<p>This paper challenges sociology’s reductive approach to failure talk in the interview, which flattens its complexity and denies social actors’ interpretive powers. While cultural sociology typically foregrounds meaning making activity, it undercuts this commitment when participants speak of failure. We show how this inconsistency is sustained by an analytical bias that treats failure talk as evidence of internalized individualism and by three methodological tendencies that emerge in interview practice: avoiding failure talk to protect rapport; focusing on its role in narratives of self-betterment; and responding to it as a disempowering form of speech. We offer an alternative framework that treats talk of failure as meaning making and critique. We reclaim three tools of cultural sociology—cultural autonomy, ordinary critique, and boundary work—and provide practical methodological tips for engaging failure talk more expansively. Drawing on interviews with young people at a cosmopolitan high school in Northern Europe and older adults reflecting on democratic transitions in Greece, we demonstrate how failure talk can evoke sharp, emotionally complex critiques of institutional norms and cultural ideals. By realigning cultural sociology’s theoretical commitments with its empirical practices, we reposition failure talk not as critique’s opposite, but as one of its most ordinary, ambivalent, and revealing forms.</p>