ON WRITING... With Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro

Welcome to another special edition of How to Fail, where I revisit conversations from the How to Fail archives. Each week, we shine a light on a particular theme, hopefully offering inspiration, perspective and comfort through the words of past guests. This week’s theme is on writing - appropriately, because my new book ‘One of Us’ is out this week (25th September)! So it felt only fair that I re-shared a couple of my favourite authors who have guested on How to Fail in the past. First up, you’ll hear from Nobel Prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, whose episode originally aired in March 2021. He shares thoughtful reflections on creativity, memory and the way stories help us explore both truth and imagination. Then, we turn to Salman Rushdie, in an excerpt from our original conversation back in June 2024, where he discusses his extraordinary book ‘Knife’ and reflects on the role of stories in making sense of life’s most difficult moments. I hope these highlights remind you of the power of storytelling, not only as a means of escape but also as a way to process, connect and endure Listen to Salman Rushdie’s full episode of How to Fail here: https://link.chtbl.com/OE63hsrn Listen to Kazuo Ishiguro’s full episode of How to Fail here: https://link.chtbl.com/zu0kLq-0 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: ‘One of Us’ is out on 25th September: lnk.to/OneOfUsElizabethDay Salman Rushdie’s books: www.salmanrushdie.com Kazuo Ishiguro’s books: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/14137/kazuo-ishiguro/ Elizabeth’s Substack: https://theelizabethday.substack.com/ Join the How To Fail community: https://howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content 💌 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: @howtofailpod @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod @elizabday Website: www.elizabethday.org Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com 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 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.

• 0:00Elizabeth Day?

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• 0:45Elizabeth Day?

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• 0:57Elizabeth Day?

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• 1:42Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 2:03Elizabeth Day?

  Welcome to How to Fail. I'm so excited to bring you some more highlights from our extensive How to Fail back catalogue. And I'm hoping that you might find the comfort that you need or have your interest piqued by some of my favourite guests. Now, this week is a particularly special week because it just so happens to be my new book publication week. One of us, my new novel, is out in the world from the 25th of September. And I want to be really honest with you because I always am with my lovely How to Fail listeners. I'm feeling really anxious and really exposed. And I'm having to remind myself to breathe into that anxiety

• 2:48Elizabeth Day?

  and to turn it into a love of adventure and a belief in excitement. But I wanted to share that with you because I think it's really important to be real about this process. And it's something that I'm often asked about. I'm often asked, how do you write a book? And of course, the easy answer to that is you have to start writing and you have to carry on writing. And eventually you will get to the stage where you have a draft that you can then edit. But that's only the beginning of the story. There's a whole other part of the story, which is, if you are lucky enough to get published, and I do consider myself so blessed that this is the 10th book I've had published.

• 3:31Elizabeth Day?

  This feeling of anxiety and exposure and a sense of sight impostor syndrome never entirely goes away. And I have come to understand that it, in and of itself, is part of the writing process. So now, even though it still feels the same, the accumulated wisdom means that I understand it's a transitional phase and I will get to the other side of it. But if we are to care about our work and to put that work out into the world, then if you're doing it right, it should always feel exposing because it means that you are being truthful about emotion and feeling and stories.

• 4:14Elizabeth Day?

  So obviously, I had to take this opportunity to look back at some of my favourite writers who have been on How to Fail. First, you're going to hear an extract from my conversation with arguably one of our greatest writers of contemporary fiction, Kazuo Ishiguro. You might know his most famous book, The Remains of the Day, which won the Booker Prize and was adapted into a major film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. His other works, including Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant, have earned him countless awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. He was actually the first Nobel laureate I interviewed on this podcast. He talks about feeling like an imposter in the writing world, starting out at the University

• 4:58Elizabeth Day?

  of East Anglia, and a writing technique he coined "the crash", highly relatable. Then we're going to hear from the legendary Salman Rushdie, the writer whose reputation is such that it transcends the literary world. This is a man famous enough to have had a cameo in the first Bridget Jones movie and Curb Your Enthusiasm. In August 2022, Rushdie was viciously attacked while delivering a lecture in New York. The violent attack almost cost him his life, but against all expectations, he survived. In this excerpt, he talks about his book Knife, in which he reflects, "We would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays."

