So please find herewith my pick of the best current high street jacket offerings.

1. Denim

A good denim jacket (one that is neither too long nor too short; too smart nor too scruffy; too light nor too dark) is incredibly hard to find. Thankfully, Nobody’s Child have designed a great one which has just enough roominess to be comfortable but not so much that it loses structure altogether.

2. Suede

   A suede jacket is always going to be a spenny investment piece, but it is worth it when you find the right one. I bought one a couple of seasons ago from Massimo Dutti that has served me so well. Suede always feels luxurious so it elevates any outfit but the key is (for me, at least) to keep it a bit slouchy and nonchalant. This one from Reiss is very lovely.

If you like the shape of the above jacket but can’t stomach the price…

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Welcome back to the final week of our How To Navigate Failure Masterclass. Thank you so much for being here - I hope you’ve found it helpful. Today, we round up our learnings in this final dispatch.

So, here goes.

The most valuable thing I have learned about failure is that when we choose to be honest about our own vulnerability, we forge the greatest sense of connection with others and find the greatest reserves of strength in ourselves.

There is solidarity in failure and a courage that comes from the admission of it. All of that feeds into future resilience. Because emotional strength, just like its physical equivalent, is a muscle that you build up the more you use it. Deciding to face failure head on, to process it and then to learn from it in an honest and open way, is the key to living a more authentic life.

This is a life without pretence, in which you don’t have to remember what lies you’ve told about yourself for fear of being caught out. This is a life in which you don’t have to be cooler than you feel, more fashionable than you are, or more professionally successful than you know yourself to be. This is a life in which you can be honest about who you are and where you are respected - and loved - for your imperfections, not in spite of them. Imperfections are what make us human. They are what enable us to relate to each other. They are what ensure our uniqueness.

The author and professor Brené Brown has spent years researching the sources of shame and the potential of vulnerability. Shame, she says, can be lethal. But it cannot survive empathy. The antidote to shame is to talk about it, to connect with another person about what it feels like. I believe it’s the same with failure. If we feel ashamed of something that has gone wrong, the antidote is openness. It’s always a surprise to discover how many other people have felt exactly the same way.

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Part Three: Failure in the Fabric of Life

This week, I want to start by addressing a pernicious cultural myth.

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This week, we’re turning to my first principle of failure. It’s the one I return to whenever I am in the midst of a particularly tricky challenge and it is this: failure is something that happens to you. It is not who you are.

This might sound simple. It is not, in practice, remotely simple. Because the cultural messaging we absorb from an early age runs in precisely the opposite direction. We are told that failure is a reflection of character, intelligence, effort, and worth. We grow up understanding that if you fail, it is because something is wrong with you. And so when it happens (as it inevitably does) the failure and the self become fused in a way that can feel impossible to disentangle.

The language of failure matters enormously here. So let’s look into how to tackle it.

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Over the course of writing this masterclass, and through the hundreds of conversations I've been lucky enough to have on my podcast How To Fail With Elizabeth Day, I've become increasingly convinced of one thing: failure is not the opposite of success. In fact, it is one of its most reliable ingredients. As I said in my first ever podcast introduction, way back in July 2018, learning how to fail actually means learning how to succeed better. And yet while failure happens to us all, most of us have never been given a framework for handling it. This series is that framework. It is built around seven principles I've developed through years of research, interview and often painful personal experience. My hope is that by the end of it, you'll think about failure differently - not as something to be avoided or hidden, but as one of the most useful things that will ever happen to you.

So, if you’re sitting comfortably, let’s begin…

Part One: What Failure Is (And Why We’ve Been Getting It Wrong)

There is a question I have been asked, in one form or another, for several years now. It tends to arrive in the margins of other conversations: at dinner parties, in green rooms, after talks. It goes something like this: Why on earth would anyone want to talk about failure?

My answer is always the same. Because we already are talking about it. We just haven’t been given the language to do so openly, honestly and without shame.

I came to this subject not through academic research (though the research followed). I came to it through the experience of my own life. Because I have failed at things that mattered enormously to me: relationships (even a marriage), pregnancies, jobs - and failing successfully to perform the version of myself I had so carefully constructed (and then -spoiler alert - watched collapse.

For a long time, I treated those failures the way most of us are conditioned to: as evidence of personal deficiency. As something to be hidden and internalised as a negative verdict on my sense of self. As a source of private shame that would, if discovered, confirm the worst suspicions other people had about me.

What shifted everything for me was the simple act of asking other people about their failures. In 2018, I launched a podcast called How To Fail With Elizabeth Day in which I invited guests (writers, actors, athletes, thinkers and people who had, by most external measures, become extraordinarily successful) to talk me through three of their failures. The response was astonishing. Not because people loved dwelling in their worst moments, but because they loved being released from the pretence that those moments didn’t exist.

This is the foundational premise of everything that follows: failure is universal, but our silence about it is learned. We are not born ashamed of falling over. We learn that shame gradually, through a culture that rewards the appearance of effortlessness, punishes visible struggle and sells us the lie that success is a straight, uninterrupted path travelled by those who are in some way simply ‘better’ than us.

What struck me, across all those hundreds of conversations, was that those who had made the most meaningful peace with their own lives were invariably the ones who had developed a working philosophy of failure. Namely: they didn’t treat setbacks as aberrations from the real story of their lives. They treated them as part of the story - and often the most instructive part, at that. They had learned not to ask ‘why did this happen to me?’ but ‘what is this asking of me?’ That shift in framing changes everything.

So before we get to the principles that I’m going to outline over the next four weeks, we need to understand the thing we’re actually dealing with. We need to ask the question that sounds almost laughably obvious, and yet turns out to be far more complex than it first appears: what is failure, really?

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1. Schiaparelli Exhibition at the V&A

I was lucky enough to go to the private view of this stunning exhibition which taught me so much I never knew about the designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Working mostly from the 30s to the 50s, she had an extraordinarily innovative eye and her clothes, jewellery and accessories are so wittily conceived that they feel decidedly modern. Just look at THIS dress, designed in 1936…you would never know it’s 90 years old.

2. Citizens of Humanity Flight Pant

Absolutely obsessed with these trousers which are the perfect alternative if you struggle to find anything other to wear than jeans. These are so well-fitted: comfortable but with clever pleating that makes them look elevated. Plus - you know how much I love a pocket and these have plenty of them.

This is a paid post, if you’d like to subscribe for the full content, I’m running an Easter sale - 50% off over the long weekend.

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She wanted others to shine, to feel sp…

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As an author, I hugely appreciate it when people read books. I’m so grateful - truly, I am.

But over the last few years, something strange has crept into the bookish ecosystem like gathering moss. Slowly…

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We’ll be working across fiction and non-fiction, with the intention of making unheard voices heard.

We stand for radical empathy: for imagining ourselves into other lives, other…

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It’s only after a book has been published that I can understand the themes I’ve explored. It turns out that there is one that constantly recurs. I never intend to write about it and yet there it always is, rising unbidden to the surface: the exploitation and abuse of women. I’ve written in multiple genres about dysfunctional families, fertility, failure, friendship, politics, class, power and rich people behaving very badly (sometimes all at once). Yet at some point, in every single one of my books, a woman has to confront the endemic toxicity of male rage.

It almost didn’t feel worth pointing this out. You might be reading this and thinking well d’uh in which case you’re probably a woman and/or a marginalised person. Or you might be thinking oh here we go, another whinging female in which case you’re probably not. You might fall somewhere between these two camps, which is fine. I love a centrist.

But then I realised that my reticence to write about it was precisely reason I should. Just because I find it a statement of obvious, if painful, fact that women are routinely abused, exploited and discarded as worthless, does not mean that it shouldn’t be re-stated. In truth, it means that we should keep on saying it again and again and again until accountability is taken and structures are meaningfully changed.

Staying silent because something seems like ‘old news’ slips ineluctably into tacit acceptance. The more things recur, the more desensitised we are and the less angry we become. In this vacuum of accountability, perpetrators are enabled to deny or rebrand past actions as belonging to ‘different times’. As if abuse could possibly have a sell-by date.

