How to Fail

‘So what are you up to at the moment?’

‘I’m in the first year of studying for my GCSEs,’ I replied.

His lower lip trembled as if he’d been punched. No more conversation was forthcoming.

I suppose what I’m getting at is that, one way or the other, I never entirely fitted in. I was immature in some ways (horrifyingly unworldly) and overly mature in others (I asked for a three-quarter-length camel coat for my eighteenth birthday). Adults assumed I was capable because, by now, I was tall and good at exams and well behaved in class, but really I was just trying to work things out and I still barely knew myself. I always felt something of an outsider – in Ireland because I spoke like a foreigner; in England because I hadn’t grown up there.

But this social failure at school had some positive by-products. At an early age, it made me into an observer of human behaviour. I started to listen more than I talked. It’s a skill that has been incredibly useful as a writer. And because I wasn’t born cool but had to learn how to fake it, I like to think I have a degree of empathy for others who have never felt they belonged. When it came to writing my fourth novel, The Party, I mined my own experiences of being a scholarship kid on their first day in an unfamiliar environment for my protagonist, Martin Gilmour.

I have often been asked at literary festivals how I imagined myself into the character of a misfit teenage boy and the truth is, I based it on what I felt at the time. The emotions were so vivid to me that I can feel them still. (Although it’s worth pointing out here that Martin is a borderline sociopath who inveigles his way into his best friend’s life with disastrous consequences. That’s where any similarity between him and me ends.)

It’s interesting how many of the successful people I’ve interviewed, both for the podcast and as a journalist, have felt a similar sense of alienation at school. I’ve found that a surprising number of performers – specifically comedians – had parents in the military and therefore moved around a lot as children. They got used to adapting to new environments and often the easiest way to make friends was to crack jokes or act the class clown. It’s not a giant leap to think that this was what shaped their talent for performance. Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Adrian Edmondson, Jessica Alba and Christina Aguilera all came from military families.

There’s a sense, too, in which not being able to fit in makes you cultivate independence and resilience. If you move around a lot, you become used to making the most of your own company. If you’re like me, you lose yourself in stories and imagination and create rich internal worlds to counterbalance the external complexities.

When I interviewed Clint Eastwood in 2008, he recalled his own itinerant childhood as his father, a steel worker, travelled up the West Coast of America looking for work in the 1930s.

‘It was kind of lonely in some ways because you never went to the same school for six or seven months, you were always moving on somewhere,’ Eastwood said.

The rap star Wiz Khalifa, too, was a military brat. I spoke to him about it for Elle magazine in 2015. We met in a classic Los Angeles hip-hop pad – all white walls and clean angles and heavy clouds of weed obscuring the view of the Hollywood Hills beyond and he told me he moved bases every couple of years – to Germany, the UK and Japan.

Always being the new, ‘nerdy’ kid at school made him ‘nervous’ so music was his refuge: ‘Seeing everybody else being confident and knowing everybody, and me just kind of coming from the outside, it wasn’t comfortable at all,’ he said. ‘But doing my music, it was just my way of being the best at what I was interested in.’

He later turned his music into a chart-topping career and a net worth of $45 million.

But it wasn’t just the army kids who struggled to fit in. The novelist Sebastian Faulks told me he ‘loathed’ the boarding school he was sent to at the age of eight. Later, he went to Wellington College, which he ‘disliked intensely’.

‘It was traumatic, undoubtedly because the world you found yourself in, it just bore no relation to any world I’d ever known,’ he said. ‘Iron bedsteads, weird clothes, weird food, Latin, Greek, hymns and … there was no experience for the first sort of month that I’d ever had before. But eventually you sort of got used to it. And I remember one term I didn’t go home at all because there was some sort of mumps outbreak and in some ways it was easier not to go home at all actually. And I learned to fit in and adapt.’

The actress Christina Hendricks, who starred as Joan in the hit series Mad Men, was bullied at school. When I interviewed her for the Observer in 2014, she told me her parents had moved from Idaho to Virginia because of her father’s job when she was thirteen. She hated her new high school and felt ‘uprooted’ and resentful.

She wore Birkenstocks and ‘hippy dresses’. She was surprised when she saw the other girls her age at her new school ‘carrying purses [handbags]. I was like, “Ooh, purses!” To me, only moms had purses. They were much more sophisticated and they were having sex and wearing make-up – all these things that had not happened for me.’

From the start, Hendricks was singled out. ‘We had a locker bay, and every time I went down there to get books out of my locker people would sit on top and spit at me. So I had to have my locker moved because I couldn’t go in there … I felt scared in high school. It was like Lord of the Flies. There was always some kid getting pummelled and people cheering.’

Hendricks found her tribe in the drama department. Acting provided an outlet for a feeling of impotent rage. She became a goth, dyeing her hair black and purple, shaving it at the back and wearing leather jackets and knee-high Doc Marten boots. She said her clothes, and her capacity for reinvention, provided a type of armour against what she was experiencing.

‘My parents would say, “You’re just alienating everyone. You’ll never make any friends looking like that.” And I would say, “I don’t want those people to be my friends. I’m never going to be friends with the people who beat up a kid while everyone is cheering them on. I hate them.”’

Of course, we know now how the story turned out: Hendricks’ passion for drama turned into a successful career, winning her critical plaudits, Emmy nominations and the slavering admiration of a legion of borderline-obsessive fans.

That, it seems, is what connects all these stories: the lesson that, in order to survive, one needs either to adapt to a potentially hostile environment or to redirect one’s pain into a more positive – and often creative – outlet. It strikes me that school is not simply a place where academic lessons are taught but also a place where we educate ourselves on who we are; where we can try out different identities and see what fits before the constraints and responsibilities of adulthood are upon us.

I was always so frustrated as a teenager when condescending grown-ups would tell me that schooldays were the best days of my life and that I should ‘make the most of them while you can’. At the time, I wondered whether it was one of those things I might grow into believing, in the same way as I grew into French cinema and liking pesto, but I never have. Schooldays were categorically not the best days of my life and, in fact, I still have nightmares about them.

On the podcast, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator of the Bafta-winning Fleabag, spoke about the ‘duality’ she felt at school. At home she had been raised to be strong-minded and to test unnecessary boundaries and yet she was entering a place where rules had to be obeyed.

‘I remember my mum saying to me when I first went to secondary school, “Just be an angel for the first three terms, if you are an angel for the first three terms, you’ll get away with anything you want for the rest of your school career,”’ Waller-Bridge said. ‘And I really took that to heart and I made sure that I worked hard, I got the little badges or whatever you got, but the whole time [I was] just basically saying to my mates, “If I nail this then I can take anyone down later.”

‘And it was so true because then I just had the reputation of being a hardworking student, and I was a massive practical joker and the cheekiness, that also my mother had bred in me, was brilliantly offset by the lesson to appear to be a good girl and you’ll get away with being a bad girl.’

Of course, it was this duality that Waller-Bridge later deployed to great effect in Fleabag where the protagonist is, to all intents and purposes, a seemingly nice, well-brought-up middle-class girl who is actually grappling with darker issues of grief and abandonment and who uses sex as distraction from having to deal with her own inadequacies. Within that premise lies a further duality because although Fleabag ultimately addresses serious themes, it is also unabashedly funny.

Failure to fit in at an early age teaches us to develop a resilience that can ultimately help us flourish. The political campaigner Gina Miller found this to be the case when she was sent from her home in Guyana to boarding school in Eastbourne at the age of eleven. She was targeted by bullies for looking different and for the way she spoke. Before leaving home, Miller had taken a bottle of her mother’s L’Air du Temps perfume with her to remind her of all the things she loved. Every night before going to sleep in her dormitory bed, Miller would dab a bit of the scent on her pillow before another girl spotted what she was doing and tipped the perfume down the toilet. When she discovered what had happened, Miller shed a few private tears before assessing her options. She could tell on the bully, which would alienate her from the other girls. She could suffer in silence, which might make her seem like a pushover. Or she could try and win the bully over.

