Agony Uncle Salman Rushdie – ‘I walked into a glass door and fell in love’

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0:36hello and welcome to how to fail the podcast that flips the traditional interview on its head and asks its guests to talk about three moments that things went wrong this week for an extra especially fabulous one-off, I thought it would be nice to give some of you who aren't yet subscribers to Failing With Friends a little taste of what we've been up to behind the paywall. Failing With Friends is where we ask our very special guests to stay and put on their agony aunt or uncle hat to answer some of our listener questions, problems, failures, and much, much more. Today, I'm pulling back the curtain to bring you one of my favourite subscriber episodes of the year in front of the paywall.

1:19You're welcome. Don't say I never spoil you. My guest agony uncle this time is none other than Sir Salman Rushdie. We talk about how to deal with professional bullshitters, how to get over writer's block, and unbelievably, he gives brilliant dating advice. I hope you love it as much as I do. Roll tape.

1:45So Salman Rushdie, welcome. Thank you. Are you often asked for advice? Not by anybody who wants to listen to the answer. Do you ask your wife Eliza for advice? Is it more often that way around? Yeah, it's more often that way around. She seems very wise. Yeah, she tells me what clothes to wear. Does she? Yeah. Has she had a say this morning? Yes, she said put a suit on. And you look, wasn't that one of the first things I said to you? Thank you, yes. The grey goes very well and the pink of the podcast. You see, well, she knew all that. Well, thank you, Eliza. OK, the first email is from Philippe, who is writing from Lyon, France.

2:21And he says, Hi, Elizabeth. Five years ago, I was all set to make my first short film with the support of my friend. I had the cast and crew sorted and the dates were locked in. But my friend, who was also a filmmaker, criticised the film. and I ended up abandoning the project altogether. Now I feel like I want to revisit the project and actually make it, but I'm scared and full of self-doubt. How do I move on from my first-time failure and find the confidence to finally make my film? Thanks, Philippe. That's such a good question because making a film is... There are so many ways in which it can go wrong and not happen.

3:04that I have enormous respect for anybody who gets a film made. It can be Animal House 12. Never mind what the film is. You get your film made, I think, respect. You got your film made. When they were going to make the film, The Midnight Children, which I was working, I ended up writing the screenplay, and I ended up working with wonderful Indian-Canadian director Deepa Mehta. And I sold her the rights for$1 because I wanted her to make the film. and there were so many obstacles you know other people not liking what you've done is just the smallest you know then there's i mean one of the biggest obstacles is not surprisingly is money and we would find because we were not it was not a big studio film it was an indie movie and so we had to do a lot of smiling at the money and people i learned that the level of bullshit in the film industry is higher than anywhere else in the world that I've experienced.

4:04People would come into these meetings, money people, and they would say to her, you know, we revere you. You are like a goddess to us. We will support you to the last dollar we have. And they would say similar nonsense to me. And then not one dollar would show up. And I understood that this was just their way of saying hello. It really didn't mean more than that. That's what What I'm saying is, and I would say to Philippe, that there's endless blows to your confidence in the process of making a film. Because it's like nobody wants you to do it. And so you just have to, if you believe in your project, you have to put that aside.

4:48Yes. And give yourself the opportunity to fail. I think it's very important not to think, oh, well, I have to make a masterpiece. Just make your film. And if it doesn't work out, make another film. Well, I think, as you said so eloquently in the How to Fail interview, you found out who you were through the process of those three unpublished novels and the first published novel that didn't get the reviews that you necessarily wanted. And I think that that is a great piece of advice. No piece of art that you put out there is ever really a failure because it will teach you something meaningful about how to create art next.

5:25Yeah. I mean, if you're paying attention, it will. Yes. But I think certainly the best thing to do is to leave aside the question of success and just do the thing, you know. Preach. Yes. And if it doesn't work out, it'll teach you something and then do the next thing and then do the next thing. Exactly. And also remember, Philippe, it's one person's opinion and great art elicits response, whether that be negative and positive. And obviously we'd love it to be positive. But the worst thing I think is if you create something and the response is, well, it's fine, but doesn't elicit any strength of feeling.