We live in a culture where an old-fashioned sexist can be repackaged in online-friendly incel clothing and invited onto male-fronted podcasts to bro out about why their failure to get a girlfriend is feminism’s fault. We live in a climate where gropers and rapists are rewarded with power; where it’s easier to list the famous men who aren’t in the Esptein files rather than those who are. We live in a post-shame era, where a former member of the British royal family can be arrested for suspected misconduct in public office after having loudly declaimed his innocence in a devastatingly misguided television interview where he blamed everyone else for a stitch-up and airily glossed over the victims of his paedophile pal’s heinous crimes.

We live in an age where I can almost guarantee that every single woman reading this has either experienced some form of sexual or verbal assault from a man. In the last couple of months alone, I can count five friends who have been coercively controlled, physically abused or targeted with vituperative insults from male partners, strangers and work colleagues.

Why is this still happening? For all the righteous noise and fury of 2017’s Me Too movement, it feels as if it signified nothing. Now, when women raise these inequities, we are more often than not shouted down by those who claim that feminism has won all the territory it set out to conquer. They say that it’s men who suffer the indignities of being the overlooked, oppressed gender. And while there are, of course, serious structural issues that negatively affect men - rising rates of depression and suicide; a ‘glass basement’ for jobs; societal pressure to appear ‘strong’ while also being sufficiently emotionally literate to understand the evolving nuances of sexual politics - I would argue that these get a lot of airtime. You can barely log into your favourite streaming platform without being offered the choice of six different documentaries on Andrew Tate.

Does equality truly exist? There’s a simple way of finding out.

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Happy Friday everyone! And if not ‘happy’ then just…FRIDAY!

1. Getting back into The Archers

   I started listening to The Archers aged four because my parents would have it on as we ate dinner. Even at that age, I loved it with a fierce and unusual passion. So much so that when I was about 10, I wrote an entire script on spec and sent it off to the producers at Pebble Mill. I received a lovely reply with signed photos of the entire cast but they didn’t ever use the script. Bastards. (JK).

   

   Anyway, I listened every single week until a few years ago when life got busier and there were suddenly 5000 podcasts to catch up on. But I’ve recently resumed the habit and it’s been so nice to be re-acquainted with old friends and some new ones. A delightfully reassuring listen, even when it’s full of thrilling plot twists and turns (as it has been lately) and each episode is only 13 minutes long.

2. Stripe and Stare pyjamas

   My favourite underwear brand (the knickers are SO comfortable) has recently expanded into pyjamas and they’re deliciously good. Size up in the tops.

3. America’s Next Top Model documentary on Netflix

   Blimey. I used to love ANTM. Now…not so much. I can’t believe what we all thought was acceptable in the early 2000s. Shocking.

   

4. L’Oréal Professionnel Tecni.Art Fix Max 200ml

   My easy fix when I cba to style my hair - I just sweep it back with this gel et voila…looks like I’ve made an effort.

5. Going on Reality TV podcasts

   Recently, as part of a push before US publication of my new novel, ONE OF US, I’ve been going on ALL my favourite reality TV podcasts and it’s been an absolute blast. Thank you to all the fantastic hosts who have had me on! You can listen at the links below:

   Watch What Crappens

   So Bad It’s Good With Ryan Bailey

   Gabbing With Gib

   Bitch Sesh

   Two Judgey Girls

   

6. Preparing for my US publication

   On which note…publishing a book is a combination of joyous privilege and anxious exhaustion. I’m doing a few events in the States where I’ll be in conversation with some TERRIFIC authors. Nonetheless, I’m haunted by the thought no-one will turn up and I’ll become one of those heart-rending TikTok viral videos where someone films me at a signing table surrounded by piles of my own book with a benign but disappointed smile on my face.

   

   If you’re in NYC or LA, please come along to any of the below events to prevent that from happening:

   The Strand Bookstore, NYC, Wednesday Feb 25 7:00 PM in conversation with JENNY JACKSON

   Barnes & Noble, The Grove, LA, Thursday Feb 26 7:00PM in conversation with MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD

   Vroman’s, Pasadena, LA, Saturday Feb 28 4:00PM in conversation with AMANDA DE CADANET

   Zibby’s Bookshop, Santa Monica, LA, Sunday 1st March 4:00PM

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So instead of the full, cogently-argued and impassioned essay I wanted to write (and still will) I leave you instead with a quote that keeps returning to me. I’ve recently started listening to the audiobook of Eckart Tolle’s bestselling global hit, The Power Of Now. I know I’m outrageously late to the party (if one can describe a profound meditation on the state of existential consciousness to be a party) but while I was aware of Tolle’s work and referred to snippets of it often, I’d simply never gotten around to reading the original text.

