I'm just a massive oversharer - author and podcaster Elizabeth Day on fertility, fashion and fiction

Her toes are painted upbeat orange, picking up some of the highlights of her equally immaculate nail art.

Poised, elegant, amenable and funny, the London-based author, podcaster and journalist is in Edinburgh for an event to launch her latest book One of Us, her tenth. She’s a combination of a sophisticated ease that takes her everywhere from the House of Commons to church halls packed with her legions of fans to sipping tea with journalists and a down to earth openness that sees her share her own vulnerabilities in her journalism and chart-topping podcast How To Fail With Elizabeth Day.

Not that 46-year-old Day is failing, with awards and bestsellers such as Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict, Magpie and The Party to her name and A-listers appearing on her podcast.

She laughs and says: “Yeah, I'm aware of the irony that a podcast called How To Fail has actually turned into one of the most successful things I've ever done. But I think it's because failure connects us all. We've all failed, even though we might fear it sometimes, or we might try very hard not to. We will all fail, myself included.”

Later we talk about her ‘failings’ but first she tells me about One of Us, which has been hailed as a ‘state of the nation’ novel by Marian Keyes and has ringing endorsements from the likes of Stanley Tucci. It’s a follow up to her 2017 novel The Party, of which there is a TV adaptation in the pipeline, but you don’t have to have read the first book.

“This is also a standalone. I tell you everything you need to know. But if you have read The Party, there are lots of secret winks.

“One of Us is a multi-voice narration and essentially about why we fall in love with the people who damage us, and why sometimes we elect them too.

“There's a whole political backdrop and it mainly concerns the story of two former best friends. There's Martin Gilmour, the quintessential outsider and unreliable narrator who won a scholarship to boarding school after a difficult childhood and there became fixated on the aristocratic, wealthy, handsome Ben Fitzmaurice. They became friends, but something happened at university that meant they fell out massively. Now several years later, Martin is hell bent on revenge at precisely the same time as Ben is on course to become the UK's Prime Minister. It's about what unravels after that.”


What was it about The Party that made her want to return to those characters and their story?

“In 2017 I found Martin Gilmour sinister but compelling, and the story unfolded from his character, and became more political than I thought it was going to. It was set against a backdrop of a particular era in the UK, a time of David Cameron and Theresa May, and since then the political landscape has changed almost beyond recognition. There's been Brexit, the rise of Trump, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, COVID, these huge seismic events.

“And I had gone to Mallorca for a long weekend with my husband and we got to the hotel early and our room wasn't ready yet [Day is a story teller, setting the sene], so we had lunch, paella and rosé wine, and in the midst of this bottle of rosé he was like, "What are you going to write next?” and tipsy, I said, "Do you know what? I want to do something about this change in political climate."

“Then I thought wouldn't it be interesting if I took the characters from The Party and saw how they had changed alongside the changing currents of society. I realised there was such an opportunity to have fun with it too, to not only write something hopefully observational and insightful and with a touch of political satire and thriller, but also something funny and poking fun at some of the media excess and absurdity of power and what it does to people.”

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For Day, having done what she calls ‘most of the hard work’ already in creating the characters and their world, she found One Of Us one of the most fun and creatively fulfilling experiences she’s had writing.

“Because it was like meeting these eccentric friends again. And I introduced new voices and that was great too. One is Richard Take, a failed Tory MP, who lost his front bench seat for a work indiscretion [watching porn at work]. He was incredibly joyful to write because he has no sense of his own ridiculousness and lacks self-awareness, but through the course of the book understands more about life. I always like it when a character goes on a journey.

Lesser characters from The Party also come to the fore in One of Us.

“Ben’s wife Serena gets her own voice. I really valued the chance to understand her in a more three dimensional and nuanced way because I'm that bit older - now she’s my age and I was able to write her as I was experiencing some of the things she was experiencing, be it perimenopause or grappling with this sense of transitional womanhood and what your identity is when you're in your mid to late 40s.

For Day, Serena is an interesting character because she’s a mother of four, and motherhood, IVF, miscarriage and acceptance that it might not be possible being one of the things Day has written and talked about.

“The real gift of fiction for me is I get to explore other lives. I get to explore motherhood on the page even if I'm not a mother in the conventional sense in real life.”

In Day’s podcast, How To Fail, she asks people about three failures and what it taught them and what they learned from it. Can she tell me three of hers?

“So I went through a divorce in my mid 30s, which did feel like a failure. I thought I had known myself, and actually, it turned out I hadn't.

“My second is I failed to have babies, which is my self-perceived failure. I spent 12 years going through fertility treatment, having recurrent miscarriage, and yearning to be a mother in the conventional biological sense. About two years ago I came to terms with the fact that that wasn't going to happen and decided not to pursue any further treatment, and I'm really at peace with that. But it still brings me an element of sadness, and I can live alongside that sadness and it informs my life and it's really helped me grow, but there's still a part of it that does feel like a failure in terms of the life I thought I was gonna have and the life I actually have.

Day has her finger on the zeitgeist and alongside politics, is a self-confessed reality TV fan - she includes one in the book called Shit Happens! which the aforementioned disgraced MP joins and she is at ease discussing current societal issues such as gender.

“Martin is an outsider who's always struggled with his own identity and sexuality. Now it’s as though society has caught up with him and he realises gender fluidity and discussions around what binary means or doesn't mean encompass who he is.
And at the same time as he realises that, he's also sort of annoyed by what he would call ‘wokery’, whereas ultimately, it's an act of inclusion that he benefits from.”

Day’s books are character driven and themes appear to her later, almost after she’s written them.