6:00Yeah, I remember there used to be this little book that you could get in bookshops here called Rotten Reviews. And what it was, was terrible reviews of great works of art. Genuine ones. Yes. Written at the time that they came out. You know, Virginia Woolf's trashing of James Joyce's Ulysses. I actually spent, so my first novel got, the first two reviews it had were excoriatingly bad. Yeah. And I spent a lot of time on Google Googling terrible first reviews for great works of literature and it really made me feel better. And there is, you know, I'm sure Homer had bad reviews. Exactly. So forget about it, as we say in New York.

6:44Also, both Jane Austen and Salman Rushdie and I found out Zoe Heller, your greatest successes came with your second novels and not the first one. So that made me feel better too. Yeah, no, I think that's true. People always say the second novel is a difficult one, but actually, in my case, the second novel was the lucky one. Okay, the next one is from Rina. Dear Elizabeth, I keep meeting very avoidant guys who never seem to want to commit. How do I stop myself from feeling like such a failure in love? Thanks so much, Rina. I can't wait to hear what you're going to say about this. Well, I don't know how old you are, Rina, but it does seem to be a generation in which people don't want to commit.

7:29There's a lot of hookups more than attempts to create something lasting. So maybe you just have to accept that you're part of the generation that you're a part of. That's depressing. What do you think? So you don't strike me as avoidant at all. If anything, you're probably a commitment addict. Yeah, I like one thing. I'm in all parts of life, including romance, one thing at a time. Yeah, so long-term monogamy, but you've been married five times. Yeah. Yes. But this time round, everybody in my family said, finally. I know. Eliza got t-shirts made up with finally printed. Finally on them, yeah, which I have.

8:16She seems completely wonderful. I'm not just saying that because she uses her middle English as Eliza. No, no, she seems completely wonderful. Yeah. Reena, as someone, so I don't know how much you know about my personal life. I got divorced in my mid-30s and then I was single in my late 30s and was using apps for the first time. And it was terrifying for multiple reasons. and I think in that phase of my life I definitely had a tendency to meet avoidant men and after a while I realized that that's probably because that's what was familiar to me in some way and there was a part of me that felt it was extraordinarily passionate never quite to know what you were going to get like whether someone was going to turn up or not whether they wanted to commit or not.

9:02And this sort of sense of uncertainty, I confused for romance and love. And actually, I now realise I needed to learn that lesson that I was making that error. Because now, true love for me is feeling safe. And having consistency. No, but I also think, and I would say this constructively to Rina, is that it never arrives from the direction you're looking in. It comes up behind you and smacks you on the head, and then you've got no option but to be in love. Well, literally for you, because you walked into a glass door. I walked into a glass door and fell in love. I, the day that I met my husband, who I did meet on Hinge, a dating app, I walked into this bar and I sat down, it was raining outside, and I was taking my coat off and everything, and the bar stool started wobbling and I fell over.

9:49The bar stool wobbled fatally. I fell onto the floor and it was the most embarrassing moment of my life. In the first five minutes of meeting this very handsome man, Anyway, I also literally fell in love. Literally fell. Literally fell. Well, there you are. You see, a little falling over might help. Yes. Yeah. And Rina, actually, the same thing that we said to Philippe, treat every data as data acquisition. It's not a rejection of you if someone is emotionally avoidant. It's data that you can acquire about what you want to do differently next time and what you want differently in someone else.

10:20So that's a way to avoid feeling like a failure. You're just experimenting and you're learning more and you're gaining more valuable knowledge. And good luck. Okay. Don't walk into glass doors.

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11:38Right. This one is from Trudy in Manchester. SOS, at the minute I'm stuck in a major creative rut. Do you have any tips for freeing yourself up? I don't care about my writing being good at this point. I just really need to get out of my head. appreciate you, Trudy. You know, there's a thing that Trudy may find hard to understand, but it actually works. Because I know I do this, and I know a lot of writers who do this. When you're stuck, and you don't know what the next sentence is or how the next bit goes, I very often will walk over to the bookshelves and pick up a book at random and open it at random.

