Beyond fear, with Elizabeth Gilbert

Nonika Singh in Jaipur

Like her writing, she is unflappable and irreverent. Easy on the eye and smooth with words, famed author Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love fame is a reader’s delight. No wonder, she confesses to having the soul of a serious writer and the personality of an airline hostess. Hence, being hyperactive on her Instagram handle comes as naturally/organically to her as writing.

A precursor to her prolific writing career was reading, that too voraciously. She recounts how in childhood years both she and her elder sister, also an author, were exempted from any work if they were engaged in reading. Interestingly, even as kids they would come out with books and then inscribe the word ‘bestseller’ on them, something that proved to be prophetic. Her 2006 memoir Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything spent 199 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list. Today, as many of her books sell out, including in India, she shares, “I was destined to be a writer.”

Much of her writing is personal and intimate, but she reveals, “It’s not exactly a personal diary. There is a huge chasm between the book one believes must be written and the one that finally gets published. A lot of what is in the first draft gets edited out.” Besides, though the initial catalyst for her writing may have been a bid to come out of depression after a failed marriage, not all her books are memoirs. Nor do they always reveal her state of mind. For instance, she was going through a period of turmoil, having lost her partner to cancer, when she wrote City of Girls — clearly her most cheerful and funny piece of work. For, the book became her way to “rebalance the forces of darkness”.

As the book delves into the sexuality of women of the 1940s in no uncertain terms, she recalls that it is not exactly a figment of imagination. Having met showgirls of that era, the words of a 96-year-old — “Honey, who wants to have sex with the same man for 65 years?” — is proof enough that women are sexual beings, she insists. Thus, in times of the MeToo movement, she doesn’t want the whole discourse to be just about women’s consent.

For too long, women, including herself — “shame and I were partners” — have lived with shame of and over who they are. “Neither society nor women themselves know what to do with their sexuality, even though women as protagonists in my book have always existed.”

Though her first marriage and the ensuing divorce may have led her to a nervous breakdown, she strongly believes single women do so much better in life, live longer and outperform married women. While the reverse, also substantiated by data, is true for married men for they thrive on direct exchange of female energy.

On myriad aspects that she touched upon, the most interesting was her take on passion versus curiosity. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, her self-help book and manual of sorts for many readers, talks about courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust and divinity. She calls curiosity that one special gift. “While following your passion asks you to make big sacrifices, curiosity leads you through little markers and clues to maybe realise your passion too.”

But if you are following the passion called writing, Elizabeth Gilbert offers a piece of advice: “Know who you are talking to.” What makes her writing so versatile and variegated is the fact that she is not always talking to the same set of people. In The Signature of All Things, a period novel of a female botanist, she allowed herself the luxury of four years of research. Taking herself and consequently her novel on a journey from London to Peru to Philadelphia to Tahiti to Amsterdam, she literally navigated through the world as well as found takers for her book everywhere. Even though publisher Alexandra Pringle, with whom she was in conversation with at JLF, pointed out that UK was rather slow to accept it.

Intriguingly, whatever may have been her relationship status, her association with creativity, in her words, has never ever been fraught with “drama, trauma, pain or chaos” and has been rather simple. Of course, at the heart of it lies her desire to make something more beautiful than it needs to be. No wonder, among many other epithets, City of Girls is described as a hymn to female desire.

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