“One of Us is about how power and love can often come in the same package but are toxic for each other if not handled carefully. It's about the state of not only the nation but the world, politically speaking, and how confused we seem to be. We've made so many strides in society but still seem to be hidebound by the belief that if someone has been privately educated and gone to Oxbridge and had a very entitled life, they must know what's best for the rest of us, and spoiler alert, it doesn't seem they do, because they have vanishingly little experience of what real life is like.”

“It’s also about class, one of the things that perpetually fascinates me because of my own experiences, speaking with this kind of accent [English RP], but actually growing up in the north of Ireland. And never quite fitting in, the assumption being that I must be quite posh. I’m incredibly privileged but I don't know if I'm actually posh!”

In fact she’s the sort of person who will accept a couple of the leftover Balmoral shortbread biscuits that I urge her to shove into the pocket of her sleek grey wool overcoat to eat on the train journey south. There’s something about Day that makes you want to overshare. But the shortbread is fitting as Day has Scottish roots in her paternal grandfather.

“He was a Duncan and they all came from around Loch Fyne. Also, because I grew up in North Ireland I was always very aware that Scotland was just across the water from The Giant’s Causeway. But I don’t have any Duncan tartan - yet.”

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Returning to the subject of themes in One of Us she says: “I think it's also about womanhood and misogyny, because through the course of writing it, so many of my female characters had experienced something similar, some damage at the hands of the men in their life. And it explores a toxic power dynamic.

“And it looks at a particular moment in time. One of the main characters is an environmental activist so there’s that idea that the world is literally burning and all of this comparatively trivial stuff is happening alongside. The people in power who should be dealing with climate change are so invested in their own ambition they ignore the fact that the world is basically on the course of extinction.

“I also hope it's funny. There's a satirical bent to it as well,” she says.

Day is happy to laugh at herself and her concerns, giving herself a cameo in the novel.

“There's a scene set in the British Museum where there’s an exhibition on female rage through the millennia where I was guest curator and it spoke to that theme of womanhood, identity and women's rage being sidelined. At the reception this woman wearing a purple jumpsuit gets up and gives a speech, and my character Serena describes her as blathering on about female anger and The Kardashians. I was giving that speech and wearing that purple jumpsuit. I gave myself a Hitchcockian walk-on part.” She laughs.


Speaking of purple jumpsuits, in her gauzy grey jumper, Levi’s and spiked black boots, Day cuts an elegant figure so it’s no surprise her 2021 wedding to Justin Basini, co-founder and CEO of a financial tech company was featured in Vogue. She’s also recently collaborated with the fashion brand Aligne on her own collection.

“Oh my God, it was so much fun,” she says. I've been wearing their clothes anyway. It's an all female team and I love clothes that are practical and stylish and designed for a woman maybe in their 40s who wants something that flatters and makes you the you-est version of you. Everything has pockets, all that stuff. They suggested a collaboration and I was thrilled because it's a different avenue for creativity. Sitting in a room with an incredible designer talking about the things you want to exist in the world and colours you want to see then within six months to see those ideas be clothes on women's bodies. It was one of the highlights of my career.”

For Day fashion and fun, fiction and non-fiction, writing and podcasting all go hand in hand.

“I think everything I do is about connection and curiosity. Understanding human nature more. And the podcast is an incredible gift because I get to ask people questions, often about really vulnerable moments or things they haven't spoken about much. For me, vulnerability is the point of most authentic connection because it's when people take the risk of showing up as their true selves. When you get someone like Kate Winslet, Mark Ronson, Bernie Sanders, or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi to take that risk with you, it's not only an immense honour, but it's so revealing and generous because it makes me and I hope the listener feel everyone has struggles. On the red carpet they seem dazzling and godlike but they are feeling like imposters or insecure or living through grief.”

Favourite podcast guests include Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Kate Winslet. Sharon Horgan, Melinda Gates, Monica Lewinsky and Egyptian software engineer, entrepreneur, author and podcaster Mo Gawdat.

Was there anything they all have in common?

“They all came so willing and ready to be real. I felt it was a genuine conversation and connection. Melinda French Gates spoke about her divorce, which she doesn't normally speak about, and was so real about that. And Monica Lewinsky is such an extraordinary person and has such a fascinating story to tell and for me represents what I've been talking about in One of Us, that idea that because of the way society was and the rampant misogyny in the 1990s she was blamed for what happened with President Clinton. Yet when you revisit her story you realise this was a man twenty-something years older, the most powerful man in the Western world, who was to my mind abusing that power, and she was publicly shameful and vilified. So to talk to her as a survivor and understand what she's learned about failure when she was the public symbol of that was riveting and profoundly moving. The strength of that.“

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Day herself is open to having a genuine conversation and writes about her own struggles, with infertility, divorce, the perimenopause. How is she able to be so frank?

“It comes quite naturally to me. Sharing makes me feel better because then you often meet others with similar stories and it makes you feel less alone and shameful. I’m really passionate about it, particularly in terms of fertility, because it was so unspoken for so many years and there was so much misplaced shame and stigma attached. Talking and writing about it has brought me into contact with this incredible community of women and men who understand. When I started doing the podcast I was just asking questions then I started getting comments from listeners saying we like it when you share something about yourself and it becomes more like a conversation.

“The thing we think of as uniquely personal, shameful or embarrassing actually turns out to have far more universal resonance than you can imagine. So I carried on doing it.

“And now we are where we are now - I'm just a massive oversharer!”

Book credit. One of Us by Elizabeth Day is published by Harper Collins, Hardback, £18.99.

Podcast - How To Fail With Elizabeth Day, www.elizabethday.org

And on major platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music.

With thanks to The Balmoral, Edinburgh, www.roccofortehotels.com/hotels-and-resorts/the-balmoral-hotel

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