• 5:42Elizabeth Day?

  First up, here's Kazuo Ishiguro. I mentioned there that when you applied to the UEA Creative Writing Course, you felt this sense of dread, this fear of being humiliated. Were you humiliated during that course?

• 5:58Speaker 01

  No, I wasn't actually. There were only six of us on the course. It wasn't like it is now. People didn't really have a concept of a creative writing course in those days. This was really a pioneering course, and actually, even within the University of East Anglia, a lot of the other academics really frowned upon it. They thought it shouldn't exist. We shouldn't be giving MAs for things like this. It only existed because Malcolm Bradbury, the guy who put this on the course, was a celebrated writer and academic. To be frank, I wasn't. I was pleasantly surprised that the standard wasn't that high, although, you know, I think there was some interesting writing being done on the course and very rapidly I was seen to be the star of the course, which I wasn't so

• 6:41Speaker 01

  sure about myself. But before I went, yes, I didn't know what to expect because I was a bit of an impostor. I hadn't really written much fiction.

• 6:49Elizabeth Day?

  Do you feel like an impostor now, or do you think the Nobel Prize has helped you maybe get over that?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  I don't think the Nobel Prize has done anything one way or the other about that. I mean, we can talk about this later when we come to Phaedas. I mean, at some deeper level, I worry about the whole impostor thing, yes. But not at the level of, do I deserve to be published? Do I deserve to be called a writer? I don't think I ever had much doubts about that once I got going. But at a more profound level, I do ask, is what I do really that worthwhile? Does it merit something like a Nobel Prize alongside scientists? You know, people have made huge breakthroughs in medicine. Do I merit a Nobel Prize alongside such people for what I do? And I guess some of the things that have been happening in the world in recent years do lead me to actually wonder, what is the

• 7:40Speaker 01

  purpose of writing novels and putting them out there? Is it that important? In fact, have we been contributing to something that's a bit dodgy, given the way we seem to have shifted over onto emotions rather than truth and fact? This idea that, oh, what you feel is what matters. You can, if you feel it, then it's true. I'm kind of wondering if the huge emphasis I've always put in my work on being able to communicate through emotions and to relate to readers emotionally, is that a sound way to be going about things? At that kind of larger level, I've often thought, you know, is this thing, what I do, is it just some sort of cultural accident, that it's been given a certain place in the

• 8:22Speaker 01

  hierarchy of things? And I get given prizes and knighthoods and things, but actually, that's just some sort of historical and cultural accident? And is it actually so valuable? Is it actually contributing to something adrift away from truth and a kind of dispassionate way of looking at things?

• 8:40Elizabeth Day?

  Fascinating. I don't have an answer, other than saying that I think what you do is incredibly valuable, because every single one of your novels encourages the reader to examine. What life means and what brings it meaning. And it's interesting to me that you're talking about how useful emotion is because it strikes me now that Clara and the Sun is a meditation on that in many ways, in which you use the point of view of an artificial friend who doesn't fully understand the nuance of this human world that she finds herself in, or even sometimes what she's literally seeing. And therefore, you as a writer have to use deceptively simple language to reveal quite profound truths.

• 9:24Elizabeth Day?

  And I just wanted to know on a technical level how difficult that was for you, because essentially you have to see the world anew.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I've always had the habit of doing that ever since I, you know, I started to write. I've always written from the point of view of an outsider, a foreigner, a peculiar, kind of near autistic butler, a clone. It's my kind of favoured stance is to use a distanced and sometimes peculiarly emotionally restrained viewpoint to look at human beings. I'm always after perspective. And so I like to create things that perhaps offer readers a slightly startling perspective on familiar things. No, Clara wasn't such an amazing departure for me at all, really, I don't feel. It felt oddly natural to me to be talking through a robot. I don't know what that says.

