sense of agency, but the women and children stuck sheltering behind closed doors.’

By the time I arrived, this traumatised numbness had evolved into a culture of silence. Words were used sparingly and often carried symbolic, historic importance. The closest city to where we lived was referred to as Londonderry on the road signs, but to use its full name in conversation was to make a political statement that you were pro-British. You had to refer to it as Derry or risk the consequences. No one told me this directly but I absorbed the knowledge without it having to be said.

Sometimes the silence was particularly acute. When the shopkeeper father of a boy in the class below me was machine-gunned to death for selling his goods to the British Army, I can’t remember any of us even mentioning it. I was aware of my parents speaking to each other in hushed, serious tones and I became used to listening for what wasn’t being said as much as I listened for what was. Mostly I just got on with it and tried not to think too much of the things that scared me.

But when I went to secondary school in Belfast, I became more aware of my difference. I was a weekly boarder there and one weekend, as I walked to the coach stop to catch the bus home, my route took me through the aftermath of a bomb attack the previous night. I passed the hulk of a blasted car, the metal warped beyond recognition. Every single window of the Europa Hotel had been blasted out. A confetti scattering of glass crunched under my feet.

In those days, to speak with an English accent was, in certain quarters, to be marked out as the hated occupier. I was aware of this, and tried not to talk too much when meeting new people or when I found myself in unfamiliar locations. But at school, I had to talk. At school, there was nowhere to hide.

I had no notion of my own alien nerdishness until, shatteringly, at the beginning of my second year in secondary school, I was told a boy in my year didn’t fancy me ‘because she’s English’. He wasn’t even a particularly attractive specimen. I didn’t fancy him because he had a ruddy complexion and always smelled vaguely of uncooked sausages.

Still, his rejection cut me to the core. Overnight, I started seeing myself through other people’s eyes: my fluorescent orange rucksack which I wore on both shoulders was not the last word in style; corduroy trousers had never been cool; my accent was so noticeably foreign as to be actively off-putting to boys who smelled of sausage-meat; my hair was flat rather than curly like Charlene’s in Neighbours and I didn’t own crimpers and my mother wouldn’t let me get a perm. In fact, my mother still cut my hair, which wasn’t exactly helpful either.

To add insult to injury, I had also been put up a year, which meant I was the youngest in my class by a considerable margin. But worst of all – I was English.

I began to notice that the girls I thought of as my friends were talking about me rather than with me. They would make plans that didn’t involve me to go to nightclubs with fake laminated IDs. I would hear them in groups laughing loudly and when I approached, the laughter would mysteriously stop like wind dropping from a sail but because I was so accustomed to the constant shifting tension between said and unsaid, I didn’t think to question it. I simply accepted it. I became used to not belonging.

It all came to a head in the week we had our school photographs taken – those embarrassingly awkward portraits that are all blazers, uneasy forced smiles and wary adolescent eyes.

My photograph was a particularly good example. I had wonky teeth, ears that stuck out through the limp shoulder-length hair that my mother still cut. I was grinning dementedly at the camera, sitting with one shoulder angled towards the lens as the photographer had demanded. My blazer sleeves were too long for me and hung over my hands because my mother, as well as believing I should always have short hair, also believed there was no point in investing in a uniform that actually fitted when one could purchase clothes with substantial growing room.

It was as I was walking down the busy school corridor on my way to Double History with Mrs O’Hare that I saw it. The most popular girl in my year – let’s call her Siobhan – was in fits of giggles. She was looking at a piece of paper in her hand and then passing it around a group of willing acolytes, each of whom in turn glanced at it and then laughed riotously. Siobhan said something in a low whisper, cupping her hand against her mouth. More giggling. Then she saw me staring at her and caught my eye.

‘We were just looking at your photo,’ she sniggered. ‘You look …’ Snigger. ‘Really.’ Snigger. ‘Pretty.’

There was an outburst of laughter. Even I knew I didn’t look pretty. My eyes prickled with tears. Hold them back, I told myself, pretend you don’t care. But of course I did care. I cared terribly. As a twelve-year-old, my need to camouflage myself by belonging was at its most pressing. I didn’t want to stand out. I wasn’t sure enough of myself yet to risk forming a new teenage identity of my own and until I figured that out, I simply wanted to be one of them.

That was the moment it dawned on me: I was the school joke. I didn’t fit in and I never had. I was the weird, ugly English girl with bad clothes. I felt stupid, as if I’d perpetrated this big lie on my own unconscious. I’d been fooling myself up to that point that I was like all the other normal kids. I had stupidly thought that the qualities my parents and sister valued – a sense of humour, strong opinions, a slightly eccentric love of The Archers – would transfer seamlessly into a different environment. But teenagers are unforgiving of difference. Plus, there’s a thin line between strong opinions and shameless precocity, isn’t there? I was probably unbearable.

It’s so interesting what your mind chooses to fix on. Lots of other things happened during that period that were probably, in their own way, far more upsetting. My mother recently told me that I had once kneeled down in the middle of the road, arms held aloft like a wailing penitent, crying and begging her not to take me to school. I had completely forgotten this, but when she spoke about it, glimmers of memory came back to me and I remembered the sensation of gravelly tarmac against my knees.

Yet it was Siobhan’s reaction to my photograph that stuck with me and although it would have been, in any other context, a passing, thoughtless comment, it became in my mind’s eye definitive proof that I was not good enough. Worse, I knew that the source of my difference and my shame was my real self; the self I had been brought up to believe would be accepted on its own merits. My parents encouraged my enthusiasms and my individuality. At school, I learned too late that my strength of character was perceived as oddness and from that moment on, my sense of self started to disintegrate.

I wanted to change and to blend in, and yet I had no idea how to pretend to be someone else. In fact, there seemed to me to be something fundamentally dishonest about even attempting it. I was living in a society where there were so many different versions of the truth and where danger lay in the silent, shifting gaps between these truths, that at the same time as wanting to fit in, I also had an innate desire to hold on to the one thing I knew was me: my voice. I was a conflicted, unhappy mess.

I started to talk less at school. I stopped putting my hand up to answer questions. If no one heard my Englishness, I thought, then maybe they’d un-see my difference. During the days, I kept myself to myself and trudged long corridors with lever-arch files clasped to my chest, hunched inwards. I sat at the back of the classroom, defacing my books with Tipp-Ex, fighting my natural inclination to work hard because I knew now this marked me out as weird. I started cheating in tests, sneaking in scraps of paper with the answers on them and propping them up inside my pencil case. I did the bare minimum.

It was a big school and during the days, I was able to lose myself quite effectively amid the blue-and-grey-uniformed mass. At nights in the shared dormitories of the girls’ boarding house, I took down the posters I’d Blu Tacked of fluffy seals (too babyish) and striking Calvin Klein adverts (if they had a woman in them, I was called ‘gay’ by the other girls) and replaced them with black-and-white male Levi’s models and pop stars. At weekends, I wasn’t allowed to leave until Saturday morning, when I got the coach back home. The journey took ninety minutes. When my mother picked me up from the stop, my shoulders would drop with relief that I could be myself again.

