The How To Fail host and Magpie author on how she survived an abusive relationship, found love, tried egg donation and inadvertently inspired a scene in Fleabag.
“My fertility has been the canvas on which all else has been painted,” Elizabeth Day writes in her ninth book, Friendaholic. “Every friendship, every emotion, every moment of professional success or failure, every love affair, every social media post, every cat stroked, every book read and Line of Duty series watched has taken place against this backdrop. My yearning to have a child has not just shaped me as a woman: it is me as a woman. There is not a single day that I don’t think about it.”
Today the author and podcaster is unpacking what exactly that yearning involved. “I had 12 years of trying and failing to have a baby.” It played out “through multiple relationships and incorporated two rounds of IVF, three miscarriages, egg freezing, operations on my womb — all of that. And then I met my now husband and we had a couple of miscarriages.”
Her first miscarriage, at 12 weeks pregnant, was the catalyst for her divorce from her first husband, the former BBC journalist Kamal Ahmed, the father of two children from his first marriage. They were married for three years, until she walked out on him in February 2015. “I didn’t realise it then because I was so numb to myself, but looking back I think I was depressed,” Day, 45, says over lunch at one of her favourite London restaurants.
That miscarriage was also the inspiration for a plotline in the hit television series Fleabag. In the opening episode of the second series, Claire, Fleabag’s sister, starts bleeding while at a family dinner in a restaurant. Day’s started while she was having brunch with a friend who was visiting from Australia. Just like Claire, she went to the lavatory, realised she was losing the baby and then returned to the table as if nothing had happened. “I didn’t say anything,” Day says. “I was, like, ‘Oh, I’ll be fine.’” She says she went into “functional denial. It’s an extraordinary thing. And it’s so embedded in us as women not to create a fuss.” Eventually, as the pain got worse, she came to her senses and rushed to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.
She relayed the story to the writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge on the day they first met in Las Vegas in 2014. “Talk about oversharing. Poor Phoebe,” Day says laughing. They were on a British-American networking trip with other rising stars in various fields and sat together on a coach. “We talked incessantly and haven’t really let up ever since.”
Waller-Bridge filed the story away and only realised that she had magpied it from Day after she’d written the scene. “She called me out of the blue. ‘I think I’ve done this thing.’ And I could hear that she was nervous. I said, ‘Brilliant. I’m so glad that you’ve taken this and it’s going to help so many people.’” How did it feel to watch the episode? “I felt really emotional. She had done something deeply beautiful with it. Phoebe is so good at telling an emotional truth and balancing darkness with the terrible humour of it.”
After her divorce Day started dating Waller-Bridge’s brother, Jasper, who was nine years her junior. Over a year and a half into the relationship, just as Day was about to turn 39, it finished “out of the blue. And it was a real shock to the system. I’d ended up in this place where I never thought I would be, staring down the barrel of my forties, feeling as if I don’t have any of the things I thought I would have in my personal life. I thought I would be married and have children. And actually there’s none of that and it’s going to take me so long to try to find that, if I ever do.”
At the time her professional life was going well. She had plenty of freelance writing work and three well-received novels to her name. Her debut, Scissors, Paper, Stone, a story of sexual abuse, won the Betty Trask award. “I felt very disconnected from that because I felt like such a failure.” After the break-up she escaped to Los Angeles. She started listening to podcasts, including Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin?, which features therapy sessions with individuals and couples. That sparked the idea of a podcast in which she’d ask others about how they had grappled with adversity.
Phoebe is so good at telling an emotional truth and balancing darkness with the terrible humour of it.
The break-up with Jasper “provided so much impetus for launching How to Fail”, she says. “I’m so grateful. If it weren’t for him, my life would not have changed in this way. And I’m so happy that he has found happiness with Michelle Dockery [he married the Downton Abbey actress last year] and I’m so happy that I’m married to the person I’m married to. It all worked out in the end,” she says breathlessly.
In 2021 Day married Justin Basini, a “distractingly handsome” divorced father of three children aged between 14 and 20. He is the co-founder and CEO of ClearScore, a financial tech company, and they met on the dating site Hinge. They now live in Vauxhall, in south London, with their ginger cat, Huxley.
Day is just as polished in person as she appears on the billboard that went up in Leicester Square last month, advertising the 20th series of her podcast, which has been downloaded more than 45 million times. As she bounds through the restaurant door with her Aligne coat pulled tightly around her 5ft 11in frame, she looks younger than her years, with flawless skin and short dark hair artfully tousled around her unlined forehead.
