Bonnie Garmus - ‘Adoption Gave Us A Family’

Bonnie Garmus was 64 when her debut novel, Lessons in Chemistry, was published. It went on to sell more than eight million copies, spend almost two years on the New York Times bestseller list, was translated into more than 40 languages and become an eight-part Apple TV+ series. At its centre was Elizabeth Zott, a fiercely intelligent, forthright chemist turned 1950s TV cooking star. Bonnie and I talk about the misogyny that inspired Lessons in Chemistry, her love of dogs, working through a stutter, adopting her two daughters from China and what it took to overcome years of rejection. Her new novel, Peck & Peck, is out in the UK on 13 October. IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Intro 03:41 Arts Versus Science 05:44 Sexism Sparks Novel 08:58 Greed And AI Warning 12:19 Dogs Behind Characters 16:30 Childhood Failures 30:26 Living With A Stutter 31:50 Letters And Workarounds 32:53 Adoption Journey To China 36:10 What Adoption Really Means 37:23 Family Bonds And Fate 39:17 Jeopardy Husband Spotlight 40:10 98 Rejections And Resilience 47:05 Finding An Agent And Writing Life 💬 QUOTES TO REMEMBER: I’ve had a lot of dogs in my life, and not a single one has disappointed me. I never look back on my career and think I have regrets. I had a therapist who was a stutterer… he gave me the courage to embrace it, and then I got better. 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: Bonnie’s new novel Peck & Peck is available to pre-order now: www.waterstones.com/book/peck-and-peck/bonnie-garmus/9781786588975 Join the How To Fail community: www.howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Elizabeth’s Substack: www.theelizabethday.substack.com 📚 WANT MORE? Alain De Botton - swap.fm/l/dnU4ieYPW7eCbesQFNSf Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - swap.fm/l/YiA3DPR1awzdCrHfEMfPv 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod Podcast Instagram: @howtofailpod Website: www.elizabethday.org Elizabeth and Bonnie answer listener questions in our subscriber series, Failing with Friends. Join our community of subscribers here: https://lnk.to/7i0moR Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: askhowtofail.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Engineer: Matias Torres Assistant Producer: Shania Manderson Senior Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Alex Lawless How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You know, I look back now and the stutter was tough. But you know, it made me a great listener because stutters don't want to talk. My mother was one of the very first volunteer AIDS nurses in the United States. And when it came time to care for these people with AIDS, she was the only nurse on the entire floor. My husband and I decided to adopt. Here's another failure. We were rejected from every program in the United States. Every single child we applied to, four, we were told no. When we first heard about our first daughter, Zoe, we knew it was our child.

• 0:39Elizabeth Day?

  This episode of How to Fail is brought to you by Ala Lacto Free. Welcome to How to Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. This is the podcast that, to paraphrase James Joyce, believes all failure is a portal to self-discovery. Before we get cracking on this episode, please do remember to like, follow and subscribe so that you never miss a single conversation.

• 1:02Elizabeth Day?

  Confession time. I have a tendency to postpone certain decisions for far longer than is sensible. Not the big life decisions, oddly enough, those I can usually handle. It's the smaller ones that somehow become disproportionately complicated. For me, rugs fall squarely into that category. I've known for a long time that a rug can completely change how a room feels. But I've always found sizing for a space tricky. That's why Ernesta appealed to me. Ernesta makes designer quality rugs custom cut to the exact dimensions of your space. So instead of making do with something that's close enough, you're choosing something made specifically for your home.

• 1:42Elizabeth Day?

  I also love the fact that you can order five oversized 12 by 12 samples for just $10 before committing. And Ernesta's design team will help with sizing completely free of charge. Visit ernestacom and order five samples for only $10 and you'll get $50 towards any rug of your choice. That's ernestacom. Bonnie Garmus's first published novel came out when she was 64. It sold over eight million copies, spent nearly two years on the New York Times Bestseller list, and was translated into more than 40 languages before being adapted into an eight-part TV show for Apple.

• 2:23Elizabeth Day?

  That book was Lessons in Chemistry, whose protagonist was the fearlessly forthright Elizabeth Zott, a chemistry whiz turned 1950s TV cooking star. But while Lessons in Chemistry was Garmus's first published novel, it was not the first she had written. An earlier attempt was rejected by 98 agents. Nor was novelist her first career. In fact, Garmus started out as a copywriter, a profession that required her to research unfamiliar subjects, understand complicated information and make it accessible to a general audience. All skills that she later transferred to fiction. Her new novel, Peck and Peck, is a perfect example.

• 3:08Elizabeth Day?

  In it, Garmus displays an astonishing knowledge of both typography and poetic structure. And it tells the story of Batta Gray, a recent graduate in 1980s New York, unsure of anything other than his passion for poetry. When a chance encounter leads to a job at the most prestigious poetry quarterly in the world, Batta's life starts picking up pace. The book is destined to be another smash hit. Not that any of this has gone to her head. "I find writing a novel is like setting out on a long hike with an outdated map and not nearly enough food," Garmus writes in her latest acknowledgements.

• 3:49Elizabeth Day?

  "There are only ever two choices, turn back or rewrite, but only one leads to the lake." Bonnie Garmus, welcome to How to Fail.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here.

• 4:02Elizabeth Day?

  I'm delighted to have you. And I know that the How to Fail community is going to be so thrilled because they are ardent Bonnie Garmus fans, as they should be. Is it true that your two daughters now have your name in their phones as Global Phenomenon?

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, I think they mean it somewhat sarcastically. But yes, when they saw it on the trailer, it just said, "From the global phenomenon." And so they changed their phones that day, apparently. And I discovered it by accident when I called them and I was sitting nearby and their phones rang and I went, "Oh."

• 4:39Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 4:39Elizabeth Day?

  That's amazing. They'll always keep you down to earth.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 4:44Elizabeth Day?

  Lessons in Chemistry, in many ways, was a clarion call for the importance of science. And Peck and Peck does the same thing, but for the arts. How conscious was that decision?

• 4:57Speaker 00

  It was extremely conscious. You know, for some reason in our society, for as far back as I can remember, the humanities are always second place compared to the science, math, computer science. And I've never really quite understood why. Because the arts provide everything of beauty in our culture, everything important. The written word, all the music, all the design, all the things that we collect are done by artists, by people from the humanities. And so it made sense to me to turn the direction away from science this time and talk about the arts. Because right now in our society, the arts are really under attack. And I wanted to explore that issue.