But I only had one night of grace, because we were required to be back early on Sunday evening for a chapel service. My mother would give me dinner, making my favourite things, and I’d have a lump in my throat as I ate and I would try not to cry. I dreaded returning to school and my way of coping was to seek comfort in the rare pockets of the familiar. I brought food from home. I read books, and cherished the ability to lose myself in a different world. When I cried, I did so in private, behind a locked lavatory door. And as time went on, I did make a couple of friends who were, like me, social outcasts.

My grades spiralled downwards. I failed exams, once getting 47 per cent in a Chemistry exam – a shame so acute it haunts me still, three decades later. I developed two distinct personalities: a home self and a school self, and I went to great pains to ensure that the two never coincided. I never invited anyone back to mine at the weekends. I didn’t tell my parents a lot of what was going on because I wasn’t sure I fully had a grip on it myself. I just knew I was unhappy.

It was to set in motion a coping mechanism that would last into my adult life, and cause me a great deal of heartache. It was an internal dislocation, which meant I could distance myself from the pain of my sadness and put it to one side, like a washed-up dish left to dry in its own time, while I continued to exist and function seemingly effectively. But the detachment from my own hurt meant I gradually lost touch with what I was actually feeling, which meant that this became difficult to express. I, who had so many words, could not find the right ones when it came to myself. At the same time, I was desperate to please others in the hope that, by doing so, I would finally be granted the secret access code to belonging. So I shaded my character according to the company I found myself in. I would pretend to like pop stars and clothes and television programmes I didn’t much care for, all the while clinging on to my English accent like a life raft that could still carry my disparate selves back to the actual me. I felt fury and guilt at what I conceived of as deception, and I turned these emotions inward and worried, all the time, about the myriad things I was doing wrong.

Eventually it got to the stage where I point-blank refused to go back to school. My mother pleaded with me to finish the term, but I couldn’t. I had reached the point where I had no emotional energy left, and in the end my parents agreed to take me out halfway through my third year. During the time that followed, I got a scholarship to a boarding school in England where no one thought my accent was exceptional. That September, I went back into the year I was meant to be in. The school was single-sex rather than co-ed, which I found less intimidating.

I had also learned some valuable lessons about how to be popular from my earlier experiences. I knew to stand back a bit and take stock. To be cautious about revealing myself too quickly for who I really was. I needed to suss out the other girls first and assess the group dynamic before making my move.

So it was that, aged thirteen, I approached my first day as a new girl with Machiavellian intent. My strategy was simple: I would identify the most popular girl in my year and I would befriend her. I would observe the way she dressed and spoke and what she did with her hair. Then I would copy it. This I did. It worked like a dream.

It was, in some respects, relatively straightforward and a matter of acquiring and doing the right sort of things. I bought River Island black hipster trousers. I said I fancied Robbie Williams from Take That. I drank Cinzano straight from the bottle on a park bench because you had to get drunk to be cool. I had a boyfriend in my final year and went to the Algarve with a group of friends to celebrate the end of our A levels. It was the first time I’d ever stayed up to watch the sun rise. On the surface, at least, I appeared to belong. I was one of the cool ones.

After my earlier failures, I was indubitably better at playing the game. I got good grades and made real friends. The teachers liked me. Still, I didn’t much like school. I always felt resentful that I wasn’t in control of my own life. I wanted, more than anything, to be an adult and in charge of my own existence. I was impatient to get on with things, to have a job, to live in my own flat and pay my own rent. In fact, I couldn’t wait to leave.

I had a growth spurt at the age of fourteen and people frequently told me I seemed older than I was. It caused some confusion when I visited my sister at university. When we went out for a black-tie dinner with some of her male postgraduate friends, I was keenly aware that I didn’t want to embarrass her. I wore a black dress, with white buttons all the way down the front (River Island again. I really did love that shop). Halfway through the Chinese meal, I was told that one of the men had taken a shine to me. He tried to strike up conversation across the table. I politely asked what degree he was taking and after a few moments of chit-chat he said:

‘So what are you up to at the moment?’

‘I’m in the first year of studying for my GCSEs,’ I replied.

His lower lip trembled as if he’d been punched. No more conversation was forthcoming.

I suppose what I’m getting at is that, one way or the other, I never entirely fitted in. I was immature in some ways (horrifyingly unworldly) and overly mature in others (I asked for a three-quarter-length camel coat for my eighteenth birthday). Adults assumed I was capable because, by now, I was tall and good at exams and well behaved in class, but really I was just trying to work things out and I still barely knew myself. I always felt something of an outsider – in Ireland because I spoke like a foreigner; in England because I hadn’t grown up there.

But this social failure at school had some positive by-products. At an early age, it made me into an observer of human behaviour. I started to listen more than I talked. It’s a skill that has been incredibly useful as a writer. And because I wasn’t born cool but had to learn how to fake it, I like to think I have a degree of empathy for others who have never felt they belonged. When it came to writing my fourth novel, The Party, I mined my own experiences of being a scholarship kid on their first day in an unfamiliar environment for my protagonist, Martin Gilmour.

I have often been asked at literary festivals how I imagined myself into the character of a misfit teenage boy and the truth is, I based it on what I felt at the time. The emotions were so vivid to me that I can feel them still. (Although it’s worth pointing out here that Martin is a borderline sociopath who inveigles his way into his best friend’s life with disastrous consequences. That’s where any similarity between him and me ends.)

It’s interesting how many of the successful people I’ve interviewed, both for the podcast and as a journalist, have felt a similar sense of alienation at school. I’ve found that a surprising number of performers – specifically comedians – had parents in the military and therefore moved around a lot as children. They got used to adapting to new environments and often the easiest way to make friends was to crack jokes or act the class clown. It’s not a giant leap to think that this was what shaped their talent for performance. Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Adrian Edmondson, Jessica Alba and Christina Aguilera all came from military families.

There’s a sense, too, in which not being able to fit in makes you cultivate independence and resilience. If you move around a lot, you become used to making the most of your own company. If you’re like me, you lose yourself in stories and imagination and create rich internal worlds to counterbalance the external complexities.

When I interviewed Clint Eastwood in 2008, he recalled his own itinerant childhood as his father, a steel worker, travelled up the West Coast of America looking for work in the 1930s.

‘It was kind of lonely in some ways because you never went to the same school for six or seven months, you were always moving on somewhere,’ Eastwood said.

The rap star Wiz Khalifa, too, was a military brat. I spoke to him about it for Elle magazine in 2015. We met in a classic Los Angeles hip-hop pad – all white walls and clean angles and heavy clouds of weed obscuring the view of the Hollywood Hills beyond and he told me he moved bases every couple of years – to Germany, the UK and Japan.

Always being the new, ‘nerdy’ kid at school made him ‘nervous’ so music was his refuge: ‘Seeing everybody else being confident and knowing everybody, and me just kind of coming from the outside, it wasn’t comfortable at all,’ he said. ‘But doing my music, it was just my way of being the best at what I was interested in.’