• 10:15Elizabeth Day?

  Was it startling for you to see the world anew when you moved to Guildford from Nagasaki at the age of five?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  It was startling at some level, but not as much as all that. Because, I mean, if you can cast your mind back to when you were very young, but everything was startling. When you're only five, you remember when, well, maybe you don't remember. But I mean, presumably there was a time when you couldn't walk. And so the world was something that you crawled around. And then suddenly you could walk and you could run and you couldn't speak and then you could speak. And so it just seemed to be part of that. It was another new batch of experiences. But, you know, I went to school at the same time, for the first time, as the English kids did. So I was kind of in sync with my peers in that sense. I didn't have that weird experience of coming to a school where people had been together for ages and they all spoke in this different language.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  And I felt I was kind of learning. Things at more or less the same pace. It was odd because I don't remember actually not being able to speak English. But obviously, when I, when I arrived, I didn't speak English. But I don't really have a memory of consciously learning the language.

• 11:22Elizabeth Day?

  You mentioned the butler there from The Remains of the Day. Just before we get on to your failures, is it true that you wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks using a technique you and your wife describe as the crash?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  No, it's not true at all. This has become a bit of a weird myth. I mean, I said this in some interview, maybe I wrote about it somewhere. Though this was just a way to get the rough stuff, the rough draft done. And I was finding at the time difficult, partly out of self-discipline, but partly because of other obligations, to just get down to it. And so we just cleared the deck of everything. I mean, in those days, we didn't have things like the internet. So it was easier. You know, I wasn't allowed to pay any attention to the answering machine. I wasn't allowed to open any mail. In those days, I used to spend a lot of time shopping and cooking. I didn't do any of that. I was just given one hour off for lunch and two hours off for dinner. And then after dinner, I'd have to go and work again. And I had Sundays off.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  That was it for four weeks. We just thought, what, you know, let's see what happens if I did that. And it wasn't just the amount of time, it was the psychological space you entered into when you did that. It was a bit weird, but yes, it was like before we had this concept of virtual reality and alternative realities. It was like I found myself entering a fictional world that seemed to be more real than the world outside. And on Sundays, I would go outside and giggle.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  I wander in the street outside and giggle at everybody. And the fact that, the fact that the high street, Sydenham High Street was on a slope seemed to be hilarious.

• 12:58Elizabeth Day?

  I love also the idea that you and your wife were involved in this endeavour together. Is she very much someone whose opinion you respect as a reader? Will she be someone who reads your work first? How involved is she in the creative process?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Oh, she's vital to the creative process. You have to understand that for one reason or another, we've been together for forty years. And so she knew me before I was a writer. You know, when we met, I hadn't written anything. I was a would be singer songwriter. And so she was there criticizing the very first things I wrote on paper and saying, ha, you know, what's this? Do you reckon you're a writer because you've written this? I mean, look at, so, you know, stories, whatever. I mean, she was the first person to look at them, scrutinize them, say which ones were good, which ones weren't. And so I've kind of got used to that. I mean, she's a very good critic and editor, but the important thing is I know where she's coming from. I know when to ignore her and when not to ignore her.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Most of the time I don't ignore her because I get in real trouble if I do ignore her. And I mean, it's almost second nature to me, you know, that she's part of the team. Sometimes you get these musical duos that nevertheless their act is named after just one person, like a person I really admire at the moment is Gideon Welch, the American singer. But actually, they're a couple, it's Gideon Welch and David Rawdings. But it's a two person act with a name. The band's name is Gideon Welch. You know, I kind of feel it. It's a little bit like that with me and my wife. She doesn't just edit afterwards. I mean, she sometimes gives me the ideas to start with.

