Over the years, author, award-winning podcaster and dating guru Elizabeth Day has shared her fertility struggles with refreshing honesty. Such honesty, in fact, that in an exclusive interview with Good Housekeeping, she explained how details of one of her miscarriages ended up in an episode of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s hit TV series, Fleabag.
Elizabeth opened up about how she’d hit it off with Phoebe at a conference in Las Vegas, with the actor and screenwriter later appearing as Elizabeth’s first guest on her podcast, How to Fail. A year after Phoebe’s appearance, the second season of Fleabag aired – and in the first episode, Fleabag’s sister Claire (played by Sian Clifford) has a miscarriage. She's in the bathroom of a restaurant at the time and refuses to tell her family, who are having dinner to celebrate the engagement of their father to Olivia Colman’s brilliantly evil stepmother.
Just before the episode aired, Elizabeth got a call from Phoebe. "She said, 'Elizabeth, I’m so sorry, but I’ve used a story you told me about having a miscarriage in the new season of Fleabag'," says Elizabeth. 'I had my first miscarriage while I was having brunch with friends; I went to the loo, found out what was happening, returned to the table and didn’t say a thing because my people pleasing had got to such nauseating lengths.'
Was she okay with it such a personal moment appearing on screen? “I was thrilled. I said, ‘Great. Have it. Use it’," she says. "I knew that Phoebe, who’s a creative genius, would make it tender, darkly comic and relatable. I knew it would speak to so many women. When I saw the episode, I was blown away by it."
After a challenging 12-year period that incorporated two rounds of IVF, three miscarriages, egg freezing and operations on her womb, Elizabeth made the decision to put her dream of having children behind her. She’s now stepmother to her CEO husband, Justin Basini’s three children, a role that she was initially wary of.
“I’d been a stepmother in my first marriage and it’s a very challenging role,” she says. “I was wary of interrupting a complicated story that wasn’t mine and not having children of my own added a degree of nuance. But early on, Justin said that his children, who are now 15, 19 and 21, don’t need parenting because they already have two parents.
“My role, which I enjoy, is to be there as a semi-friend, semi-aunt, semi-godmother, which is a really privileged place in the family unit.”
Now, she shared, she feels "at peace" and is looking forward to a particularly exciting year ahead. As well as the release of her sixth novel, One of Us, later this year, Elizabeth will record an American season of How to Fail in New York, more episodes of her How to Date podcast that she hosts with relationship expert Mel Schilling and – perhaps most importantly of all - she’ll take some “nice holidays”. Life for Elizabeth is looking pretty good.
Read the full interview in Good Housekeeping’s June issue on sale from Thursday 24th April.
How To Fail with Elizabeth Day is available wherever you get your podcasts.