He later turned his music into a chart-topping career and a net worth of $45 million.

But it wasn’t just the army kids who struggled to fit in. The novelist Sebastian Faulks told me he ‘loathed’ the boarding school he was sent to at the age of eight. Later, he went to Wellington College, which he ‘disliked intensely’.

‘It was traumatic, undoubtedly because the world you found yourself in, it just bore no relation to any world I’d ever known,’ he said. ‘Iron bedsteads, weird clothes, weird food, Latin, Greek, hymns and … there was no experience for the first sort of month that I’d ever had before. But eventually you sort of got used to it. And I remember one term I didn’t go home at all because there was some sort of mumps outbreak and in some ways it was easier not to go home at all actually. And I learned to fit in and adapt.’

The actress Christina Hendricks, who starred as Joan in the hit series Mad Men, was bullied at school. When I interviewed her for the Observer in 2014, she told me her parents had moved from Idaho to Virginia because of her father’s job when she was thirteen. She hated her new high school and felt ‘uprooted’ and resentful.

She wore Birkenstocks and ‘hippy dresses’. She was surprised when she saw the other girls her age at her new school ‘carrying purses [handbags]. I was like, “Ooh, purses!” To me, only moms had purses. They were much more sophisticated and they were having sex and wearing make-up – all these things that had not happened for me.’

From the start, Hendricks was singled out. ‘We had a locker bay, and every time I went down there to get books out of my locker people would sit on top and spit at me. So I had to have my locker moved because I couldn’t go in there … I felt scared in high school. It was like Lord of the Flies. There was always some kid getting pummelled and people cheering.’

Hendricks found her tribe in the drama department. Acting provided an outlet for a feeling of impotent rage. She became a goth, dyeing her hair black and purple, shaving it at the back and wearing leather jackets and knee-high Doc Marten boots. She said her clothes, and her capacity for reinvention, provided a type of armour against what she was experiencing.

‘My parents would say, “You’re just alienating everyone. You’ll never make any friends looking like that.” And I would say, “I don’t want those people to be my friends. I’m never going to be friends with the people who beat up a kid while everyone is cheering them on. I hate them.”’

Of course, we know now how the story turned out: Hendricks’ passion for drama turned into a successful career, winning her critical plaudits, Emmy nominations and the slavering admiration of a legion of borderline-obsessive fans.

That, it seems, is what connects all these stories: the lesson that, in order to survive, one needs either to adapt to a potentially hostile environment or to redirect one’s pain into a more positive – and often creative – outlet. It strikes me that school is not simply a place where academic lessons are taught but also a place where we educate ourselves on who we are; where we can try out different identities and see what fits before the constraints and responsibilities of adulthood are upon us.

I was always so frustrated as a teenager when condescending grown-ups would tell me that schooldays were the best days of my life and that I should ‘make the most of them while you can’. At the time, I wondered whether it was one of those things I might grow into believing, in the same way as I grew into French cinema and liking pesto, but I never have. Schooldays were categorically not the best days of my life and, in fact, I still have nightmares about them.

On the podcast, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator of the Bafta-winning Fleabag, spoke about the ‘duality’ she felt at school. At home she had been raised to be strong-minded and to test unnecessary boundaries and yet she was entering a place where rules had to be obeyed.

‘I remember my mum saying to me when I first went to secondary school, “Just be an angel for the first three terms, if you are an angel for the first three terms, you’ll get away with anything you want for the rest of your school career,”’ Waller-Bridge said. ‘And I really took that to heart and I made sure that I worked hard, I got the little badges or whatever you got, but the whole time [I was] just basically saying to my mates, “If I nail this then I can take anyone down later.”

‘And it was so true because then I just had the reputation of being a hardworking student, and I was a massive practical joker and the cheekiness, that also my mother had bred in me, was brilliantly offset by the lesson to appear to be a good girl and you’ll get away with being a bad girl.’

Of course, it was this duality that Waller-Bridge later deployed to great effect in Fleabag where the protagonist is, to all intents and purposes, a seemingly nice, well-brought-up middle-class girl who is actually grappling with darker issues of grief and abandonment and who uses sex as distraction from having to deal with her own inadequacies. Within that premise lies a further duality because although Fleabag ultimately addresses serious themes, it is also unabashedly funny.

Failure to fit in at an early age teaches us to develop a resilience that can ultimately help us flourish. The political campaigner Gina Miller found this to be the case when she was sent from her home in Guyana to boarding school in Eastbourne at the age of eleven. She was targeted by bullies for looking different and for the way she spoke. Before leaving home, Miller had taken a bottle of her mother’s L’Air du Temps perfume with her to remind her of all the things she loved. Every night before going to sleep in her dormitory bed, Miller would dab a bit of the scent on her pillow before another girl spotted what she was doing and tipped the perfume down the toilet. When she discovered what had happened, Miller shed a few private tears before assessing her options. She could tell on the bully, which would alienate her from the other girls. She could suffer in silence, which might make her seem like a pushover. Or she could try and win the bully over.

Miller went for the last option, giving the girl in question a bracelet as a peace offering.

‘As soon as I reached out to the girl who was bullying me, her defences crumbled,’ Miller recalled. ‘I didn’t counter anger with anger. Nor did I show I was upset. Instead I tried to disarm her with kindness so that we could engage with each other. Once a bully sees you as human, that’s half the battle.’

She added: ‘All of this taught me an important lesson. It was that most bullies act from a place of weakness. They feel threatened and backed into a corner by something – or someone – they don’t understand. Bullying is the way they lash out, but underneath all that bravado, there’s often a fragile individual riven with insecurities and weakness who doesn’t know how to express him or herself when confronted by the unknown.’

It was a lesson that she took with her into adulthood, when Miller found herself the target of death threats and racist abuse after successfully taking the UK government to court in 2017 over the triggering of Article 50 to exit the European Union without parliamentary consent.

So what do we learn from failing to fit in? We learn how to cope with social rejection. We learn how to entertain ourselves. We learn independence and empathy and we put our imagination to better use than we might have done otherwise. We learn how to handle bullies and people who don’t like us. We learn strategies that help us acclimatise to new environments. We learn to code-switch between different social languages. We learn not to let our mother cut our hair beyond an appropriate point.

But my failure to fit in also had less positive effects. It made me, at an early age, into a people-pleaser. I wanted others to like me and accept me and the coping strategy I had developed to survive was predicated almost entirely on their good opinion. I wasn’t particularly selective about who liked me, I just hankered after safety in numbers which meant that for years I flailed around trying to fit in anywhere I could. It was an exhausting way to live. It meant I lost touch with a lot of what I was actually feeling and what I truly wanted, in an attempt to contort myself around other people’s desires. This became so embedded in my psyche that I didn’t even know it was happening until I turned thirty-six and realised the existential corner I had painted myself into was diametrically opposed to my long-term wellbeing, and my life imploded in spectacular fashion. I wonder how different I would have been had I adopted Christina Hendricks’ ‘fuck you’ attitude; if instead of unthinkingly going along with the herd, I had developed a strong individual identity and found refuge in difference rather than being scared by it?