• 14:28Elizabeth Day?

  That's so lovely. And your wife's name is Lorna. Let's give her her name.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's Lorna. Lorna Shiguro. And now I've got another member of the family who I have to get past before I can send anything off, which is my daughter, who's now a published writer. She had a short story collection out early in twenty twenty. She has a book coming out and her first novel coming out at the same time as me in twenty twenty one. And I have to get past her as well now. And so for Clara, for instance, I thought I'd finished Clara back in two thousand and nineteen. Yeah, in the spring of two thousand and nineteen, I thought I'd finished it. But my wife told me I had to do about four months more work on it. She didn't say do four months more work. She said, you know, you've got to change this, this, this, this. And it took me four months. And then I thought I better show it to my daughter and then she gave me a huge pile of notes.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  And so I spent about ten more months on account of these family members who wouldn't allow me to show it to my agent or anything. It's tough, you know, it's very difficult, but I mean, what can you do?

• 15:32Elizabeth Day?

  Why did you call it Knife?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, just two reasons. One is the obvious reason, which is that it starts with a knife attack. My head works in a very pre-associative way, so I started thinking about knives that I knew about in art and film and books and so on. And then I thought language itself is a kind of tool which I can use to fight back, if you like. So, so I began to think of language and this book as being kind of my knife, you know, not, not in order to injure anybody, but in order to, as a word, cut things open and understand and explain them.

• 16:12Elizabeth Day?

  You make the decision not to name the assailant, the would-be assassin. You call him The A. And you also made the decision to write Knife in the first person. Your previous memoir, Joseph Anton, was written in the third. Can I ask why you made those decisions?

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Well, the not naming him was, I just didn't want his name in my book.

• 16:31Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, fair enough, yes.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  And I actually remembered this thing that Margaret Thatcher used to say about the IRA. And she said, "Don't give them the oxygen of publicity." And I thought, okay, you know, let's not give this guy the oxygen of publicity. It is one of the few moments in my life when I've been inspired by Margaret Thatcher.

• 16:57Elizabeth Day?

  There's more than one?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Well, well, you know, actually, back in the bad old days, when, when the, there was this major police protection here, I mean, I met her a couple of times when, when she was Prime Minister, you know, and

• 17:13Speaker 02

  the most unexpected thing about Margaret Thatcher is that she's very touchy-feely.

• 17:18Elizabeth Day?

  With men, I hear.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, she puts, put her hands on your arm and shoulders and "how are you, dear?", etc. Very kind of, kind of, in a way, auntie-like, you know, but very unexpected and quite disarming, you know. And the third person, well, you know, when I wrote that earlier book, Joseph Anton, it was quite a long time after the events that were described in the book. It was several, several years later. And what I thought is that the that the me who was writing that book was that it was so slightly different than the me who was being written about, you know, I mean, I was in a better place, I was in a better spirit, you know, life had improved. And the person

• 18:00Speaker 02

  being written about was in a very difficult situation and under a lot of stress and so on. And so I thought there's a little distance between the two me's, you know, and the third person, in a way, dramatized that difference. This time, there's no distance at all. But the thing about that is, if somebody attacks you with a knife, I thought there's no way this can be written, except in the first person. Because also, it's a very, kind of very unguarded and kind of undefended book. And I think it that doesn't require the the distance of the third person.

• 18:32Elizabeth Day?

  We chatted a bit before we started recording about whether talking about this re-traumatizes you. And you've been kind enough and generous enough to say that you're okay with it.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's got a little switch in my head has flipped. So that instead of me talking about the attack, I'm talking about the book about the attack.

• 18:50Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  And so I'm talking about a book. And that, I think, is a way of defending myself from the risk of re-traumatizing.

• 18:59Elizabeth Day?

  Let's talk about the book, then, and that opening account of what happened to you. Would you mind telling us your memory of seeing the assailant?