Miller went for the last option, giving the girl in question a bracelet as a peace offering.

‘As soon as I reached out to the girl who was bullying me, her defences crumbled,’ Miller recalled. ‘I didn’t counter anger with anger. Nor did I show I was upset. Instead I tried to disarm her with kindness so that we could engage with each other. Once a bully sees you as human, that’s half the battle.’

She added: ‘All of this taught me an important lesson. It was that most bullies act from a place of weakness. They feel threatened and backed into a corner by something – or someone – they don’t understand. Bullying is the way they lash out, but underneath all that bravado, there’s often a fragile individual riven with insecurities and weakness who doesn’t know how to express him or herself when confronted by the unknown.’

It was a lesson that she took with her into adulthood, when Miller found herself the target of death threats and racist abuse after successfully taking the UK government to court in 2017 over the triggering of Article 50 to exit the European Union without parliamentary consent.

So what do we learn from failing to fit in? We learn how to cope with social rejection. We learn how to entertain ourselves. We learn independence and empathy and we put our imagination to better use than we might have done otherwise. We learn how to handle bullies and people who don’t like us. We learn strategies that help us acclimatise to new environments. We learn to code-switch between different social languages. We learn not to let our mother cut our hair beyond an appropriate point.

But my failure to fit in also had less positive effects. It made me, at an early age, into a people-pleaser. I wanted others to like me and accept me and the coping strategy I had developed to survive was predicated almost entirely on their good opinion. I wasn’t particularly selective about who liked me, I just hankered after safety in numbers which meant that for years I flailed around trying to fit in anywhere I could. It was an exhausting way to live. It meant I lost touch with a lot of what I was actually feeling and what I truly wanted, in an attempt to contort myself around other people’s desires. This became so embedded in my psyche that I didn’t even know it was happening until I turned thirty-six and realised the existential corner I had painted myself into was diametrically opposed to my long-term wellbeing, and my life imploded in spectacular fashion. I wonder how different I would have been had I adopted Christina Hendricks’ ‘fuck you’ attitude; if instead of unthinkingly going along with the herd, I had developed a strong individual identity and found refuge in difference rather than being scared by it?

Perhaps I would have had a less critical internal narrative: that judgemental voice which kept telling me I was wrong or bad or not good enough throughout my teens and twenties. But maybe that voice was also part of my drive and ambition. I was seeking to prove to myself through the frantic ticking of external boxes (degree; career; professional success) that I was all right. That I did have stuff to offer. That I was worth being friends with. That I was worth being loved.

So I don’t think, looking back, that I could have had the one without the other. I wouldn’t have the published books, the journalism awards, the joy of seeing my name in print, without a borderline-obsessive work ethic fuelled by outsidership. And maybe I wouldn’t have such a wonderful circle of dear friends had I not also acquired the certain knowledge that acceptance is a fragile and fickle thing, and isn’t to be taken for granted. That you need to look after your friendships as you would your own health.

I never did pick up an Irish accent but when I wrote my first novel, my publisher found out I’d grown up outside Derry and I went back to Ireland to promote it. By then, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement had brought peace to the Province and I was struck by how much lighter the atmosphere felt. In Derry, there were new buildings and shopping centres and a bridge that arced over the width of the River Foyle. In Belfast, I was interviewed by newspaper journalists and radio presenters who wanted to know about my schooldays and which other Irish writers I most admired. When the pieces were published or when the programmes aired, I was always introduced as a local novelist. I was welcomed everywhere I went, by people who bought me pints of Guinness and who showed demonstrable pride in me. After all those years, it didn’t matter to them how I spoke. It was the most amazing feeling.

What did it feel like? It felt like coming home.

How to Fail at Tests

When I went to that secondary school in England, I got really good at exams. I was more content, had better teachers and had already done half the year back in Belfast. At GCSE, I promptly dropped all the subjects I didn’t like without a backward glance. I became a straight-A student and my end-of-term reports were glowing with praise.