Perhaps I would have had a less critical internal narrative: that judgemental voice which kept telling me I was wrong or bad or not good enough throughout my teens and twenties. But maybe that voice was also part of my drive and ambition. I was seeking to prove to myself through the frantic ticking of external boxes (degree; career; professional success) that I was all right. That I did have stuff to offer. That I was worth being friends with. That I was worth being loved.

So I don’t think, looking back, that I could have had the one without the other. I wouldn’t have the published books, the journalism awards, the joy of seeing my name in print, without a borderline-obsessive work ethic fuelled by outsidership. And maybe I wouldn’t have such a wonderful circle of dear friends had I not also acquired the certain knowledge that acceptance is a fragile and fickle thing, and isn’t to be taken for granted. That you need to look after your friendships as you would your own health.

I never did pick up an Irish accent but when I wrote my first novel, my publisher found out I’d grown up outside Derry and I went back to Ireland to promote it. By then, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement had brought peace to the Province and I was struck by how much lighter the atmosphere felt. In Derry, there were new buildings and shopping centres and a bridge that arced over the width of the River Foyle. In Belfast, I was interviewed by newspaper journalists and radio presenters who wanted to know about my schooldays and which other Irish writers I most admired. When the pieces were published or when the programmes aired, I was always introduced as a local novelist. I was welcomed everywhere I went, by people who bought me pints of Guinness and who showed demonstrable pride in me. After all those years, it didn’t matter to them how I spoke. It was the most amazing feeling.

What did it feel like? It felt like coming home.

How to Fail at Tests

When I went to that secondary school in England, I got really good at exams. I was more content, had better teachers and had already done half the year back in Belfast. At GCSE, I promptly dropped all the subjects I didn’t like without a backward glance. I became a straight-A student and my end-of-term reports were glowing with praise.

This was lucky because it felt as if I were constantly being made to take tests. Life was a morass of exams – weekly tests to check I’d learned my algebra and understood photosynthesis; end-of-term exams where the sun beat tauntingly through the classroom windows as I attempted to revise the finer points of Henry IV’s domestic policy; musical grades; GCSEs; A levels … it went on and on. And then, because I’d been studying so hard and straining my eyes poring over books and the library computer screens, it turned out I needed an eye test (and glasses) too.

The culture of continuous testing has got even worse since I left school in 1997. In 2018, the charity Childline reported delivering 3,135 counselling sessions on exam stress in the previous year, with half of those phone calls being with twelve- to fifteen-year-olds, some of whom spoke of ‘an overwhelming workload’ and ‘worries about whether they would get the grades they want’.

The sheer number of exams – from SATs to GCSEs to AS and A levels and beyond – means that, at some point, you will probably fail at least one and your sense of self risks being reduced to a series of red biro marks on foolscap and a percentage point informing you that you haven’t passed.

It’s hard not to take it personally. At my new school, the spectre of that 47 per cent Chemistry exam result in Belfast cast a long shadow. I’m not sure why it haunted me so. That particular test wasn’t of any great importance but it was still difficult to separate who I was as a person from the grotesque caricature I built up in my mind of a backward numbskull who couldn’t remember what happened to magnesium when it met a naked flame (did it ask it to put some clothes on? I wondered).

Why did that particular failure affect me so deeply? It was partly because my surgeon father was an excellent scientist and was forever trying to engage me in ‘experiments’. I remember once, at the age of seven, being encouraged to take a dead bat to my primary school for display on the Nature Table. Until this point, the Nature Table had consisted of shrivelled autumn leaves and the odd branch of pussy willow, each one neatly labelled in Mrs McCarter’s comforting round handwriting.

I had found the bat that morning in our attic, its furry black body lying like a winged comma on the floorboards. When I told my father, he was delighted, and took the opportunity to give me an informative little talk on the nature of nocturnal flight. He told me to wrap up the bat in kitchen roll and take it into school. My classmates would be fascinated, he said confidently – a dead bat was just the sort of thing the Nature Table needed.

He was mostly right. The other pupils were fascinated, although their fascination was somewhat ghoulish in tone and the majority of the girls were just plain terrified. Mrs McCarter recoiled in horror when I carefully unfolded the kitchen roll and offered up the dead bat in the damp palm of my hand.

It turned out the bat was not dead after all, but simply sleeping deeply, in a state of semi-hibernation. The drive to school and the subsequent commotion had woken the creature up and it leapt from my hands and started flying around the classroom, flapping its wings and causing Mrs McCarter to shriek in distress.

It was Liam Andrews who saved me: a boy who had been the subject of my fervent but unrequited crush for many months. Bravely, he shepherded the bat out through an open window. Everyone clapped. The Nature Table was restored to its former pussy-willowed glory. The bat was never mentioned again. And Liam Andrews thought I was a freak for the rest of my time at primary school.

The point being: my father was keen on science and, sweetly, he wanted me to share his enthusiasm. But I just didn’t have that kind of brain. I found it frustrating having to learn properties of chemicals by rote and I didn’t really want to know the inner workings of a rat or how heat was conducted through a baked potato. So when I got that 47 per cent in Chemistry, I felt it not only as an academic failure, but also as if I were, in some small but significant way, failing as a daughter. I was letting him down, as well as myself.

Tests are never just tests. They tap into all sorts of deeper issues too.

Looking back now, I also see that exam as symptomatic of my broader unhappiness. I had lost confidence socially after that episode with Siobhan, which meant I’d also lost confidence in my abilities. And when I knew I wasn’t good at something, I became less motivated. It’s a fairly standard human impulse: if I’m not going to succeed at this, the reasoning goes, then I’m not going to try. That way, I’ll lessen the humiliation when, inevitably, it comes.

But when I became better at exams, being ‘academic’ was something that wormed its way into my identity and into how I saw myself. I was rewarded and praised for it. This was beneficial in some ways – I worked hard because I wanted to keep on succeeding – but it also came with some negatives attached. It’s never a particularly good idea to build your sense of self on the shaky foundations of academic merit. The older you get, the more you realise that such markers are pretty arbitrary – especially in the arts subjects I’d chosen to pursue.

The author Jessie Burton came to this realisation as an adult after a lifetime spent doing well at school and cultivating ‘an intellectual maturity [that] can mask vulnerability’.

In her thirties, ‘I’d never, perhaps, tuned in emotionally. And I do think it has come from a more or less self-imposed state of doing. Doing things that garner applause or garner approval and therefore make me feel safe.

‘I think it was a pattern that was made way back when I was young and doing well at school and for most children, that’s our life … at age five, we’re at school a lot more than probably we’re at home … and that was always rewarding me. I did enjoy school; I loved it. And feeling that there was a formula there of working hard and getting the results and getting everyone’s approval and everything in the status quo being maintained.’

The flip side of this was that Burton ‘felt a lot of the love I got was conditional [on doing well academically] … and when The Miniaturist [her first novel] was hugely successful, the biggest success I’ve ever had, it was almost too much. “Well, I’ve tried to write a book and, oh, it’s an international bestseller.” What now? Who am I?’

As Burton so perceptively outlined, school achievements and exam results are only ever external validations. In my experience, they do not make you feel confident in any long-lasting way because, by the time you’ve left school or graduated from university, you realise that there are no exams left to take unless you’re an architect or a doctor or one of those high-flying financial types who keep having to sit complicated accountancy tests.

When you’re a grown-up, life becomes bafflingly free of signposts. There is no exam board telling you whether you’re doing well or meeting the necessary requirements for being a twenty-five-year-old. There’s no one who can give you an A* for moving house efficiently or managing to file your tax return on time. Sure, you can be given promotions and pay rises, but these are often scattered and random events. There is no long, anticipatory build-up of revision to an eventual climax of essay-writing against the clock as an invigilator walks up and down between rows of desks and tells you that you have five minutes left.

In adulthood, no one gives you marks for getting the answer right.

I wish I’d been more aware of this. At seventeen, I thought exams were all-important. I got my work in on time and I prided myself on being good. Good at school. Good at debating. Good at behaving. Good at not smoking a cigarette until my eighteenth birthday, and then only taking a single drag because it seemed a symbolic thing to do. Good at not getting my ears pierced. Good at talking to adults. Good at seeming outwardly confident, despite the rumbling internal engine of anxiety. I was even fairly good at the trumpet – as long as I didn’t have to take a test (I managed Grade 6 before realising there is nothing more stressful than a music exam which requires you to stand in front of a stranger, regulate your shallow breathing, and blow loudly into a brass tube blindly hoping to hit the right note and realising there is nowhere to hide if you don’t). Still, I was good at being the school Orchestra Secretary, which was the next best thing.

But then I took my driving test. And I failed.

No big deal, you might think. Worse things happen at sea. But this failure hit me especially hard. It came at a time when I was passing all the other tests in my life, and applying to Cambridge University, where I would later get a place. These socially sanctioned successes had led to a belief that I could do things I set my mind to because – let’s not mince words here – I was spoiled. I was white, middle-class, had attentive parents and had won a scholarship to an excellent boarding school where opportunities were handed out like doughnuts at break-time (we did actually get doughnuts every Thursday). I thought that if I put enough time in, worked hard, did my best and if my parents threw money at any given problem, success would automatically follow. It was the logic of entitlement and I’m aware that countless people from different backgrounds, who have experienced discrimination for everything from their ethnicity to their sexuality, will find this a curiously slight example. And it was. But it’s the slightness that revealed the sheer depth of my arrogance.

I was arrogant about my driving test. Not because I thought I was an exceptional driver – I really, really wasn’t and my lack of spatial awareness means I can still barely parallel park – but because I thought success in tests was a perfect equation of effort multiplied by intelligence equals reward. I also knew that all my family – mother, father and older sister – had passed their test first time. In fact, my sister was a driver of such skill that later she took an Advanced Driving Test in order to qualify for lower insurance premiums and a lifetime of making all her romantic partners feel slightly emasculated (she’s also an excellent map-reader, motorcyclist, pilot and shooter of rifles, having once represented her country in precisely this sport. My cousins, not without reason, call her Jane Bond).

Being the youngest in a high-achieving family means you’re left scrabbling to keep up. In many ways, this was a gift – it gave me determination and a die-hard work ethic. In other ways, it meant I was more likely to take it to heart when I failed in areas that my parents or sister had already succeeded.

So it was with the driving test. Having done twenty lessons with long-suffering Bob, my driving instructor and a man blessed with the innate calmness and patience of a Buddhist monk, I felt wholly prepared. I had passed my theory test after swotting up on motorway lights and highway road signs. All that was left was the practical element – and how hard could that be?

Pretty hard, as it turned out.

I was paired with a stern-faced female examiner, the sort of person whose head seemed to have been chipped off an Easter Island statue, except less expressive. She was impervious to any effort at small talk or charm. Well, that’s fine, I thought, I’ll just drive brilliantly and she’ll be forced to crack a smile by the end.

For the first twenty minutes, everything went according to plan. I can honestly say, with the benefit of over two decades of driving cars, that it was quite possibly the best bit of driving I have ever done. Three-point turns were executed seamlessly. The emergency stop was deftly handled. Roundabouts held no fear. I indicated with grace, checked my wing mirrors as if born to the task and bowled smoothly along the roads trailed by songbirds whistling a merry tune.

Then, on our return to the test centre, the instructor motioned that I should go up a steep hill. I chuckled to myself. Hill starts were my forte. I’d learned to drive in Malvern, which is renowned for two things: its spring water and its gradients. Back at home in Ireland, we lived at the bottom of a valley. Navigating inclines was a way of life.

The car chuntered up to the brow of the hill. At the top, there was a traffic light and a column of cars waiting to turn into the main road. I slowed, stopped and pulled on the handbrake with full force. But then – calamity! – the car rolled back. It was just a few centimetres, and I stopped before hitting the car behind, but I already knew this was an automatic fail. Despite the blemish-free drive up to this point, I was going to be judged on this single moment of not-good-enough.

I drove back to the test centre and saw Bob, peering hopefully at me from the car park. I gave him a shake of the head and could tell he was already gearing up to say it can’t have been that bad.

The examiner turned to me, un-clicked her seatbelt and uttered the words ‘I regret to inform you …’ as if she were a telegram boy delivering news of a dead soldier on the Western Front. I slumped out of the car and Bob patted me on the arm and said it was just a bit of bad luck. He drove me back to school, where I used up what was left of my BT charge card to wail down the phone at my mother, who was nonplussed by my disproportionately melodramatic reaction.

‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘You can take the test again. Plenty of people do.’

She was right, of course. It was simply that by failing this test, the persona I’d built for myself based on passing exams came crumbling down. It dawned on me, as if for the first time, that perhaps I wasn’t guaranteed a pass through life purely because I was good at getting ‘A’s or because my parents had invested money in helping me to do so.

When I interviewed the memoirist and journalist Dolly Alderton for the podcast, she had a similar experience when she failed to get into Bristol University. Like me, she had been lucky enough to be sent to a private school, something that struck her as ‘the most wildly unfair thing in the world’.

‘I’m not an academic person,’ she said. ‘I was pretty lazy, and I came out with tremendous results that 100 per cent I wouldn’t have got had I not been at a private school. I truly believe and know that in my heart, because it’s actually really hard to be a failure at private school because you’re paying this extraordinary amount of money to be in these tiny classes, normally, to have a huge amount of time and focus and resources spent on you.

‘I think it’s so unfair that a girl like me, who would have just completely fallen through the cracks, I think, in any other schooling environment, manages to have these great opportunities and excel in a way that isn’t artificial, but was very much supported at every baby step of the way.’