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Totoqua Institution is this very pretty, beautiful, peaceful place in upstate New York. It's kind of silven and peaceful and full of silver-haired liberal retirees. Nobody locks their door. It's the last place on earth where you'd expect an act of violence to occur. There's this amphitheater space, which is actually quite large. I mean, it seats like 4,000 people, but on this occasion, there are probably 1,500 people in the audience. And we had just come out on stage to have a conversation about my friend, Henry Reese, who runs an organization in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which gives refuge to writers from various parts of the world who need who need refuge.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  So they were celebrating the 20th anniversary of his project. And so I was there for him. You know, I wasn't there to talk about me, I was there to talk about him. And we've just we'd just come out and been introduced and sat down in our chairs. And I saw This person get up from the auditorium, I mean, not very far back, six or seven rows back, wearing dark clothes and wearing a face mask, a black Covid face mask. And he started running. I was on the right hand side of the stage and to my right, there was a small flight of like four steps down from the stage level to the audience level. And he just sprinted up the steps and rushed at me. I had a pretty good idea of what it was.

• 20:41Elizabeth Day?

  You recount in the book that idea of, oh, it's you, that sort of familiarity of, oh, this has come at last.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I had, I mean, back in the early days, after the initial threats, obviously, I had thought about it, you know, I thought about the possibility of an attack like that happening. And then I'd stop thinking about it, you know, because, you know, I moved to New York City in just after the millennium, I mean, like, January 2000. And I'd been living there for, at that moment, for more than 23 years. And I'd been leading the ordinary life of a writer, you know, I'd been doing things that writers do, I'd been going on book tour, I'd been doing readings and going to literary festivals and giving lectures and writing books. There had never been a moment of trouble.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  And so I thought, you know, okay, that's over. And then it wasn't.

• 21:39Elizabeth Day?

  You recount this thought process and you also write that the thought of death you were quite matter of fact about, but you didn't feel pain, or at least you can't remember feeling the pain.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's very strange that. I mean, as part of the work of writing the book, I had to read about other people's witness evidence of what they saw and heard. And quite a lot of the people who were interviewed. Said that they'd heard me screaming with pain, oddly, I have no memory of pain. It's, I guess, some kind of shock reaction. So I remember, you know, being on the ground and seeing a lot of blood and seeing people rushing to help. What I don't remember is pain. So there's this curious disconnect between outside me and inside me. So I tried to write about that.

• 22:30Elizabeth Day?

  You do, however, remember as part of your extensive rehabilitation process, your eyelid being sewn up and that being excruciating.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. They said, if we stitch the eyelid shut, then the eye will be able to moisturize itself and will allow it to heal. And I said, that sounds really painful. They said, no, no, there'll be a very powerful local anesthetic. All I can say is either they lied, or if that's how much it hurt with the anesthetic, I can only imagine what it would have, how much it would have hurt without the anesthetic. Because it was agonizing. Picture to yourself a needle going through your eyelid.

• 23:11Elizabeth Day?

  Actually, one of my worst fears. I mean, I salute you for getting through it and thank goodness you did. And thank goodness you're here. I wonder how your relationship with your body has changed through this process.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, really, that's a great question because, you know, if you're a novelist, you don't really pay a lot of attention to your body. And this was such an intensely physical experience that it connected me in a way to my physicality. It showed me the kind of miracle of this thing we live in and its ability to heal. I mean, for example, my liver was badly damaged, but the liver regenerates. So boom, it's just back. I also lost an enormous amount of weight.

• 23:58Elizabeth Day?

  You look extremely well, I have to say.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  In the years before the attack, I'd put on a lot of, much too much weight. This thing happens and I lost 55 pounds. I mean, not a diet technique to be recommended.

• 24:12Elizabeth Day?

  Is that your next book, is the Rushdie Diet?

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's like Jane Fonda's workout book, isn't it?

• 24:21Elizabeth 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.