Failing Upwards

As Charlotte Philby’s debut novel is published – nine years after her first manuscript was rejected by countless agents – she reflects on the importance of perseverance in the face of adversity and why failing is so much a part of the journey for many successful women

- Charlotte Philby

‘You are just so bloody accomplished!’ a friend said while scanning through the bio of my new novel, as a testimony to the fact that I am a highly competent human being. It was all I could do not to howl with laughter. Because what now, neatly pulled together on that page, reads as a perfectly plotted journey on the road to becoming a published novelist, at each interchange has felt like an ever-mounting pile-up of my failures. What that bio doesn’t include is the novel I wrote eight years ago, which I poured my heart and sleep-deprived soul into while on my first maternity leave and then had rejected by no less than seven agents. It doesn’t mention the crappy bit-jobs I’ve taken between roles to fund writing, nor the crippling self-doubt that culminated in several emotional breakdowns along the way.

The pressure to know oneself and one’s dreams, and to have fulfilled them by a certain stage in life can be crippling. I clearly remember a friend telling me how relieved she had been to leave behind her twenties, how it had taken having a baby and turning 30 to understand who she was. Later, weeping to my husband, I said, ‘But I’m 34 and have three kids and still I have no idea who I am!’ As far as I was concerned, my life was in free-fall. This was the story I told myself night after a sleepless night, not knowing how it would end. It was impossible to imagine then that two years later I would have one novel published and two in the pipeline.