Alderton passed her GCSEs, managing to get a C in Maths ‘even though it seemed like that was the most impossible thing’ and sailed through her schooling so that by the time it came to applying to universities, she was blessed with ‘this rock solid assurance that everything is going to be really easy in life, which I suppose is entitlement’.

When Bristol rejected her, ‘I just didn’t believe it. That’s the extent of how little I had faced failure in my life. Everything that I tried, my parents ploughed money in and time in to make sure that I just dragged my feet through it. Whether it was a ballet exam or getting into this boarding school for sixth form. Or my Maths GCSE. I just hadn’t experienced failure.

‘But yeah, it was a good lesson to me because it made me acknowledge the extent of my privilege and the curious and unfair and unusual education that I had. And to acknowledge that and realise that that’s not what the real world was going to be like.

‘And maybe it’s not just exclusive to people who were privately schooled, maybe it’s a sort of adolescent arrogance as well. But what a good lesson to learn!’

It is. Alderton ended up going to Exeter, so it’s not exactly an unremitting tale of woe. Nor was my driving-test failure. A few weeks went past, and I sat my test again. I had been randomly allotted the same examiner. The absurdity seemed to me so great that my nerves actually dissipated.

Interestingly, because I’d already failed and faced the entirely self-imposed indignity of that failure, I was liberated from my own expectations. My family now knew I was a rubbish driver, I thought, so there was no need to worry about letting anyone down. Besides, maybe continuing to fail my driving test over the coming years would become a loveable character quirk and I’d develop a hitherto untapped ditziness that people would find funny and charming.

So I embarked on my second driving test in a pleasant fog of couldn’t-give-a-shit-ness. I made legions of minor errors. I could see the instructor jotting them down on her clipboard and I still didn’t care. This time, when it came to the hill start, I glided smoothly away without any rollback but the minor errors kept piling up until her sheet of paper became blackened with tiny vertical hyphens.

I returned to the test centre and waited for the examiner to deliver the bad news.

‘I’m pleased to say …’ she started and I knew I’d passed.

The biggest lesson I took from it all was that the secret to succeeding at tests is not, actually, to get a fantastic mark. Succeeding at a test means not defining yourself according to the outcome. It means reminding yourself that you exist separately from those ticks in the margin and that most of life is an arbitrary collision of serendipitous or random events and no one is awarding you percentage points for how you live it.

Since then, I have tried to adopt this mindset, of someone who has made the effort to understand who they really are, what they care about and what their values are rather than what grades they think they deserve. After all, the person awarding those grades might simply be having a bad day or might not agree with what you believe about Prospero’s role in The Tempest or whether you think Richard III really did kill the Princes in the Tower (it was definitely Henry Tudor). But that doesn’t mean you’re a failure as a person.

Of course, that is not to say exams are unimportant. They are. They give you discipline and focus. Good results can be a conduit to a more expansive life with greater opportunities. They can get you into universities and fulfilling careers and they can give you confidence in your own abilities. I’m not one of those people who, every year when A-level results come out, takes to social media to pontificate pompously about how none of it really counts and, hey kids, I left school with an E in Snail Breeding and Advanced Crochet Work, but look at me now – I’m a C-list reality TV star with 120,000 followers on Twitter and a boohoo.com clothing line. No, I think exams are important. But I also think we need to keep them in perspective. No one deserves to pass a test simply because they believe they’re entitled to a positive result. Nor are we wholly defined by exams; it’s just that working hard and doing well at them can occasionally help us get to where we want to be.

And sometimes, if we don’t end up where we’d planned or we’re forced to confront the humiliation of a failed science exam or an undead bat flying around a classroom, it can make us understand all of the above.

That is its own kind of success.

How to Fail at Your Twenties

I got into Cambridge University. I did well at my exams there too, having fallen into the habit of doing everything I could to achieve the best grades. I enjoyed my time at Cambridge because, true nerd that I am, I loved my subject and geeked out reading Plato and studying war memorials and writing essays with linking words such as ‘nevertheless’ which I thought made me sound intelligent (I was wrong).

I also met my best friend, Emma. She was standing in the corner of the college bar one evening in freshers’ week. A half-Swedish blonde-haired sexpot, she wore a slogan T-shirt with ‘One for the rogue’ emblazoned across the front and was holding a pint in one hand. Inevitably, she was surrounded by a gaggle of slavering men who could barely keep their tongues from flopping out of their teenage mouths.

Whoever that is, I thought as I walked in and ordered my old lady gin and tonic, we are so not going to get on. At first glance, Emma looked like one of the popular girls I had lived in fear of since the days of Siobhan. But then one of the men I knew vaguely from halls beckoned me over and introduced us, and Emma looked straight at me, ignored all the guys trying desperately to get her attention, and started quoting dialogue from the Austin Powers film. She turned out to be so incredibly funny and so disarmingly unaware of her own gorgeousness that, right then and there, I fell in platonic love.

Emma has the most darkly hilarious sense of humour I’ve ever encountered, and it’s so unexpected because she looks so sweet and pretty when you first meet her, and also because later in life, she became a psychotherapist and a very seriously successful person. The contradiction is part of her considerable charm. In our final year at university, we lived together in student rooms. We used to have friends over for ad-hoc dinners, although because we had no kitchen, we were severely limited in what we could offer in terms of food (most of the time it was guacamole, I seem to remember). Emma and I washed the dishes in the bathroom basin, and left them to dry on the window-sill, which meant that occasionally we’d be awoken by a dramatic crashing sound as soap-sudded plates slipped off the ledge and ricocheted into the alley below. I truly hope no passerby was ever injured, but I cannot guarantee it.

After graduating, I upgraded to a place with a kitchen and lived in a house-share in Clapham, along with approximately 98 per cent of nicely spoken, middle-class recent graduates hoping for a 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 it 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 is what I’m wearing?’ he said, spitting out the words in a fit of pique. To which I should have responded, ‘Mate, that’s what women get asked all the time, I’m just levelling the playing field.’ But I didn’t. Instead, I flushed furiously and felt humiliated and left without seeing the film.

The truth was, at the age of twenty-two, I didn’t have enough confidence in myself or my own opinions not to let incidents like this get to me. My sense of self was unmoored, at the mercy of any passing gust of wind. This was the age where my people-pleasing kicked in to a higher gear. Like many young women, I mistakenly thought that the best way of feeling better about myself was to get other people to like me and to attempt to survive on the fumes of their approbation.

For someone who spent her twenties in a series of long-term relationships this was terrible logic. I would contort myself into varying degrees of discomfort simply to fit in with someone else’s life, someone else’s desires. It got to the stage that if a boyfriend asked me where I wanted to go for lunch, I became paralysed by indecision. I didn’t want to tell them where I wanted to go in case they preferred somewhere else. After a few years of this, I genuinely no longer knew what I wanted to eat anyway and so actively needed someone else to make the decision.

I lost myself in the rush to be part of a couple.

