Elizabeth Day says she has made peace with the fact that she will never be a mother at 45, but she still thinks about having a child “every day.”
The How To Fail presenter and Magpie author, 45, who lives in Vauxhall, south London, with her husband, fintech chief executive Justin Basini, said The times who tried to have a baby for 12 years, but last year was forced to accept that her dream would never come true.
She went through two rounds of IVF, miscarriages, egg freezing, and in-utero surgery, but eventually the “stress” of the process became too overwhelming.
She told the newspaper: ‘My desire to have a child has not only shaped me as a woman: it is me as a woman. There isn’t a day that I don’t think about it.’
Elizabeth Day says she has made peace with the fact that she will never be a mother at 45, but she still thinks about having a child “every day”
Last year, at the age of 44, Elizabeth decided to stop trying after failing to get pregnant with an egg donor in the United States.
She and her husband spent a year searching for a donor, who underwent the extraction process and IVF, and the embryo was implanted in Elizabeth’s uterus.
She said it was “heartbreaking” to receive an email from the clinic 10 days later saying, “You are not pregnant.”
Throughout her fertility struggle, Day felt her “purpose” in life was to be a mother, but her perspective has changed.
‘I realize that the most important goal is to speak on behalf of those who are not mothers or fathers, often not by choice. That gives meaning to my life, and that’s what I was worried about not having,” she said.
She also believes that adoption is not a simple process and is not necessarily the right option for her.
The novelist previously spoke about her battle to have a child during her first marriage to former BBC editorial director Kamal Ahmed, whom she divorced at the age of 36, and her current husband, Justin Basini.
Her first miscarriage was with Ahmed when she was 12 weeks pregnant, which she claims was the catalyst for their eventual breakup when she left him in February 2015.
Day also dated Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s brother Jasper, who was nine years her junior. She said her breakup partly inspired How To Fail.
She has been married to Justin since 2021 after meeting on the dating app Hinge.
The How To Fail presenter and Magpie author, 45, lives in Vauxhall, south London, with her husband, fintech CEO Justin Basini (pictured together this Christmas).
Elizabeth told The Times in a new interview that she has been trying to have a baby for 12 years, but last year she was forced to accept that her dream would never come true.
How To Fail now has 20 series and has been downloaded more than 45 million times, interviewing the likes of Rory Stewart and Margaret Atwood.
She published a memoir of the same name, while her thriller Magpie explores the topic of infertility.
Day spoke previously on the podcast. Changes about her difficulties conceiving, in a conversation with former Radio 1 DJ Annie Macmanus.
She told the podcast that women undergoing fertility treatment can often feel “turned on” by the doctors treating them, and she said she has experienced this firsthand.
Day told the station that he often felt like “I’m failing, but I have an extra level of moral judgment coming from people who I’ve been taught to respect and who have an enormous amount of power in a medical situation.”
He told Macmanus that after telling a friend about his experiences, the friend suggested, “Maybe you’re not failing to respond to the medications, maybe the medications are failing you.”
Day says: ‘It was a bombshell moment of truth. I’m basically being gaslit by a male-dominated establishment -None of them will have any idea what a miscarriage is, much less menstruating.’
Day added that he thought “there are some amazing, compassionate medical professionals and I have met many of them” and said the profession was “changing for the better.”
Elizabeth’s How To Fail podcast now has 20 series and has been downloaded more than 45 million times, interviewing the likes of Rory Stewart and Margaret Atwood.
Last year, at the age of 44, Elizabeth decided to stop trying to have a baby when she was not yet pregnant after a year of searching for a donor.
Referencing the fertility struggles of one of the characters in Day’s best-selling book Magpie, Macmanus asked the author to what extent she had drawn on her own experiences.
The author said she wanted to write about her own experiences in novel form, saying: ‘I’ve had IVF, I’ve had miscarriages, I’ve frozen my eggs, I’ve had uterus surgery – and I really wanted to put that somewhere.’
She also told the broadcaster that leaving the marital home in February 2015, after her first marriage to Kamal Ahmed fell apart, was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
“When I realized I was really unhappy, it was after a horrible year in which I had two failed rounds of IVF, then got pregnant naturally, and then had a miscarriage after three months. I was in a hormonal mess and numb with sadness.
He said that after a “bleak Christmas” he knew that “the level of unhappiness was unsustainable” and went to therapy.
Knowing that the marriage was not going to survive, she told Macmanus that she had a “terrible shame” at the thought that it had failed, but knew that “I had hit a wall and needed to make a change.”
Day’s ninth book, Friendaholic, is available now.