So it’s perhaps no surprise that Day has been challenged about her failure credentials – particularly since, in addition, she is a successful novelist and newspaper columnist, has a double-first from Cambridge and willowy, Keira Knightly-ish looks. Paradoxically, the book and the podcast that inspired it – How to Fail with Elizabeth Day – have been hugely successful. In her memoir How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned from Things Going Wrong, Elizabeth Day explores with painful and often funny honesty what happens when things go wrong, and how failure can work in our favour. The 1968 sci-fi that spookily predicted today Can fiction improve your mental health? Could failure be the new literary success? And if so, doesn’t that mean it’s not really failure at all? Karl Ove Knausgård devoted several autobiographical volumes to everyday failures in My Struggle, and since then there has been a deluge of ‘fail-lit’, both in fiction and non-fiction. Recent years have seen a similar preoccupation seeping into literature, particularly in the memoir sector. Fail better,” wrote Samuel Beckett in what has become a familiar mantra in the world of business and tech start-ups – along with ‘Fail fast, fail better’ – where the notion of failure as a route to success has taken a firm hold.
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