As a result, I was scared by the notion of not being in a relationship. The longest I was single between the ages of nineteen and thirty-six was two months. In those two months, I came up with every excuse I could to keep in touch with my ex-boyfriend, and simultaneously tried to distract myself by saying yes to any man who crossed my path and expressed even the mildest interest (years later, when I told a male friend of mine about this period in my life, he replied with ‘Fuck. I wish I’d known you had no standards back then,’ which wasn’t exactly what I meant, but it wasn’t far off either).

During these eight weeks, I engineered the least spontaneous one-night stand in the history of random hook-ups, purely because I believed that having a one-night stand was exactly the sort of thing I should be experiencing in my twenties.

The man in question was called Mike and lived in Paris but had come to London for the weekend. We spent an evening eating overly complicated Chinese food served on wooden platters and then we danced in a terrible basement club off Oxford Street that only played salsa music and had stains on the walls that looked like faecal matter. Mike was perfectly nice but had the unfortunate quality of becoming less attractive the more time I spent with him because he said things like ‘Golly gosh’ and ‘Is that the time? Best be getting on then.’ But so intent was I on having this much-lauded sexual experience of no-strings-attached, shirt-rippingly intense bodily contact with a near-stranger, that I insisted on going back to his hotel and falling into bed with him. It was, hands-down, the worst sex of my life. At one point, I had to ask ‘Are you in?’ because amidst the fumbling-golly-gosh embarrassment of it all I honestly couldn’t tell.

As soon as it was over (he had, it turned out, been ‘in’) I gathered up my clothes, locked myself in the bathroom and got dressed.

‘You’re not staying then?’ he asked plaintively when I emerged.

‘No … erm … deadlines … so sorry … lovely evening …’ I said, backing out of the door like a faithful retainer leaving an audience with the Queen. ‘Speak soon!’

Outside, I took out my phone and called my ex-boyfriend. He answered and said he was missing me. We met the next day and got back together. We went out for another year.

As I walked to the tube in the early hours of that particular morning, I reflected that I had tried my best to live out the fantasy of my twenties, to experience the heady whirl of irresponsible youth and casual sex, and yet, when it came down to it, I’d rather be in a steady relationship and have a bath and an early night.

It felt like an extended metaphor for the whole decade: that shifting tension between where you wanted to be, where you thought you should be and where you were right now.

It was the same with work. The Londoner’s Diary was great training for spotting a story and writing it to deadline, but I was desperate to be getting on with the business of being a ‘proper’ journalist.

I was in a job in the area I most wanted to have a career – journalism – but it wasn’t the one I was really after, and it would take me several more years to get there.

I was in a long-term relationship that wasn’t serious enough to lead to marriage and wasn’t fun enough to be casual.

I was in a house-share that, on paper, should have been a place of hedonistic excess but was mostly just a nice terrace inhabited by people who reminded each other of the need to buy toilet roll and made tray-bake brownies from Nigella’s latest cookbook when they had a spare couple of hours on a Sunday.

It didn’t help that there was so much cultural baggage around one’s twenties. When this particular decade was represented on screen, it looked as if everyone else was having a fabulous time. The mood music of my twenties was provided by the Friends theme tune and the clatter of Sex and the City heels on New York sidewalks. But it never translated into real life. The rest of us who didn’t hang out with their closest pals in Central Perk coffee shop or drink Cosmopolitans and discuss the female orgasm were left labouring under the misapprehension that we were failing to make the most of it.

I remember my twenties being a decade in which no one talked – not really, not honestly – about the things they felt unhappy about or the stuff that was going wrong in their lives. It was, instead, ten years of trying to put on a good show – for yourself and for anyone else who might be watching. It was ten years of moving forwards while groping blindly for the point of it all; ten years of building a career but feeling impatient at the lack of pace; ten years of wondering who you were meant to be dating and how you would find the mythical right ‘one’; ten years of casually assuming you had all the time in the world while knowing you were running out of it, to the extent that turning thirty seemed to me to be a giant cut-off after which I would never be truly young again.

One of the most interesting revelations that came from the How To Fail podcast was how many other people struggled with this period of their life. I’d assumed that my interviewees would have nightmare tales to tell of adolescence (I’d been preternaturally well behaved as a teenager, and I expected others to have misbehaved for me) but actually, it was their twenties that came up again and again as a time of immense transition and uncertainty. Unlike me, who had been lucky enough to know what I wanted to do professionally, many of those I spoke to had had little idea of what their future held, and that brought its own challenges.

The writer Olivia Laing chose the entirety of her twenties as one of her failures, because she dropped out of university.

‘I completely fucked up my twenties,’ she said. ‘I went to university for a year and then I dropped out and lived on road protests. So I was a dreadlocked, incense-smelling hippy really. I completely dropped out of society. I was very non-material …

‘Then I really didn’t have any money. I was working as a cleaner, I was working, doing the filing for an accountant. And I was in my late twenties, and I couldn’t see any way out of it … It’s very hard to drop back in [to society] again. So yeah, it was a very, very dark period. And a very long, dark period.

‘You know, at the time I thought, “What does a degree matter?” And I just hadn’t really realised the entire infrastructure that going to university builds for you in your life. It’s not just education, which I think I sort of patched together on my own anyway. It’s that you don’t have a circle of friends that are also doing things. You’re not part of that sort of professional world at all. And the older I got, the more it became clear that I really slipped between the cracks somehow. And it is so hard to get back in.’

Phoebe Waller-Bridge struggled to get the parts she wanted at RADA and felt so broken down by her tutors that she lost confidence and spent much of her twenties failing at auditions or being typecast as the posh, hot girl until she began writing her own material.

Sebastian Faulks recalled being ‘optimistic as a child. So although very shy, I was essentially a jolly little chap. I looked on the bright side. And I think I became essentially pessimistic in my twenties really. And you know, I’ve had to fight pretty hard to try and look on the upside. But I think … I’m not sure it’s a terribly intellectual thing. I think it’s more of a temperamental thing. My physiology or temperament or whatever word you want to use. And the place where they meet, perhaps, is naturally a touch on the gloomy side. So I do have to try pretty hard to be optimistic.’

We were talking in one of the expansive rooms in Faulks’s beautiful Notting Hill home. The window gave out onto a long garden, bordered by rose bushes not yet in flower. Faulks sat in a chair, surrounded by piles of books, and every now and then our interview would be interrupted by the skittering sound of his dog’s feet on the parquet. Faulks had been mildly amused by the idea of my podcast series and wasn’t quite sure what I was trying to get at by doing it or that he’d have anything of interest to say. I’d told him that was my responsibility: I’d have to ask the right questions.

And so I pressed him on what had been going on in his twenties to cause that change in outlook: the shift from optimism to pessimism, as he described it.

‘Well, at Cambridge, which I didn’t like as well as not liking school, I just sort of struggled to adapt really to fit in academically … I was still quite competitive in some strange way and I thought perhaps I ought to get a first, and I ought to do this, and that … I was just confused and I drank too much and smoked too much and became very confused and unhappy. And I dropped out really, I suppose you’d say. And I was aged twenty-two or -three and I was extremely confused and very fragile and it took quite a lot of time to get over that. I wouldn’t say I have got over it really.