12:20and what I look at tells me what to do. That's a brilliant piece of advice. And I've talked to, I can tell you five or six writers I've talked to all say they all do the same thing. Is that because of, is there a serendipity to it every time? No, it's just something happens in your brain. It's magic, is what it is. Well, thank you. I mean, I don't know if I have anything to add to that. I think that's what you should do immediately, Trudy. I mean, I suppose the thing that I would say is sometimes you can get caught up so much in your solitary writing brain that you forget to be out in the world yeah and yeah I mean one of the things that happened there was one time when I was writing a book and I was didn't know what to do I was in the middle of writing it and I thought this I don't know how to fix this is that I left it to one side and went and wrote something else yes completely different I mean the book I was writing was fiction and I went and wrote a piece of non-fiction and then came back to it and felt my head was in a different place and I could continue.

13:19Yes and if you're not Salman Rushdie you could just go and get on a bus and just look out of the window and I think that thing about being engaged with something outside of your own head is quite helpful and you're not wasting time by doing that you're actually living the life that you need to live in order to inhabit your writing better. No getting out of the house would have a very good idea. Yeah. Okay. So get out of that. Okay. Final one is from Chloe in Ipswich. A fun one for you both. I'm someone who really takes joy in imperfection. I love mistakes. Well, Chloe, you sound very enlightened and think they make us appreciate life's inherent gorgeous messiness.

13:57With that in mind, what are your favourite imperfect or messy works of art and why? One of my favourite lines of literary criticism is by an American critic called Randall Jarrell, who said, a novel is a long piece of writing that has something wrong with it. Oh, that's so good. Because the point he's making is that perfection is a pipe dream. Yes. No such thing. And I don't care who you are. You could be Dostoevsky or Virginia Woolf, but there's going to be a false note somewhere. Yes. And so once you let go of the idea of perfection, then you're kind of free. You just try and make it as good as you can, but you don't ever think there's going to be anything you do that doesn't have something wrong with it.

14:47For example, let's take really great books. Love in the Time of Cholera, I think, has one of the greatest openings and one of the greatest endings that I've ever read. in between there's an enormous amount of repetitive stuff about all the love affairs that the guy has I think you know okay we get the point after 10 maybe we don't have to have 20 yes so I think that's a great novel with something wrong with it that's a perfect example and also a great note I remember interviewing Marina Abramovich for How to Fail recently and she talked about teaching art students and how she would make them write down ideas and the ones that they weren't happy with they had to screw up and throw into a waste paper basket until they arrived one that they were happy with and at that point she said okay you've got your idea that you're completely happy with I want you to disregard it and fish out all of the failed ideas from the waste paper basket and make art from that very good idea and I think she's a very good representation of messiness in art that makes you think some of her performance art really is extraordinary because of its inherent danger and edge and then I'm not comparing myself to Marina Abramovich but this podcast is obviously born out of the glory of imperfection and I hand drew my logo on like with felted pens you can probably see on the microphone but for me that stands for something you know I felt that I wanted to show up as my messy and perfect self and hopefully to create a space where a guest could do that too.

16:18And I wanted the logo not to be perfect deliberately for that reason. So I suppose those would be my two. I've just been thinking while we were chatting about books that have something wrong with them. Kafka was such a perfectionist that he thought all his books had things wrong with them and he didn't want them published. And he considered them to be unfinished.

16:44There's only three novels. There's The Trial, The Castle, and America. And he didn't want anybody. He wanted his best friend, who was his executor, to destroy them all. And fortunately, his best friend did us all the service of not destroying them all. Yes. But allowing them to be published. But he was somebody with such self-doubt. And this is one of the greatest writers in the history of forever, but he had such self-doubt that he published very little in his lifetime. And the three great novels were all unpublished in his lifetime because he thought they weren't any good and they weren't done.

17:19And he was embarrassed by them. And by the way, he was wrong. Yes. And also, if you think about the birth of Impressionism and that idea of those paintings seeming undone and causing such a scandal at the time. Yes, in fact, the word impressionism was an insult. Yes. These people can't paint. They can only give an impression of something. And now they're the heart of every modern art collection in the world. Yes. Every book, when you start it, is perfect in your head. And then you have to fight with the fact of your talent or lack of it. And the book that you finish is never as good as the book that was in your head.