Waller-Bridge was Day’s first guest on How to Fail in 2018. She went on to interview people such as Rory Stewart, Margaret Atwood, Jarvis Cocker, Tom Daley and Minnie Driver about what they had learnt from failure. Her 2019 memoir How to Fail, which draws from the podcast, has sold more than 60,000 copies. Magpie, a psychological thriller that has infertility as a theme, has been the most successful of her five books, selling more than 132,000 copies.
This month she launched Daylight Productions, a podcast production company that aims to bring more female and diverse voices to the format. She is also appearing at the Sydney Opera House and Hamer Hall in Melbourne in a celebration of all the things in her life that haven’t gone quite right. A UK tour follows next month. You could say she has perfected the art of relatability, although cynics might argue that her self-laceration is a bit incongruous in the face of such success. One of her friends loves to preface texts to her with the tongue-in-cheek “noted failure Elizabeth Day”.
An early guest on the podcast was Gina Miller, the anti-Brexit campaigner, who opened up to her about the failure of her second marriage and surviving domestic abuse (her ex-husband denies the allegations). Miller enlisted Day as a ghostwriter for her memoir, Rise. Day herself has written about her own experience of emotional abuse and an encounter with a man that teetered on the brink of violence.
In How to Fail she references an encounter with a man who, in the heat of an argument, pushed her up against the bedroom wall, put his hands around her neck and raised his hand as if to hit her. The incident, a one-off, was more shocking in retrospect. “I have this part of me that goes deathly calm, and it’s not fight or flight, it’s freeze. I was actually feeling, ‘Oh, if this goes one step further, this is going to tip the balance on everything.’ I didn’t feel scared. I felt it was just him, which is almost worse. It wasn’t unexpected in a way. And then I felt really ashamed afterwards. It’s such a dysfunctional thing to look back on.”
Her best friend, the psychotherapist and writer Emma Reed-Turrell, confronted her over one toxic relationship. She had noticed that Day was getting quieter and quieter. On the phone, whenever the man walked into the room, her voice would switch from her normal tone to that of a child and Reed-Turrell could sense Day’s attention shifting to this authority figure. “I’m forever grateful to Emma. I was losing myself.”
She says her people-pleasing tendencies fed into the emotional abuse. She put other people’s needs first and “in the wrong hands that can become exploited”.
“I understand now why, if you are in an emotionally abusive relationship, how difficult it can feel to speak up or escape it,” she continues. “Part of the abuse is that it removes your layers of self-confidence until you are so co-dependent that you don’t think you can exist without the other person. Often the other person is telling you things like ‘You’ll never find anyone who loves you like I do.’ I’ve had that said to me in that relationship.
“I’m an articulate, well-educated, privileged middle-class white woman. If I feel undermined to the extent that I can’t say something, my heart goes out to all those other people who are still trapped in a cycle of dysfunction and who don’t have the language to express it, because it’s only recently that emotional abuse has made it into the statute books, and rightly so.”
Day was born in Epsom, Surrey, to a British father, Tom, a surgeon, and a Swiss mother, Christine. She has an older sister, Catherine. In 1982, when she was four, the family landed in Londonderry. “It was still in the thick of what is quite diminishingly called the Troubles. It was this curious experience of the countryside being peaceful and beautiful, and on the one hand pursuing this sort of rural idyll.” On the other, in the city she’d encounter “military checkpoints, men with guns and bomb scares at the shopping precinct”.
Her father had accepted a job at Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry and would go on to treat knee-capping victims and those caught up in the Omagh bombing of 1998. Her mother taught French at a local primary school and then lectured at Ulster University. They settled in a village, Claudy, about half an hour’s drive from the city. “So much of the horrendous, tragic history is not spoken about. I became quite a watchful child as a result. I’m grateful for that childhood now because it made me into an interviewer and a podcaster. A lot of what I do is about listening for the unsaid and making people feel safe enough to talk about it.”
Day’s obsession with forging friendships and her people-pleasing tendencies, which she addresses in Friendaholic, stem from that time too. At her co-ed secondary school, Methodist College Belfast, where she boarded from the age of 10, she was “mildly bullied”. She likens the dormitory to “a Victorian tuberculosis ward” and with her English accent “not only did I sound like an outsider, but in some quarters I sounded like the enemy, like the occupier”. She describes herself as the weird, ugly girl in bad clothes, a description wildly at odds with today’s head girl aura.
One day, in her third year, the 12-year-old Day refused to go to school. She then moved to Malvern Girls’ College (now Malvern St James) in England on a scholarship. She became almost manic in her pursuit of friends “because that to me, in my teenage brain, seemed like the antidote, the cure. It became about sussing out what the other person would want from me and trying to provide that, because I got an adrenalised hit from being such a good friend. And so that’s plagued me for many years, well into my twenties and beyond.”