• 5:42Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, and you do so brilliantly. And why did you want to write a male protagonist?

• 5:48Speaker 00

  He came to me as a male protagonist. I think I would have chosen a woman, but it was a man, I heard. And I figured out why, I think. Because at that time in the 80s, and perhaps even today, there was, but especially in the 80s, I think men had this weight of expectation that they had to be a success. Women also, of course, have always wanted to be a success. But for a man not to know what he wants to do, it's not a good look. You know, and so I really wanted to explore that in this character and talk about why we often feel like we don't know what it is we're meant to do and why it's okay to struggle a little bit with that decision.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Because you know, when you're 18 and you're said, you're told, "Choose a major." It's like making the biggest life decision right then. And maybe it's the wrong one. And for many people, it turns out to be the wrong one.

• 6:44Elizabeth Day?

  That's so well put. And it brings me to your mother and to the initial spark for Lessons in Chemistry. So your mother was a nurse who gave up work to raise her four daughters. And then she went back to work. And years later, you find yourself as a copywriter in an advertising agency and you're in a meeting, having witnessed what your mother sacrificed in the early years of feminism. And you're in a meeting and something makes you angry. Will you tell us the story?

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Yes, I had, so I was a copywriter, which is in advertising. If you're high enough up, you're a creative director, so that's what I was doing. And I was in a meeting, it was all men because it was technology, it was always all men. And I'd finished presenting my ideas for the latest big campaign. It was a very expensive campaign. It was pretty major. And after I was done, the room went quiet, which had honestly had never happened to me before. And so I asked for comments and there was nothing. And finally, there was one man I didn't recognize in the room who said, "Well, you know, no, I don't think we should do any of that." And he was very superior sounding. And then he said, "What I think we should do is this."

• 7:57Speaker 00

  And then he read my PowerPoint slide out loud. And the worst part was that all the other men in the room said, "Oh, that's brilliant. Oh, you're brilliant." And so I thought I was being had. I thought it was some sort of joke. So I said, "No, come on, you guys." He literally just read my PowerPoint slide and everyone ignored me. I realized I wasn't going to get anywhere. But as the meeting ended, somebody said to me, "You know, Bonnie, you have that thing due at 5:00. We really need it at 5:00. So don't forget, just go back to your desk right now and write that." And I went, "That thing due at 5:00? Okay." And I stomped back to my desk and I wrote the first chapter of Lessons in Chemistry. And I never worked with those people again.

• 8:39Elizabeth Day?

  Brilliant. And didn't years later, someone who was in that meeting came to a book signing?

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Yes, he came to a book signing armed with 10 copies of the book for everyone who'd been in the meeting that day.

• 8:51Elizabeth Day?

  That's brilliant.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, and he, he'd actually been kind of a friend of mine, but we never, we'd never spoken after that meeting. And he told me, you know, he said, "I knew what I did was wrong that day. And I knew it almost immediately when I went home that night and I was reading to my two young daughters. And I was reading them a book about how they could be anything." And he said, "And I realized, I like to think I'm not part of the problem, but I'm part of the problem." And he said, "I apologize, years later now, I apologize for that meeting." And he said, "So feel free to sign all these books for every person in that meeting and write whatever you want."

• 9:30Speaker 00

  I said, "You know, I'm not going to hold a grudge, however, for that one vice president, whose name is still on my work. Let me autograph that one for him." And I personalized it and I just wrote, "Garmus a bitch."

• 9:47Elizabeth Day?

  Bonnie, yes to that.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Anyway.

• 9:51Elizabeth Day?

  I'm a big believer in the idea that anger, well shaped, is an extraordinary fuel for creativity. Were you angry when you came up with the idea for Peck and Peck?

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Yes, I was. I get a feeling people are going to think that I only have bad days at work, which wasn't true. But I was angry. The idea for Peck and Peck, I should explain, came before Lessons in Chemistry, way back in 2008 or 2009, somewhere in that timeframe. And I was, again, working in technology a lot and in advertising and...

• 10:26Speaker 00

  I really felt that the entire landscape had shifted. It went from really kind of crazy people doing these interesting projects. And, you know, just the amount of ideas that were in these companies was just was incredible. It was so inspiring and they were trying everything and failing at a lot of things and picking themselves up and doing something else. But what never came up was how much they had to do to make money because these companies were already kind of wealthy and they just kept saying, do what you think is right. Right around the time that I got the idea for this book, it had shifted very dramatically.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  And it went from, don't be evil to be greedy. And greed really took over and you could see it in the software. You could see it in the attitude around the office. And it became unpleasant for me. A lot of people equate wealth with intelligence and they shouldn't. And I was working with a lot of overnight millionaires and they suddenly changed. And it was not great. And now, at that time, there was a lot of talk of AI even back then. But back then, at least, everyone knew that it was a dangerous technology and that it had to be regulated.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  But that didn't happen.

• 11:53Elizabeth Day?

  So in a way, you're also attacking unmitigated wealth and what that might do and how that might corrupt the beauty that we have in the arts.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. You know, I think now we have billionaires telling us that we must use the software, which is not regulated, which it's like saying, we're not going to regulate a nuclear weapon. That's how dangerous AI can get. And to say that they, all of these people, are now in charge of the humanities, now in charge of what we write, how we say it. It's called conformity.

• 12:30Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  And that's really the message in Peck and Peck, which is you must resist conformity because if you don't, we'll go extinct.

• 12:38Elizabeth Day?

  Incredible. And also, you are so loyal to that idea because it's such a different novel from Lessons in Chemistry. Do you think that writing the character of Elizabeth Zott changed how you feel about yourself? Because she's such a strong woman.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was writing my role model when I wrote her. So some of her rubbed off on me, but I'm always waiting for more to rub off on me. She's, I hear from, I feel like, I feel funny when I say this, but I hear from her, you know, on a daily basis saying, I don't, you know, I don't know if I'd do that. I'd say no to that.

• 13:11Elizabeth Day?

  Really?

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I love that. It's been, it's been very helpful for me.

• 13:16Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:16Elizabeth Day?

  Thank you for having a heroine called Elizabeth. Big fan.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  You know what?

• 13:20Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Not a problem.

• 13:22Elizabeth Day?

  Before we get on to your failures, I want to talk to you about dogs.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:25Elizabeth Day?

  There's a fantastic dog, 630, in Lessons in Chemistry, and there's an equally fantastic dog in Peck and Peck called Bata. So Bata Gray is named after this dog. What is it about dogs for you, Bonnie?

• 13:37Speaker 00

  You know, I think I grew up with a dog. I was devoted to him and I, I just love dogs. I've had a lot of dogs in my life and not a single one has ever disappointed me. They've all brought something interesting to the table. But I think we tend to underestimate most animals in the animal kingdom. And dogs certainly, I hear people all the time say, you know, I have a great dog. I love him, but he's really dumb. Well, you're measuring that dog's intelligence against human intelligence, but your dog has skills that you'll never be able to touch. And so I wanted to develop a kind of respect for the animals that choose to live with us and choose to tolerate us and our decisions.

• 14:18Elizabeth Day?

  Will you tell us a little about Friday?

• 14:20Speaker 00

  Oh, yes. Friday was 630. That's the only character in Lessons in Chemistry that came from a real life entity. Friday had been in, she had been taken from a home. The man who had her and several other dogs had tortured the dogs. And so she'd had cigarettes burned out on her back and she'd had nearly all of her teeth knocked out. And she was in very bad shape. She had two kinds of mange. And when my kids and I and my husband went to the dog shelter, out of all the dogs they could have picked, they zeroed in on this dog, which was, she looked like she'd been beat up. And they just thought she was adorable.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  And my husband and I were a little worried about how their perception. But, but we brought her home and then she turned out to be the smartest dog to this day that we've ever had. And we always used to say, you know, she's so smart, maybe we should have her take the kids SAT tests or maybe we should ask her which stocks to pick or whatever. But she was kind of beyond the bounds of, of intelligence, as we tend to think dogs can be. When we were transferred abroad, she picked up German almost instantly, which sounds weird, but when you move to Switzerland, your dog has to pass the famous Swiss dog test.

• 15:47Elizabeth Day?

  What?

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Yes. In order for your dog to be off lead and, and be allowed on trains, your dog has to be really well behaved and well trained and all off lead. And so after we were there, there about, I don't know, maybe four months, she had to take the dog test. And what you do is you turn your dog over to the trainers and they take her away and they put her through these paces throughout the city and they, they put a deer in front of them. I mean, they do everything, cats, they take them into the grocery store, you know, the whole, you know, you may not take anything. Anyway, Friday's test, they called her Freitag, Freitag's test, was all in German.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  And at the end of it, the man came out and he said, this dog is not American. And I thought, what? I've never really thought of nationalities applied to dogs, except for maybe French poodle and German shepherd, but whatever. And he said, this dog is Swiss. This dog is the only dog in two years to get 100% on our exam. And I, yeah, and I said, and it was all in German? He said, it was.

• 16:54Elizabeth Day?

  Incredible. You, you wrote this beautiful piece about Friday for Good Housekeeping, I think it was, and it's on your website.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:02Elizabeth Day?

  And it made me cry. It was so moving. And I just want everyone to go and read that because you talk, you write more about her. What an incredible dog.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  She really was, and she was very famous in the neighborhood because when we'd take the kids, well, she would often take kids to the bus stop for us, like the whole neighborhood.

• 17:20Elizabeth Day?

  She really is 630.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so, you know, kids would come out and she'd go, no, you don't have your lunchbox. You know, go back in. Animals, they are the best.

• 17:29Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 17:32Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialized treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's Exposure and Response Prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable so you

• 18:15Elizabeth Day?

  can live more of the life you want to live. If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 15-minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail. Okay, let's get on to your failures.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 18:31Elizabeth Day?

  Your first failure is being told as a child by your teacher that you would never go to college because your handwriting was awful.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Yes, we were learning cursive. I would say my printing wasn't great either. We were learning cursive and she felt that mine was very badly done. And she became very angry with me all the time because I couldn't do the neat handwriting. I wrote everything very quickly and, and I mean, to this day, I have trouble reading my handwriting, but it was just the way I did it. Anyway, I, on my report card, I got a D minus in cursive writing. And my teacher at back to school night with my parents, and I'm sitting there, she said, she will never go to college.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  She's just not bright and it's proof that she can't even write her letters correctly.

• 19:25Elizabeth Day?

  In front of you?

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:27Elizabeth Day?

  That's awful.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  It was pretty bad.

• 19:30Elizabeth Day?

  How did your parents react?

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Well, they wanted me to really focus on my handwriting and prove it, but I remember my father saying, you must ignore people like that. You must divorce that, get that out of your brain and just, just put it on the back burner. You know, you'll be fine and you'll, you'll end up doing what you're meant to do. He was really great that way. And my mom, my mom was like, you're working on your cursive every night from now on. So I did, but it didn't really improve.

• 20:01Elizabeth Day?

  Was your father right? How easy or difficult was it to ignore that and put that voice aside? Because clearly we're still talking about it. It's very interesting that you could remember, you can remember that.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  The next day at school, she told everyone that I would not go to college.

• 20:16Elizabeth Day?

  Bonnie!

• 20:17Speaker 00

  I know, it sounds terrible, but back then they used to hit us with rulers. So, you know, it was just part of the day. She was mean to a lot of kids. I think she was a really unhappy woman. And she would just say these things, like she would constantly comment on, on girls and saying, you know, you're, you're fat or you're ugly or you're never going to get married. So me not going to college kind of fit right in, but it did nag at me a little bit. Still, I thought, no, of course I'll go to college.

• 20:45Elizabeth Day?

  Tell me a bit more about your childhood. You, you grew up in California and you, you're one of four girls. What does growing up in a household so full of feminine energy teach you?

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, I should say that my father so desperately wanted a boy that when I was born, they only had boy names picked out. And because they had no girl name at the ready, on my birth certificate, it just says girl, where my name is.

• 21:16Elizabeth Day?

  You could be Girl Garmus.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  It says Girl Garmus.

• 21:18Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  And my father came from a family of five boys. So, and all of his brothers, by the way, had girls. So it was very strange. But it was, there was a lot of feminine energy in our home. And my dad traveled a lot, so he wasn't home as much. But, you know, he made sure that if he was going to have all daughters, every single one of us would be an athlete. And he really thought, you know, that exercise was the way to get past your sorrows, work things out, but also have strength, physical strength. It was really important to him. But then, as we grew, there were no teams for us to join, so it was really frustrating.

• 22:02Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:03Elizabeth Day?

  But you became a rower. Do you still row?