I heard this quote when I was listening to The Power Of Now at the gym and had to pause my carefully-planned circuit of deadlift, squat and chest press to note it down. Which, if you think about it, is either a direct contravention of the book’s ideology or the perfect encapsulation of it. Whatever - I had to write it down immediately because I found it so shockingly accurate.

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It’s eerie, isn’t it, when you’re reading a book written almost a hundred years ago and you realise, when you lift your eyes from the page, that current events seem to reflect so much of what the author is addressing?

Eerie. And somewhat terrifying.

If you’ve reached the final chapters of this month’s DAYLIGHT Book Club read, Crooked Cross by Sally Carson, you’ll no doubt be experiencing this unsettling feeling right now.

As we watch, with mounting horror, the brutal incursions of federal immigration agents in Minneapolis - an incursion carried out in the name of a President seemingly hell-bent on sowing dangerous dissent and targeting immigrant communities - we might also be drawing the comparison with how Carson traces the escalating violence perpetrated by fascist forces in 1930s Germany. In Crooked Cross, the Nazis operate with no clear accountability or public consensus. The result is a series of fissures that crack across the surface of social convention, causing fault-lines of moral dissolution, fear and confusion.

As we witness the fatal shootings of two US citizens - Renée Good and Alex Pretti - and see how families are being ripped apart amid the terrible disruption of everyday life, we might also be reminded of the Klugers confronting the gradual erosion of civil liberties and personal connections under the early Nazi regime.

Renée Good, whose very surname stood as protest against the unfurling chaos that surrounded her; Alex Pretti the intensive nurse armed with nothing more than an iPhone at the moment of his shooting… Where is the justice? Where is the safety? And what might Carson have written about the lack of them?

I wish that Crooked Cross weren’t quite so relevant for the troubled times we are living through, but the parallels are inescapable. That insistent drumbeat we’re hearing at the back of our conscious minds as we go about our daily lives? The one we try to ignore? It’s the echoing march of history.

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Thank you to everyone who has messaged me, commented, emailed and signed up for our live Q&A. A book like Crooked Cross has such important things to say about the times we live in that it’s astonishing to think the manuscript lay forgotten about for many years. It’s been really heartening to see how many of you have wanted to engage and how many of you have ordered the book.

In doing so, you’ve not only ensured the legacy of Sally Carson lives on in a deeply meaningful way but you’re supporting the independent, female-run publisher, Persephone, which does such vital work in uncovering the work of predominantly women writers from the mid-20th century.

I was lucky enough to catch up with Francesca Beauman, who runs Persephone Books (she’s the daughter of founder, Nicola) for a martini or three last week. We chatted a lot about Sally Carson and I found it utterly fascinating. I don’t want to give too much away here because Fran will be able to convey it on our Zoom far more eloquently than I ever could but I have to say: if you’re at all interested in multi-generational detective stories, the warp and weft of history or the injustice faced by so many female creatives throughout the centuries, you will not want to miss this conversation. I’ve just added some more tickets to the event (entirely free to attend; you simply need to reserve your spot) so if you missed out the first time, you might just be able to nab one now by clicking on this link.

Anyway, without further ado, here are your Week 2 reading prompts to help you cogitate…

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Dear Daylight reader,

As many of you already know, we’re kicking off the first DAYLIGHT Book Club of 2026 by reading Crooked Cross by Sally Carson. On Wednesday 11th February at 6pm (UK time) I’ll…

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As many of you already know, we’re kicking off the first DAYLIGHT Book Club of 2026 by reading Crooked Cross by Sally Carson. On Wednesday 11th February at 6pm (UK time) I’ll be doing a live online chat with the publisher, Francesca Beauman from Persephone Books, where you get to ask us anything you like and we’ll talk a bit about h…

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