Congratulations, You’re a Failure! Stephen Marche on Enduring the Life of a Writer

Stephen Marche is the author of six books, has been a columnist at Esquire, has taught Shakespeare at the college level and has contributed to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other publications. By any reasonable measure, his career is an unmitigated success. But seen through a different lens (for instance his own) it can also look a lot like failure. That’s true of just about every writer who ever lived and Stephen grapples with this dichotomy in new book, On Writing And Failure, which is both a literary history and a reverse pep talk for aspiring artists. In this conversation, Stephen talks about how writers from James Baldwin to James Joyce to Li Bai (and many, many others) built legacies on the sands of constant rejection. He also shares stories of his own failures and offers some thoughts about how the contours of failure and rejection have changed in the new independent creator economy. For paying Substack subscribers, Stephen stays overtime to talk about failure outside of the literary arena, including the perils of marriage and childrearing. Meghan shares her story about getting rejected from a dream job because of a typo in her resumé and Stephen remembers what it was like when his first book, a novel, received a positive New York Times review from none other than . . . Meghan!   Guest Bio: Stephen Marche is a novelist and essayist. He is the author of half a dozen books, including The Next Civil War, The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century (2016) and The Hunger of the Wolf (2015). He has written opinion pieces and essays for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Walrus and many others. He is the host of the hit audio series How Not to F*ck Up Your Kids Too Bad, and its sequel How Not to F*ck Up Your Marriage Too Bad on Audible. His latest book is On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer (Field Notes).