• 22:06Speaker 00

  I do, I do still row, yeah.

• 22:07Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, which is a thing that you have in common with Elizabeth Sot in Lessons in Chemistry. And what about your mother? How much of a role model was she for you?

• 22:15Speaker 00

  Oh, my mother was this incredibly hard worker. You know, she was very conservative. I'm not sure she would approve of everything in Lessons in Chemistry. She was very religious and, but she was such an inspiration for me because of the selfless way that she approached everything and did everything. She made all of our clothes, you know, she made all of the meals. She tried to teach us, you know, to become housewives, which none of us wanted to do or be. And none of us wanted to go into nursing. So I think we were all a little bit of a disappointment to her, but, you know, she, she definitely loved us. But I do think, growing up in the neighborhood that I grew up in, where there were all these

• 22:59Speaker 00

  women who were so smart, and all of them were just cleaning the house, and they were frustrated. And it's really no surprise to me that all the kids that came out of that neighborhood were feminists, some of the boys, too.

• 23:15Elizabeth Day?

  Did that make you determined that you were going to fulfill your potential? Almost as a kind of counteracting the pain that she was in?

• 23:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, partly. I wasn't really sure, you know, I knew I wanted to be a writer. That, that, that kind of worried my parents. Whenever I'd say I want to be a writer, they, they'd say, you mean a reporter? They were worried, you know, that I wouldn't be able to fend for myself, like all parents worry, that their children won't be able to make a living. And so I, I understood, I understood why they said what they said. Per example was really important to me because my mother was one of the very first volunteer AIDS nurses in the United States. And when it came time to care for these people with AIDS, she was the only nurse on the entire floor.

• 24:06Elizabeth Day?

  Wow.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  She was inspiring to me. One time, I went to pick her up from work. I, I'd come home from college and I dropped by to, you know, pick her up and I couldn't find her. I wasn't allowed up on the AIDS floor and she was supposed to meet me below. I know, you know, it's before cell phones, you can't text her. So finally, I decided, well, she's not afraid to be on the AIDS floor. Why should I be afraid? So I went up and I finally found my mom reading to a group of young men in beds. Some of them were blind already. They were covered in sores. And she was reading The Three Musketeers to this group of men.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  And one of them looked up and he said, I know you want your mom to go, but frankly, she's our mom, too. And it was really heartbreaking. And all of them had been rejected by their families. And there's my mom. She's tiny little thing. I'm huge, but my mom was just 4'11", just 100 pounds, 4'11". And she's sitting there, surrounded by AIDS patients and fearless. She just said, all you have to do is the right thing.

• 25:17Elizabeth Day?

  My goodness. What a story.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  I know, she was just the greatest.

• 25:21Elizabeth Day?

  Also, given, as you mentioned there, her conservative religious background, ultimately, for her to see beyond that to the human in suffering.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:33Elizabeth Day?

  That's, what a, what an amazing person.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  No, she really was, you know, she was very, very selfless. Yeah, I did put her in Lessons in Chemistry. She's the woman who stands up and says that she would like to be an open heart surgeon.

• 25:45Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, I'm so glad you put her in.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:48Elizabeth Day?

  Wonderful.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:50Elizabeth Day?

  What, if anything, did this failure teach you? This teacher saying to you, well, actually, you'll never go to college because your handwriting is awful. Do you think it taught you something about other people's perception of who you are and not allowing that to define you?

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Because the day that she told me that I would never go to college with poor handwriting, I went home and I started looking at all these signatures of famous baseball players and things like that, that, that, you know, I didn't own, but I could see them in, in the encyclopedia and stuff. I looked at the Declaration of Independence. I looked at everything and I went, I'm, I'll be fine.

• 26:30Elizabeth Day?

  Good for you. Did you just have this innate sort of stubbornness and sense of self from a young age?

• 26:35Speaker 00

  Yes, unfortunately, I have always been pretty stubborn.

• 26:38Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. I think my entire family would agree with that statement.

• 26:42Elizabeth Day?

  Interesting. I, I was, I was identified as a stubborn child as well for a very early age. And I think there is something about cleaving to the identity that you know you have.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:52Elizabeth Day?

  That is very important.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:54Elizabeth Day?

  And often we, I lost it in my sort of twenties and thirties, and now I'm coming back to it. I'm coming back to my four-year-old self, I feel.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 27:01Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah. Do you feel now that you're writing books, that you're doing the thing that you were always meant to do?

• 27:06Speaker 00

  Well, to be honest, you know, I never look back on my career and say, oh, I wish I hadn't done that. I think I had to take every step necessary to get to where I am now, and I don't regret any of it. I, I worked with some of the greatest people in the world. The fact is, I wrote my first book when I was five and, and I illustrated it. It was one page long and it's, it's horrific. And my kids found it in our basement and constantly mention that, should I get out of line, they will be releasing it to the media.

• 27:37Elizabeth Day?

  Why is it so horrific?

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Because it's about a princess.

• 27:42Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  I can't have that for lessons, you know, the Lessons in Chemistry. And then I wrote another book when I was 12, a full book, and my librarian put it in the library. And then for years, no one, no one ever checked it out.

• 27:55Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, your librarian. We're coming on to your librarian.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 27:58Elizabeth Day?

  Because I believe that this librarian has something to do with your second failure, which is that you had a significant stutter as a child.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  I actually had it all the way into my thirties, but I, it was very bad as a child. It, it started to abate in my late twenties, well, in my twenties, I would say, and then, and then really start to fade in my thirties. But yeah, it was very significant. And it was really tough at the time to go through that amount of bullying and, you know, kids always make fun of you. I had a best friend and she never once made fun of me. She just completely ignored the stutter. She would never try to correct me. You know, so she was my best friend since we were, basically since we were born. When it came to acknowledging that I had a stutter, she never said, just slow down

• 28:48Speaker 00

  or anything. But it was significant and I did stop speaking. And my librarian at school worried about me. And I think she had a deal with my teacher at that time that when we were giving oral reports, I would suddenly be needed on an emergency mission at the library. And I never put two and two together for the longest time, but I'd get there and she'd say, I really need you to read these books and then tell me if we should buy them for the library or, you know, if you think certain students would like them. And I think, wow, okay, but, you know, I'm out of class. And she could know it's okay. And then I realized what she was doing.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  It took me a while, but she was saving me. She was saving me from the laughter and, and everything. But, you know, I look back now and the stutter was tough, but you know, it made me a great listener because stutters don't want to talk. They don't like talking. And if I hadn't been a stutterer, I'm not sure I would hear my characters as well or understand people as well when I listen to them. And so in a way, it's sort of one of those backhanded gifts that you're supposed to be really appreciative for, but in fact, it is.