This was lucky because it felt as if I were constantly being made to take tests. Life was a morass of exams – weekly tests to check I’d learned my algebra and understood photosynthesis; end-of-term exams where the sun beat tauntingly through the classroom windows as I attempted to revise the finer points of Henry IV’s domestic policy; musical grades; GCSEs; A levels … it went on and on. And then, because I’d been studying so hard and straining my eyes poring over books and the library computer screens, it turned out I needed an eye test (and glasses) too.

The culture of continuous testing has got even worse since I left school in 1997. In 2018, the charity Childline reported delivering 3,135 counselling sessions on exam stress in the previous year, with half of those phone calls being with twelve- to fifteen-year-olds, some of whom spoke of ‘an overwhelming workload’ and ‘worries about whether they would get the grades they want’.

The sheer number of exams – from SATs to GCSEs to AS and A levels and beyond – means that, at some point, you will probably fail at least one and your sense of self risks being reduced to a series of red biro marks on foolscap and a percentage point informing you that you haven’t passed.

It’s hard not to take it personally. At my new school, the spectre of that 47 per cent Chemistry exam result in Belfast cast a long shadow. I’m not sure why it haunted me so. That particular test wasn’t of any great importance but it was still difficult to separate who I was as a person from the grotesque caricature I built up in my mind of a backward numbskull who couldn’t remember what happened to magnesium when it met a naked flame (did it ask it to put some clothes on? I wondered).

Why did that particular failure affect me so deeply? It was partly because my surgeon father was an excellent scientist and was forever trying to engage me in ‘experiments’. I remember once, at the age of seven, being encouraged to take a dead bat to my primary school for display on the Nature Table. Until this point, the Nature Table had consisted of shrivelled autumn leaves and the odd branch of pussy willow, each one neatly labelled in Mrs McCarter’s comforting round handwriting.

I had found the bat that morning in our attic, its furry black body lying like a winged comma on the floorboards. When I told my father, he was delighted, and took the opportunity to give me an informative little talk on the nature of nocturnal flight. He told me to wrap up the bat in kitchen roll and take it into school. My classmates would be fascinated, he said confidently – a dead bat was just the sort of thing the Nature Table needed.

He was mostly right. The other pupils were fascinated, although their fascination was somewhat ghoulish in tone and the majority of the girls were just plain terrified. Mrs McCarter recoiled in horror when I carefully unfolded the kitchen roll and offered up the dead bat in the damp palm of my hand.

It turned out the bat was not dead after all, but simply sleeping deeply, in a state of semi-hibernation. The drive to school and the subsequent commotion had woken the creature up and it leapt from my hands and started flying around the classroom, flapping its wings and causing Mrs McCarter to shriek in distress.

It was Liam Andrews who saved me: a boy who had been the subject of my fervent but unrequited crush for many months. Bravely, he shepherded the bat out through an open window. Everyone clapped. The Nature Table was restored to its former pussy-willowed glory. The bat was never mentioned again. And Liam Andrews thought I was a freak for the rest of my time at primary school.

The point being: my father was keen on science and, sweetly, he wanted me to share his enthusiasm. But I just didn’t have that kind of brain. I found it frustrating having to learn properties of chemicals by rote and I didn’t really want to know the inner workings of a rat or how heat was conducted through a baked potato. So when I got that 47 per cent in Chemistry, I felt it not only as an academic failure, but also as if I were, in some small but significant way, failing as a daughter. I was letting him down, as well as myself.

Tests are never just tests. They tap into all sorts of deeper issues too.

Looking back now, I also see that exam as symptomatic of my broader unhappiness. I had lost confidence socially after that episode with Siobhan, which meant I’d also lost confidence in my abilities. And when I knew I wasn’t good at something, I became less motivated. It’s a fairly standard human impulse: if I’m not going to succeed at this, the reasoning goes, then I’m not going to try. That way, I’ll lessen the humiliation when, inevitably, it comes.