‘I mean, life is a continuous negotiation really with yourself and other people and company and the kind of company you want, how much company you want, how much you want to give, how much you want to take, what form and shape that takes. Especially if you’ve had this tremendous shyness as a child [and] still have to some extent. You know, you do change, that’s another thing you’re negotiating, the actual changes that take place in you, the different ways that you react as you get older, to people, families, situations, friendships and so on.’

Two things struck me about this answer. One was Faulks’s sense that he ‘ought’ to be feeling a certain way and doing certain things in his twenties. The other was the significance he attributed to change, at a time when many of us are negotiating not only salaries and rent deposits but relationships with partners and families too. We are half child, half adult, with a foot in both camps. We lack the innocence and irresponsibility of childhood but most of us don’t yet have the skills to navigate adulthood because our identities are still being shaped.

I was born in 1978 and am a classic Generation X-er. My mother was part of a 70s generation who fought feminist battles for their children’s future, but who also belonged to a traditional domestic set-up where the lion’s share of household duties – including raising children – fell to the women. When I went to my all-girls secondary school I was taught that I was not defined by my biology. In fact, the majority of my sex education (such as it was) was focused almost entirely on the importance of not getting pregnant before you had established yourself in your career.

So I entered my twenties with a series of mixed messages. I knew it was important to forge a professional path. But I also expected to be married before the decade was out. I think that’s why I kept finding myself in serious relationships, rather than having a more relaxed attitude to intimacy, and it’s also why my twenties were pretty busy and stressful: not only was I trying to carve out the perfect career, but I was also attempting to nail down a perfect romantic partnership. As time went on, I felt I was failing at both. I was impatient for everything to be sorted and I didn’t realise that your twenties are a time of transition, of flux and that being in the change is the point of them.

As a result, I struggled.

For millennials, who entered the job market at precisely the time the 2008 global financial crisis struck, it must be even worse. They have been brought up in a hyper-connected age where everything from dating to grocery shopping can be done online, where contemporaries are boasting about their amazing lives on social media, where rents are high, property prices astronomical and where job insecurity is rife. There’s a scene in Lena Dunham’s Girls, the millennial sitcom of choice, in which Dunham goes in to get tested for an STD and her gynaecologist sighs, ‘You couldn’t pay me enough to be twenty-four again.’ Dunham’s response is, ‘Well, they’re not paying me at all.’

But some things are universal whatever generation you belong to. Most of us will experience the loss of loved ones in our twenties. My maternal grandfather, to whom I was very close, died in my second year at university. When I was twenty-three, that beloved former boyfriend who kept eating all the food I bought, was killed in Iraq where he had gone as a freelance journalist to cover the conflict. It was a shock from which I have yet to recover and I suspect it’s the kind of shock from which one never does. A few years later, a colleague of mine who battled with alcoholism was found dead on the floor of his flat. I lost my paternal grandmother shortly afterwards. Many of us will have similar stories: your twenties are often when you first come face to face with mortality, with the sense that all of us are, to a lesser or greater degree, running out of time.

It was the decade I first went into therapy. My friend (also in her twenties) passed on the number of her therapist and when I called, the phone rang out and clicked into voicemail. I had intended to leave a short message with my details but ended up gulping back the tears while I tried to explain what was happening in my life, all the time being hamstrung by British politeness and a sense that I was being terribly self-indulgent.

‘I’m not exactly where I want to be professionally,’ I said. I was standing in the corridor of my office when I made the call, surrounded by copies of old newspapers and the sound of the ladies’ lavatory door clanging shut. ‘It would be great if you were able to see me.’

For the next three months, I went to an office in a red-brick house in Queen’s Park, north-west London, every Wednesday morning before work. My therapist was an attractive woman in her late forties with shoulder-length greying hair and a penchant for statement Bakelite necklaces. She would open the door to me when I arrived and not say anything to me beyond a cursory hello, and I would follow her up the stairs trying to make agonising small talk until I realised after a few weeks that there was no point in trying to charm her. The awkward silence was part of the therapy. It was about making me feel comfortable with being uncomfortable. It was about making me choose honesty without worrying about what she would think of me and whether she would like me or not.

Her therapy room was kitted out, as I have since discovered, like almost every therapy room I’ve ever been in: anonymous Ikea furniture, a generic pot-plant, a box of tissues on a low table and a subtly placed clock so that you can see when your session is coming to an end. Within those four walls, I made some interesting discoveries. One of them was that your twenties could be a ‘gestation period’.

My therapist would couch her opinions in a series of questions, designed to make me feel I’d cleverly come to conclusions about my own behaviour by myself. And so it was that one day, she said: ‘Do you think that maybe, you’ve been through quite a lot already and been operating at a fairly frantic pace, and that perhaps this is a necessary time of reflection, of allowing the next phase to hatch?’

It was an incredibly helpful moment. It allowed me to let go of some of the ‘oughts’ and the ‘shoulds’ that had been crowding out my thoughts, those shrill internal critics that were taunting me with the idea of what other people were doing and how I was failing to keep up. I relaxed a bit.

At my thirtieth birthday party, held in an upstairs room at my favourite pub with a playlist designed especially by me and full of 1990s hip-hop, I felt happy. In fact, I felt relieved to have made it through my twenties and relieved that I no longer had to worry about turning thirty. It was done. I was a little bit wiser. A little bit more self-aware. In a few months’ time, although I did not know it then, I would sell my first novel.

Looking back now, I suppose I would categorise my twenties as a decade of impatience, where I wanted to be at the mythical happy end point, but had to sort through a whole lot of stuff to get there. They were also a decade of worrying I wasn’t doing them right, that I wasn’t being footloose enough or responsible enough and that, caught in the unsatisfactory mid-point between the two, I was failing to make the most of them.

The author David Nicholls, who spent most of his twenties trying and failing to make it as an actor before turning his hand to writing, said that he now realised ‘there are ways out, that we’re not fixed at the age of twenty-two, twenty-three, that life is long and you can try things for a while and if they don’t work out, do something else’.

But of course, it’s only when we’re older and have knocked about a bit that we can conclude there is no uncomplicatedly happy end point. There are a series of points – some happy, some sad, some simply quietly contented – and each one will be different from how we imagined it. Not better or worse; just different. And perhaps what surviving your twenties makes you realise is that life, after all, is texture.

‘I feel like I did it [my twenties], I committed to it,’ Phoebe Waller-Bridge said when I spoke to her about her own decade of transition. ‘I’d really like to have the skin from my twenties,’ she joked, ‘but I prefer my heart and my guts now.’

That’s the thing. Because however much you might feel you’re failing at your twenties when you’re living through them, they are a necessary crucible. Your twenties are spices in a pestle and mortar that must be ground up by life in order to release your fullest flavour. By the end of them, you’ll have more heart and more guts – and you’ll know never to roast broccoli again.

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