• 30:09Elizabeth Day?

  So interesting. I'm so sorry you went through that experience at school. And I have an experience that is in no way equivalent, but there's a similarity there in that I have always spoken with this very English accent, but I was raised in the north of Ireland. We moved out there when I was four years old in 1982, height of the troubles. And I remember getting to secondary school and being teased for speaking like this.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:34Elizabeth Day?

  Understandably. It's this like English geek.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 30:37Elizabeth Day?

  And so I stopped speaking very much and I became a listener.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:42Elizabeth Day?

  And I think exactly as you identify there, listening also means observing.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 30:48Elizabeth Day?

  And empathizing.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 30:49Elizabeth Day?

  And those are extraordinary skills for a writer.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:52Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  And I was just a huge reader anyway. And so getting the extra hour in the library held me in good stead. This librarian in particular was my elementary school librarian for many years. And she'd always say, Bonnie, you're too advanced for those, so we'll take you to the adult section. And I just remember the day I brought home The Godfather, my mom's like, no, no, no, no.

• 31:18Elizabeth Day?

  Too adult.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  You know, but it was great. I, I read it. My mother was appalled. She called the school. But, you know, that's, the librarian was like, she's ready for it.

• 31:28Elizabeth Day?

  I don't know if you know this, but Maggie O'Farrell had a stutter as a child, too.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 31:32Elizabeth Day?

  Another extraordinary writer, yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  So did Ed Sheeran, I'm learning.

• 31:36Elizabeth Day?

  And Emily Blunt.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  And Emily Blunt, yeah. It's like, it, it's sort of this weird club because this is, you've probably heard this, but other stutterers recognize each other, even as adults.

• 31:48Elizabeth Day?

  I didn't know that.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so you can hear these certain hesitations and pauses in our speech, or you'll notice that they'll pause before saying a word because they've just substituted a word they know they can say. I was sitting in an airport one time, talking to another, a mom. We were, we were actually going to China to adopt our first child. And, and I'm talking away and she goes, oh, you're a stutterer. And I thought, how would you know that? And I said, but you're not a stutterer. And she said, how would you know that? And I said, what are you, a speech therapist? And she goes, yes.

• 32:23Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, isn't that funny?

• 32:26Elizabeth Day?

  How did you stop stuttering?

• 32:29Speaker 00

  I'm unsure. You know, I really wish I knew. I went to see, I'd never gotten any help from it, for it. You know, back then, they were just like, talk slower, you know, that sort of thing. There was no therapy or anything for it. And they're still not quite sure where it comes from. It has something to do with white matter accumulation. And so it's a form of neurodivergency. That's one of the ways that it manifests. But it is really interesting. I went to see, in my 30s, a professional therapist who was himself a stutterer. And I went to see him because he said, I told him, you know, I was still having trouble in my 30s. And we became friends.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  And I think there was something about being with him, and his stutter was much worse. And he was in his 60s at the time, that he gave me the courage somehow to just embrace it. And then I got better. He was an amazing man. He was a professor at University of Washington.

• 33:33Elizabeth Day?

  Do you still feel the stutter within you?

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah. It's funny, because there are certain things that stutters will just avoid. But the number one thing is answering the phone.

• 33:42Elizabeth Day?

  Right.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  We're all like, no, you get it. No, it's yours.

• 33:46Elizabeth Day?

  I mean, I avoid answering the phone, but for vastly different reasons.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:50Elizabeth Day?

  But why is, is there a sort of performance element where?

• 33:53Speaker 00

  Well, H is a really hard letter for a lot of stutterers to say. There are certain, we all have our pitfalls with certain consonants. But H is really hard for me, and S and T are, B is really hard. And so I have recognized that over the years. And I was doing way too much word substitution to avoid, you know, it's bad when your name starts with a B and you don't want to introduce yourself.

• 34:21Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  So I really had to figure out workarounds to get through this. And they finally came. I do think now they have much better therapy for stutterers to figure out how to live with it. Because it does go away.

• 34:39Elizabeth Day?

  You've named your protagonist Bata.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:41Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  I know, it's a B, believe me, I thought that. I know. Well, one of the reasons I did was I really wanted him to hate his name.

• 34:49Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, yes, that makes total sense. I won't give it away, but that makes sense. You mentioned there that you were on the plane to China to adopt your first daughter. One of my passions is talking about different paths to parenthood. I would love to talk to you about it, if you're okay with that.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  Sure, sure.

• 35:08Elizabeth Day?

  Talk to us about your daughters and how they came to be in your life.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  Oh, well, it's going to sound like a complete exaggeration, but I do think we have the two best daughters in the world. They've never been a disappointment. You know, they've been challenging and they've had, they had a lot of health problems, especially one of them. But they've been just incredible people in our lives. Before I was born, my mother took a drug called DES. Sometimes, for some women, it either manifests as cancer, which it did for me. But also, it will be very hard for you to have a baby. And so I kind of knew this, you know, going in. And sure enough, you know, it was hard.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  And so my husband and I decided to adopt. Here's another failure. We were rejected from every program in the United States. Every single child we applied to for, we were told no. We went abroad and then in South America, and I spoke fluent Spanish. And I was fluent in Portuguese because I'd lived abroad. My father had been transferred abroad. We were rejected because we weren't Catholic. It just went on and on. So we were pretty convinced that we weren't going to have a family. And we were both really sad about it. And then China had announced that they were open to adoption. And they had a very peculiar set of standards. One was, you had to be well-educated.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  You had to have gone to college. The other was that you could not be a parent if you were under 35 years of age.

• 36:49Elizabeth Day?

  I love this.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. So they wanted you to take it really seriously. There have been a lot of things about Chinese adoption that have come out in recent years, very negative. But the funny thing is, there isn't a parent I know who ever thought they were adopting an orphan. They were adopting a child that had been abandoned, and it was all because of the government. The government was forbidding women to have babies. And so some were dying through infanticide. But others, the government would forcibly go in and remove the child. And it was horrible. And then they would put them in a welfare home. And the statistics on the deaths were as high as Romania. So it was quite a terrible situation.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  On the other hand, when I went to China to get both of our girls, the people there who were taking care of these kids, and we're talking about 100 babies in one room and two workers. I mean, these women worked really hard. I have nothing but appreciation for what they tried to do and how open they were with us. Our, I guess we'd call her the president of her orphanage, which was huge, came all the way to Seattle to visit us and to check on our daughter. I mean, they really care. And so I always hate it when people paint adoption as, A, a second choice, or B, as you're saving someone.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  You're not saving anyone. It's a very selfish choice to make, actually, to take somebody out of their culture and decide to make them an American citizen. And lately, my kids have been saying about being an American right now. Yeah, and they're absolutely right. But no, it's a really incredible thing. And for us, just to suddenly be handed this child, who's, our daughters are about a year old, or Sophie was a little older than that, 15 months or so. And you'd see this person start to blossom in front of you. But it was quite, you don't know anything about the child. You just take it on faith. You just go and you're handed a child, and that is it.

• 39:03Elizabeth Day?

  My goodness.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I know so many kids from China, and I know so many parents with kids from China. It's a wonderful group of people. It really is. But not all adoptions work out. And so, of course, so it can be really traumatic for some kids. But we're really lucky and we're a very close family.

• 39:22Elizabeth Day?

  How old are your daughters now?

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Oh, they're old. I should never say it like that. They're 32 and 34. And, you know, I text them every day. We talk almost every day.

• 39:31Elizabeth Day?

  Did you feel that thing that many adoptive parents describe, that when you met each of your daughters, you felt, oh, this is my child?

• 39:41Speaker 00

  When we first heard about our first daughter, Zoe, we knew it was our child. It was, it was just like a lightning bolt. And then strangely enough, my husband, who is not at all religious in any way, not at all spiritual, told me, we were waiting to hear about our second child, and it wasn't going very well. We'd been assigned a son, but then he died before we could get to him. It was really horrible. But then he woke up one night and he said, I just had the strangest dream. There was a woman crying, and she was trying to hand me her baby. And she was crying, she was sobbing. And I said, did you take the baby? He said, of course, I took the baby. But I'll never forget how much she was crying.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  And the next day, we heard about our second daughter.

• 40:30Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know, I know, no, it was just, you know.

• 40:32Elizabeth Day?

  This is just.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  No, it's, it was, but, you know, so for us, it's been incredible. And we have this great family. And you should never go into adoption if you think you're saving someone, because that is not the job. The job is to create a family. And family isn't about saving people, it's about loving people and letting them be who they are. And the gift of adoption that no one ever talks about is that you never say, well, that's just like me. You know, she's just like me.

• 41:01Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  You get to say, you're just like you, and I love who you are. So we feel extremely lucky.

• 41:10Elizabeth Day?

  I'm so glad your family found you.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you.

• 41:13Elizabeth Day?

  They're so beautiful, thank you.

• 41:14Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you. No, we're very lucky.

• 41:17Elizabeth Day?

  Let's just chat quickly about your husband, hot mathematician David Urb.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. Oh, he loved her in that.

• 41:23Elizabeth Day?

  Should be hot, because you're basically Gwyneth Paltrow, pretending to write books. But he is a Jeopardy champion.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh, you know about Jeopardy. He's very proud of this.

• 41:33Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  When we were in the United States, his episode, we were going on tour for me, and his episode had just aired, his three, his three big wins. And we were walking through the airport, the Denver airport, and someone said, it's the guy from Jeopardy! And he was just mobbed. And then we'd go to restaurants, they'd go, it's you, the Jeopardy guy. And so he, he really ate that up.

• 41:56Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. Well, now your daughters have two global phenomena.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, they told us, okay, enough. Okay, you're making it really hard for us now. Yeah, yeah, I understand that.

• 42:10Elizabeth Day?

  There are so many things I wish I'd known when I started this podcast and my production company, Daylight. Like, why am I spending hours trying to make a website look good? Why am I designing everything from scratch? And why am I spending all my time just doing admin? What I really needed was one place that could do all of this for me. Enter Shopify. Shopify has beautiful, ready-made templates that make your website look polished without needing to become a graphic designer overnight. Its AI tools can help you get your site up and running quickly, and Shopify Checkout makes it really easy for customers to actually go from, ooh, I like that, to, yes, I'll have one. If Shopify had existed when I started out, I could have saved myself a lot of time, stress,

• 42:55Elizabeth Day?

  and some rogue design choices. If you're ready to hear the

• 43:00Elizabeth Day?

  of your first sale today, head over to Shopify.co.uk/fail to start your free trial today. That's right. Start your free trial at Shopify.co.uk/fail. Your final failure, I'm so thrilled you're going to talk about this, because I often feel that when people talk about their success stories, they leave out the parts where they were rejected repeatedly and what that taught them. And your final failure is that your first novel was rejected 98 times.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:31Elizabeth Day?

  And you kept going.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  Well, isn't it weird that I hung on that long?

• 43:35Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  At one point, my husband said, why are you going through this every time? And I said, well, I was just trying to get to 100. And he said, that is a very bad goal to have. And luckily, my 98th rejection, it was the only agent who'd read anything. She'd requested the first 50 pages, and then, and then she wrote me the meanest email of all time, which is she said, you know, I really loved your writing. I thought it was great, but you are stupid. She actually called me stupid in this email.

• 44:05Elizabeth Day?

  Was it the teacher from your school?

• 44:07Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. It turns out, she's, I think, a little bit of a legend. But she called me stupid. And she said, everyone knows that you can't write a 700-page novel as a debut. You're unknown. No one's going to take a chance on you. Your foolishness is so evident. And, you know, so she went on and on. But then she said, at the very end, she said, but I will say, you're a good writer. And what I want you to do is write a book of appropriate length, which she said was 350 pages. And she said, and I want you to send it to me. So I finished Lessons in Chemistry, and it was 400 pages. And, no, I did not send it to her. She shouldn't have called me stupid.

• 44:45Elizabeth Day?

  100%.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  I hope she regrets that decision.

• 44:49Elizabeth Day?

  I'm sure she does. And I love how you hold a grudge.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm kind of a grudge holder.

• 44:53Elizabeth Day?

  Me too.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:55Elizabeth Day?

  But they can be fuel too. That's wonderful. So you were rejected for these 97 times before you got to the final agent.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:02Elizabeth Day?

  What kept you going?

