If You Should Fail A Book of Solace

by Moran, Joe

• ISBN13: 9780241422793
• ISBN10: 0241422795
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2020-09-24
• Publisher: Viking

Summary

Do you ever feel like a failure? Enter widely acclaimed observer of daily life Professor Joe Moran, not to tell you that everything will be OK in the end, but to reassure you that failure is an occupational hazard of being human. It is the small print in life's terms and conditions. If You Should Fail is about how modern life, in a world of broadcasting success, makes us feel like failures, frauds and imposters; so we need more narratives of failures, and to see that not every failure can be made into a success - and that's OK. It is encouraging to read that the seemingly invincible Leonardo da Vinci or Virginia Woolf, for example, felt like failures. Woolf wrote that she wanted to 'look life in the face and to know it for what it is'; the truth is cruel, but it can be loved.

Author Biography

Joe Moran is Professor of English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University and is the author of eight books, including Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime, Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV, Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness and First You Write a Sentence. He writes for, among others, the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement.