How to Fail

How to Fail is a book about the things that do not go according to plan - relationships, work, identity, family - and what we can learn from them.

Elizabeth Day writes with unusual honesty about her own experiences of failure and disappointment, including divorce, break-ups and a long and painful fertility journey. She describes the experience of confronting a life that looked very different from the one she had imagined for herself, and the emotional work of letting go of plans that had once felt almost certain.

What makes the book powerful is that Day does not turn every difficult experience into a neat success story. Some things remain painful. The lesson is not that every setback secretly happens for a reason, but that our identity can survive - and sometimes expand - when the expected version of our future does not materialise.

For anyone interested in work and family, her fertility story also offers an important reminder: we rarely know what is happening behind the scenes in someone else's life. A colleague might be navigating treatment, appointments, loss, uncertainty or years of trying to build a family, all while continuing to show up at work.