• 45:05Speaker 00

  Wine. No, I mean, I think you should have, you know, some wine during this process. It's, it's really hard. I think, you know, there's this belief that these agents are just standing by and waiting, hoping to read your manuscript, when the reality is they get 50,000 of them a day. I once sat next to Felicity on an airplane and watched the queries just, yeah, just poured in. It just looked like this fountain of people saying, here's mine, here's mine. And that was every day for her. And now with AI, it's, I don't know, quadrupally bad. It was painful to go through, honestly. But I think if you're

• 45:46Speaker 00

  going to be a writer, you have to be really good with rejection. And I wanted to write about rejection in my new book, Peck and Peck, because I've been told by my poet friends that people who write nonfiction and people who write novels don't know the first thing about rejection, that it's so much worse for poets. And I think they're right. So luckily for me in my career, there's a lot of rejection in advertising. You get pretty used to it. You get a tough skin. You have to be able to take a lot of feedback. But as you grow, you begin to, to know what it is you're trying to say and what your voice is. And that makes it so much easier to say, no to that, no to that, no to that. But yes to that idea. I like that.

• 46:30Elizabeth Day?

  And also, I imagine, oh, you don't get that. You don't get what I'm trying to do. So you're not the right person for me.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah.

• 46:36Elizabeth Day?

  So how much of rejection do you think is data acquisition? Did you discover things that you could do differently as a result of this process? Or did you stick very firmly to your guns?

• 46:48Speaker 00

  When I am certain about something, I will not change it. You could threaten me with a gun. I would not change it. There were just certain things which I go, no, I know. I was a copywriter, and the stuff I was writing was seen, was being seen by millions of people. I know how to communicate to certain audiences. I know how to talk to people, and I'm a good listener. And so I know that I can create things, I hope, that people want to read. But also, I read everything I do out loud. And interestingly enough, when I read out loud, I don't stutter.

• 47:22Elizabeth Day?

  That is interesting.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so I can hear if the cadence is right and everything. But yeah, I have some, I'm really lucky because I have a lot of really good readers. My first reader is always my husband. He's very critical. He's well-read. I take what he says very seriously.

• 47:40Elizabeth Day?

  How did you then go, how do you know when to quit, I suppose, is my next question? Because you did decide to move on from that 700-page novel, although it did provide not only the spark for Peck and Peck, but Elizabeth Zott was a walk-on character in that unpublished novel, wasn't she?

• 47:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:56Elizabeth Day?

  But how did you know when to set it aside?

• 47:59Speaker 00

  Well, I set it aside that agent, the day the agent, who actually, even though she called me stupid, she gave me good advice. Don't write a long novel for your first novel. She was right. And so I had to set that aside. And I only started Lessons in Chem, I was, I thought I was done with novels. I only started Lessons in Chemistry because of that bad day at work where I thought, no, I'm not going to give up. And I think someone recently asked me if I'd always hoped to write a novel. And I said, you know, hope has nothing to do with it. Hope is sitting down in a chair and actually doing it. I have a very good friend who's won the Ironman triathlon 11 times, and also the

• 48:43Speaker 00

  Half Ironman 16 times. And she has cystic fibrosis. She should not be running at all. And she's won every time. And she always says, it's not about, you know, I want to do something. You do it. You just have to do it. And I really think that she's an amazing person, and I take a lot of inspiration from her. She's still going strong.

• 49:09Elizabeth Day?

  Incredible.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, she's incredible.

• 49:11Elizabeth Day?

  And a great piece of advice is actually in the doing that you get it done.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  It's always in the doing. And yeah, that's why I think when I hear people writing their books with AI, they're not doing it. And they're missing the whole, they're, oh, they're missing, the worst part for me about AI, when I hear people using it for their novels, is that I want to say, the computer just stole your voice. Your voice is what the agents are looking for. That's the distinguishing factor, and you buried it. So you're only doing yourself a disfavor. And you, at the same time, you're telling yourself, I'm not good enough to write. And that's a bad message to send yourself.

• 49:46Elizabeth Day?

  And you're not going on that journey that you identified in the introduction. You're not going on that hike where you get lost in the fog, and sometimes it's miserable. But sometimes you get to the most incredible view.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 49:55Elizabeth Day?

  And the journey is the writing.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  It is the writing. Yeah, it is the journey, rather.

• 49:59Elizabeth Day?

  How did you get your now agent, Felicity Blunt, who we share?

• 50:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:05Elizabeth Day?

  How did you get her?

• 50:06Speaker 00

  So we were transferred first to Switzerland, and then we were transferred to London. And my husband was traveling all the time. My kids were grown up, you know, they'd done school, they were in college, or they were in graduate school. And we moved to London, and my, my work was still in the United States. And so I was, I was lonely, you know, he was gone for six weeks at a time. And so I applied, I thought, well, I need a writer community. I've always had one wherever I've been. And so I thought, well, okay, I'll sign up for this Curtis Brown three-month writing course. I didn't want to sign up for six months. That seemed like too much of a commitment.

• 50:45Elizabeth Day?

  I'd be exactly the same.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's like, no, no, no. It was great, because I instantly, the first night, met 14 other writers, who are still all friends. And it made a huge difference to me to be in the room with those people. And we could share the, you know, the stories of what we were trying to do, but also the stories of feeling, you know, rejected, and not knowing if we were going to be able to do this. And it was really, really helpful. Anyway, at the end of three months, where you go once a week, you know, one night a week.

• 51:16Elizabeth Day?

  And did you take Elizabeth Zott with you? You took the first chapter that you'd written of Lessons in Chemistry?

• 51:20Speaker 00

  Oh, no, I was almost done with the book.

• 51:21Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, you were almost done with it?

• 51:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:22Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I was about, well, I should say, I was three quarters of the way through. And I was just, I was stuck. And I thought, well, maybe this class will help me get unstuck. But the funny thing was, I realized I was stuck because I didn't want to query again. I didn't want to go through the process.