17:55But it's the best you can do. That, you know, has to be enough. I'm going to leave it there. Thank you so much. You've been a wonderful agony uncle. Thank you.

18:08I'm sitting here in the studio with my lovely producer, Selina, who has already told me she doesn't like the sound of her own voice. So she's not going to join in this conversation about the wonder that was Sir Salman Rushdie. But I know that we are both giddy. So I'm going to try and convey the giddiness and enthusiasm that we both feel through the tone of my soul voice. I always love interviewing people who have really thought about the world and also who are so highly intelligent that they have that innate level of intelligence which makes everyone around them feel that they have a valid point of view as well.

18:52So he is not someone who ever talks down to anyone. And I think that that is such a generous expression of his own intellect. I immediately felt at ease. And I have to say, you know, I get nervous before every single interview still, you know, 25 plus years into the business. I get nervous and that's appropriate because it shows that I care. but with someone like Sir Salman Rushdie who I have grown up with not only the idea of him on the TV news that I remember my parents watching when I was 10 when the fatwa was issued but also his books he has been such a cultural giant for me and for other people of my generation so obviously I was incredibly intimidated and because I write books too nowhere near his level but because I write books too.

19:39I really wanted to pay him that respect of getting everything right and doing my research. So I was intimidated and nervous. And then obviously there is a very special setup to ensure his safety, which involved emptying the building that we record in of other people. His two Met Police Protection officers came and scouted everything out and checked that it was all okay. and then he arrived and so that's the context so that so the nerves were definitely like at a higher level than usual but as soon as he walked in he was so kind I think the kindness was something that I maybe hadn't anticipated he was kind he was funny I said before we started recording you know I know we're about to cover some very traumatic territory and I'm I'm very aware that I can't know how that feels.

20:32And if at any point it feels too much, he sort of stopped me. He was like, no, it's absolutely fine. And I will tell you and thank you. But that, again, is an act of generosity and made me feel that I could ask anything. And honestly, I could have spoken to him for hours. There's so much I want to ask him about, about life, about literature, but also about the fascinating people he has met along the way. And we didn't even get into the fact that he had this sort of celebrity life, this celebrity social life after he came out of hiding and he moved to New York. He became a fixture on the social scene.

21:05And some of you might know that he married Padma Lakshmi, who presents Top Chef in America and is one of the world's most beautiful women. I didn't ask him about that because it felt a bit undermining given the gravity of everything that he was talking about and the fact that he's got a wonderful wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Yeah, I just, I imagine he's just a fund of anecdotes, let alone E.M. Forster and Gunter Grass, who he's actually met in person, and Margaret Thatcher. I bet there's way more where that came from. But also his insights. He speaks as lyrically as he writes and said so many wonderful things about failure and success being their own shadow twins.

21:45And then another thing that we were chatting about before recording Failing With Friends was star signs. So I mentioned to him that I had interviewed Martin Amis for Radio 4 a few years ago and had the most wonderful chat with him. And it was shortly before he died. And I'm so glad I got to speak to him. And I was saying to Salman, yeah, you forget that these sort of literary giants of which you are one and Martin was one, do have this great sense of comic absurdity and are really, really funny. and Martin and I started talking about star signs because in Martin's memoir experience, there is a footnote in which he says that all astrology is bunkum apart from everything written about Scorpios, which is true.

22:26And I said, like, what Scorpio has done you wrong? Because I am a Scorpio. And he immediately was like, are you a Scorpio? I said, yes. He said, well, that's a classic Scorpio question. Anyway, it was very funny. And I was telling Salman this and then we got into a really nice discussion about his star sign he's a gemini it's about to be his birthday we're recording in may he his birthday is in june and my husband's a gemini it's the sign of communication a bit like a scorpio we get a bad reputation but it's unfair and a good gemini and a good scorpio you just can't get better than so i didn't think i'd be talking about star signs with salman rushdie when i got up this morning but i enjoyed every single minute of it.

23:08And remember, you can be part of failing with friends too. I'd love to hear your failures or any questions you might have. Just follow the link in the podcast notes to contact me. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.