But when I became better at exams, being ‘academic’ was something that wormed its way into my identity and into how I saw myself. I was rewarded and praised for it. This was beneficial in some ways – I worked hard because I wanted to keep on succeeding – but it also came with some negatives attached. It’s never a particularly good idea to build your sense of self on the shaky foundations of academic merit. The older you get, the more you realise that such markers are pretty arbitrary – especially in the arts subjects I’d chosen to pursue.

The author Jessie Burton came to this realisation as an adult after a lifetime spent doing well at school and cultivating ‘an intellectual maturity [that] can mask vulnerability’.

In her thirties, ‘I’d never, perhaps, tuned in emotionally. And I do think it has come from a more or less self-imposed state of doing. Doing things that garner applause or garner approval and therefore make me feel safe.

‘I think it was a pattern that was made way back when I was young and doing well at school and for most children, that’s our life … at age five, we’re at school a lot more than probably we’re at home … and that was always rewarding me. I did enjoy school; I loved it. And feeling that there was a formula there of working hard and getting the results and getting everyone’s approval and everything in the status quo being maintained.’

The flip side of this was that Burton ‘felt a lot of the love I got was conditional [on doing well academically] … and when The Miniaturist [her first novel] was hugely successful, the biggest success I’ve ever had, it was almost too much. “Well, I’ve tried to write a book and, oh, it’s an international bestseller.” What now? Who am I?’

As Burton so perceptively outlined, school achievements and exam results are only ever external validations. In my experience, they do not make you feel confident in any long-lasting way because, by the time you’ve left school or graduated from university, you realise that there are no exams left to take unless you’re an architect or a doctor or one of those high-flying financial types who keep having to sit complicated accountancy tests.

When you’re a grown-up, life becomes bafflingly free of signposts. There is no exam board telling you whether you’re doing well or meeting the necessary requirements for being a twenty-five-year-old. There’s no one who can give you an A* for moving house efficiently or managing to file your tax return on time. Sure, you can be given promotions and pay rises, but these are often scattered and random events. There is no long, anticipatory build-up of revision to an eventual climax of essay-writing against the clock as an invigilator walks up and down between rows of desks and tells you that you have five minutes left.

In adulthood, no one gives you marks for getting the answer right.

I wish I’d been more aware of this. At seventeen, I thought exams were all-important. I got my work in on time and I prided myself on being good. Good at school. Good at debating. Good at behaving. Good at not smoking a cigarette until my eighteenth birthday, and then only taking a single drag because it seemed a symbolic thing to do. Good at not getting my ears pierced. Good at talking to adults. Good at seeming outwardly confident, despite the rumbling internal engine of anxiety. I was even fairly good at the trumpet – as long as I didn’t have to take a test (I managed Grade 6 before realising there is nothing more stressful than a music exam which requires you to stand in front of a stranger, regulate your shallow breathing, and blow loudly into a brass tube blindly hoping to hit the right note and realising there is nowhere to hide if you don’t). Still, I was good at being the school Orchestra Secretary, which was the next best thing.

But then I took my driving test. And I failed.

No big deal, you might think. Worse things happen at sea. But this failure hit me especially hard. It came at a time when I was passing all the other tests in my life, and applying to Cambridge University, where I would later get a place. These socially sanctioned successes had led to a belief that I could do things I set my mind to because – let’s not mince words here – I was spoiled. I was white, middle-class, had attentive parents and had won a scholarship to an excellent boarding school where opportunities were handed out like doughnuts at break-time (we did actually get doughnuts every Thursday). I thought that if I put enough time in, worked hard, did my best and if my parents threw money at any given problem, success would automatically follow. It was the logic of entitlement and I’m aware that countless people from different backgrounds, who have experienced discrimination for everything from their ethnicity to their sexuality, will find this a curiously slight example. And it was. But it’s the slightness that revealed the sheer depth of my arrogance.