• 51:38Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  So after the three-month course was over, and you know, it's, you have 15 people, everyone's submitting. And so you only come up twice when you submit. So you don't actually review that much of each other's work. But it was great, because, you know, I had that community, which I think is really important. It's a huge part of writing. And at the end, where they gave us a party, and Curtis Brown is wonderful, and they, they invited all the six-month people, and then the shorter, faster, three-month people to this party. And then agents, you've got to really feel for them. They're like, they're just thrown to these wolves, who are all these writers going, oh, please let me pitch you my novel.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  And when I walked in that night, I was, I just thought, I can't even pitch a novel. I don't know. I'm not going to do it. You know, I'll just have my glass of wine and leave. And, and as I walked in, Felicity Blunt was handing out the name tags. And she was calling everyone's name, you know, and, and all of a sudden, I heard my name called. So, you know, I jumped up and got it. And she put all the other name tags down. She said, you need to come with me. I know, I thought I'd done something horribly wrong. I actually thought, oh, my God, did I not pay for the class? I really, you know, just instinctively, I would think, I've really messed up here. But as we walked away, she said, I have to tell you, I just love what I read of yours. And I thought,

• 53:00Speaker 00

  No, well, that's not right either because I think she signs thrillers and, you know, like your book, perfect. You know, it's like, that is dead on. And so I thought, well, this isn't right. So, oh, boy, she's mixed me up with somebody else. And then suddenly, like, a minute went by and then she said, Elizabeth Zott. And I said, oh, you mean my book? I mean, she must have thought I was an idiot. I thought I was an idiot. And then we had a great conversation. And she said, when are you going to be done with this novel? And I said, six months, which I just made up on the spot. I have no idea where that came from. And she said, okay, well, when it's done, I'd like you to send

• 53:42Speaker 00

  it to me. And I said, okay. And then three months later, she called and said, actually, are you done? And I said, six months? I hadn't gotten that far. And I was working this horrendous job. I mean, I was working like 70 hours a week. So I thought, oh, my gosh. Anyway, she said, why don't you just come in and we'll have a talk. And we did. And at the end of the talk, she said, well, I'd like to sign you. And I literally had to stop myself from saying, for what? Because I thought she hadn't read most of the book. She'd only read that intro. She hadn't read the rest of it.

• 54:18Elizabeth Day?

  Wow.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  And so she said, when you, so you finish it up now, and then we'll go from there. And I went, okay. But I have to tell you, that day after I left her office, you know how you kind of, you're nervous and you kind of fiddle with your phone in the pocket?

• 54:33Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  I called emergency services over and over. Yeah, I kept, I don't know even how, I've never done that before. But I did it so often that they actually called me. And my phone was, it was really loud. I guess they can make it like an alarm. And I took it out of my pocket and it said, emergency services. And I said, hello. And they said, you know, ma'am, what is your problem? Is there an emergency? And I looked at my phone and I thought, oh, my God, I've been dialing them. And then I said, no, there's no emergency, but I got an agent.

• 55:04Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  I know.

• 55:06Elizabeth Day?

  That's brilliant.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  And the woman said, that's very nice, ma'am. Please don't call again. And please shut off your phone right now. And then I got on the tube and went home.

• 55:14Elizabeth Day?

  They weren't calling saying, has Felicity Blunt taken you prisoner?

• 55:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:18Elizabeth Day?

  Do you need us to send help?

• 55:19Speaker 00

  No, they were not doing that. They were, they were very unimpressed with me.

• 55:22Elizabeth Day?

  What a story. And then it launched this ferocious bidding war at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:29Elizabeth Day?

  And the rest is history. Can you believe your life now?

• 55:32Speaker 00

  No, it's funny, though. I feel like my life is pretty much the same. I mean, it's different in that, you know, I've had to, I go do a lot of events and I talk about things that I care about. And that part, I think, is wonderful. I'm very lucky to get to do that. But, you know, in terms of the everyday, I still get up really early to write. I lead kind of a dull life. And I think people are kind of surprised that I don't have a more active life. But I know, like, oh, my God, I want to go to bed at 8:30. Are you kidding? You know, I get up at 4:30 or 5:00.

• 56:07Elizabeth Day?

  Do you?

• 56:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, from rowing. It's just a rowing habit.

• 56:10Elizabeth Day?

  Do you write immediately?

• 56:12Speaker 00

  Immediately, yeah.

• 56:13Elizabeth Day?

  For how long?

• 56:14Speaker 00

  Usually like four hours. I rewrite everything I did the day before. I just, every day, every day I rewrite. And then, and then I try to see where the story's going. And then I go on a walk and then I come back and I, and I work some more.

• 56:28Elizabeth Day?

  It's an awful question, but I'm too nosey and I need to ask it. What are you writing now?

• 56:34Speaker 00

  Well, right now, I'm just writing articles.

• 56:36Elizabeth Day?

  Even in those morning sessions?

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, because there are too many of them. I have to get them done. I have an idea for another book. I have a lot of ideas, unfortunately, and I have to choose one. And so I'm going to have to write parts of each of them and then hear, hear the character and see who shouts the loudest. So, yeah, I wrote peck and peck, mostly on airplanes.

• 57:01Elizabeth Day?

  Now, I know you can't say much about which idea you're going to pick. Will the next novel have a dog in it?

• 57:06Speaker 00

  It might.

• 57:08Elizabeth Day?

  Would you ever write a cat?

• 57:09Speaker 00

  No. I don't know cats very well.

• 57:12Elizabeth Day?

  You can come and spend time with mine.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 57:15Elizabeth Day?

  You could shadow my cat.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 57:17Elizabeth Day?

  As research.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  What is your cat's name?

• 57:19Elizabeth Day?

  Huxley.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh, that's a great name.

• 57:21Elizabeth Day?

  Thank you.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  That's a great name.

• 57:23Elizabeth Day?

  Thank you. And I always say, he's the cat that wins dog people over because he's like a dog wrapped up in a cat's body. He's a ginger cat.

• 57:27Speaker 00

  Well, my, my daughter has a little dog named Ellie, a little chihuahua sort of dog, some sort of mutt. And her boyfriend has the biggest cat I've ever seen in my life.

• 57:38Elizabeth Day?

  Really?

• 57:39Speaker 00

  It's, it's, I mean, it might as well live in the wild. It is, it is the biggest thing, you know, you can barely pick it up. But the dog and the cat get along so well. And sometimes they just cuddle together. Yeah.

• 57:50Elizabeth Day?

  That's so sweet.

• 57:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is so sweet.

• 57:52Elizabeth Day?

  Well, whatever you end up writing next, Bonnie Gomis, I can't wait to read it.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 57:57Elizabeth Day?

  Thank you so, so much for coming on How to Fail.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you so much for having me.

• 58:04Elizabeth Day?

  I hope you got as much out of this episode of How to Fail as I did. Brought to you by ala lacto free, all the taste easier to digest.

• 58:14Elizabeth Day?

  Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.