I now understand that true love is safety.
After studying history at Cambridge, Day worked as a diarist on the London Evening Standard and at 29 she landed a job on The Observer as a feature writer. But with her marriage to Ahmed unspooling, she began to assess her career and her lack of promotion. “If they needed someone to do a Q&A interview, they knew I’d always say yes. I was just seeking to people-please my bosses, thinking I’d eventually get rewarded and I didn’t. After eight years I realised that the situation wasn’t going to change unless I changed something about it.” She left her job to go freelance.
“There was just this slow-motion unravelling of things that I had thought were certain. In many ways I see the connection between The Observer and my ex-husband because I’d put them both in this position where I just wanted to do what they needed or wanted me to do. I wanted to be so perfect as an employee and a spouse that I didn’t want them to have to state their needs.” During that time she felt hollow and exhausted and lost confidence.
After the divorce, did she consider having a child on her own? “I could have done but it was more important for me to have the relationship.” She says her marriage with Basini is a partnership of equals. “I’m a huge fan of second marriages in the sense that we learnt a lot about ourselves and how to show up in a relationship because we know what it’s like for a marriage to fail. I now understand that true love is safety. True love is not bombs of unpredictable passion exploding when you least expect them.” Does she see herself as a stepmother to his children? “Justin’s kids don’t need parenting, they have two great parents,” she says. Did she consider adoption? “Adoption is not a straightforward thing. It takes so many years. And for various reasons that are private it wasn’t right for us.”
Day has been heart-on-sleeve open about her intense desire to have a child for more than a decade, getting so close as to hear baby heartbeats that would be silent by the next scan, but she tells me that she recently accepted she will not become a mother. She decided to halt all attempts last year, at the age of 44, after she and her husband ran the gauntlet of egg donation in America. “The stress was like nothing I’ve ever known,” Day says. “It was a constant thing in my head.”
It took a year to find their donor, who underwent IVF and egg extraction at the end of 2022. Day and Basini flew to Los Angeles on Boxing Day of that year to have the embryo — resulting from the donor’s egg being fertilised with her husband’s sperm — implanted into Day’s womb. “It felt like ‘OK, we’ve done all the tests, the procedures, the drugs, the uterine scratch tests — so painful — I’ve done it all, we’re finally here now and the thing that we believe is the issue, my eggs, that’s been sorted. It felt to me as though everything was aligning.”
An “agonising” 10-day wait ensued and after a blood test she got an email from the clinic that read: “You are not pregnant, cease all medications.”
“That was soul-crushing,” she says quietly. She went into a dark place. “There was a time when it was so upsetting I couldn’t really talk without crying. It was horrible.” She dealt with it through therapy and talking to friends including Reed-Turrell, with whom she hosts the podcast Best Friend Therapy. Reality TV, in particular the Real Housewives franchise, has been a comfort during all her fertility challenges. “Watching those powerful women on screen, it was, like, you can be anything and be a woman and be a successful woman. At a time when I felt that I was failing at this biological imperative as a woman, I was, like, no, you can be f---ing anything you want.”
There was a time when it was so upsetting I couldn’t really talk without crying.
And then one day last year she reached over the chasm that exists between actively attempting to be a mother and acceptance that it isn’t to be. She felt at peace. “I know that sounds completely ridiculous. But I just did. When you’re going through fertility treatment and miscarriage, you tell yourself the story to keep you going. It will work out and it will be amazing. I will look at my child and feel that all of this had to happen for you to exist. And then they will grow and we will be so close and I will feel known by that child. And then we will have these glorious roast Sunday lunches and I’ll take them to the playground. I’ll know their friends and then they’ll get married and all of that.”
But talking with her close friends about the challenges of parenting helped to shift her perspective. “Then I thought, but there are other stories that exist in this ecosystem, where actually I’m an older mother and things don’t turn out as planned. I found it helpful thinking with constructive pessimism about what it might be like for us to get the baby, but for it to feel not what we wanted it to. I experimented with the idea of giving myself permission not to do more fertility treatment. How would that feel in my body? And it felt amazing.”
She says we often hear stories of couples who faced fertility challenges before having children, but the other story rarely gets told. “I thought for all of those 12 years that part of my purpose on this planet was to be a mother. And now I realise that the bigger purpose is to speak for those who are not mothers or fathers, often not by choice. That gives my life meaning, and that’s the thing I was worried I wouldn’t have.” Then she adds thoughtfully, “The fact that I can talk about it without crying shows me that I’m in the right place.”
- Friendaholic by Elizabeth Day (Fourth Estate)
Written by: Audrey Ward
© The Times of London