Lessons from Liz

Reflections from seeing Elizabeth Gilbert speak at the Barbican this week

I’m going through some stuff. So much stuff I almost took a week off writing on here, but in the end, here I am, at my laptop, writing. And there’s something in that.

At some point I will write about the ‘stuff’ but I’m in the thick of it at the moment, which makes for messy writing (because change is messy) and I’ll know when is the right time, so instead I’m going to write about going to see Elizabeth Gilbert on Monday evening at the Barbican. Which was brilliant.

Like many women of a certain age and demographic I’m interested in Elizabeth Gilbert and her life. We are of a similar age, and I remember reading Eat Pray Love (just before exploded into the cultural consciousness) having picked it up because part of it was set in Bali and I was about to visit Bali for the first time. I devoured it, and bought a copy for the friend I was travelling with (Rachel) and she devoured it likewise on our 16 hour flight.

I loved it so much. Like many women (again, of a certain age and demographic) I felt she had captured something essential about my own quest for internal peace and self-acceptance. I was at that point in time newly single, newly sober, and like a newborn deer on wobbly legs, not very successfully flailing around for my place in the world.

Me and Rachel spent a lot of our trip to Bali talking about Eat Pray Love, and it was Rachel who bought our tickets to the Barbican event. As we both sat together in the audience listening to Elizabeth talk about the fact that the book was 20 years old a couple of weeks ago (I know right?! How is that even possible) I gave myself a momentary pat on the back. ‘Look how far you’ve come’ I said to myself, with a touch of smugness.

Then Elizabeth said something that sent me off into a huge existential crisis (the ‘stuff’ referred to above) but that’s a story for another day.

Returning back from Bali almost 20 years ago, after falling head over heels for Eat Pray Love I quite quickly fell out of admiration for its author. I am always highly suspicious of anyone around whom the vibes are ‘culty’ - and by that stage the vibes were definitely headed that way - so much of the rest of Elizabeth’s writing passed me by.

I did read Big Magic but found myself unmoved by it (I recognise now that this was because of where I was in my life, and nothing at all to do with the book) and approached All The Way To The River with similar cynicism, only to have that cynicism completely turned on its head.

I wrote about my reaction to the book here, but safe to say I realised that I’d been doing Elizabeth a huge disservice. This is a memoir that not only removes her from any pedestal, it effectively burns any and all pedestals to the ground, and in my opinion, this is an act of great courage and generosity, which I got to experience in person at the event on Monday.

I spent much of the day revisiting Big Magic, and listening to the sam baker episode of The Shift with her, and found myself spellbound as I listened to/read Elizabeth from a completely different place this time. There was so much that resonated deeply, and I started to capture some of the things that struck me from my own experience of creativity, as well as some of the ways in which I still have so much to learn.

Here are some of my biggest takeaways (with the caveat that this is what I heard/saw/took from what she said. I bet if you asked the rest of the audience, they’d all have a different take, which is something Elizabeth herself talks about in Big Magic).

The ideas will keep coming.

I remember reading Elizabeth’s perspective on how ideas work in Big Magic the first time I came to it and thinking it sounded like hippy woo-woo. The notion that ideas exist separately to individuals and are out there looking for someone to ‘land’ on and be brought to fruition felt like nonsense to me.

At the time I was in a very achievement/success oriented place in my life and was very attached to being the ‘owner’ of my work. It was all about me. I’ve since adjusted my thinking. All three of the books I have written/am writing appeared in my mind one day, fully formed, like a download. I’ve always had the sense that my only job was to write them down.

They feel like they came from somewhere else, and whether that is true or not, I now really love that idea. It makes the business of getting published all feel a lot less personal and a lot less pressurised if it is less to do with me.

At the event on Monday Elizabeth talked more about this, in particular in reference to her decision to take a few months off, where she doesn’t work on anything and instead lets the ideas flow past, like a sushi counter, to see what happens when she doesn’t grab hold of the first one, if only to notice that the ideas keep coming (which they always do) and to stop using work as a way to avoid her feelings. As a chronic workaholic, this made me feel intensely uncomfortable, in the way that messages you should take notice of are wont to do.

You don’t need a permission slip.

One of the things I have always found refreshing about Elizabeth’s stance on creativity is her lack of snobbishness around who is allowed to create. It is something I share, and meant that when it came to writing my own first novel - I just began.

Throughout my life I have believed many terrible things about myself, but not being clever or talented enough to write thankfully isn’t one of them.

If I’d needed a permission slip, I was very generously given one (unknowingly) by Marian Keyes at an event for the launch of Grown Ups in 2020, just before the world locked down. Someone in the audience asked her what qualifications she thought a writer needed and she answered that ‘voracious readers learn to write by osmosis.’ As a voracious reader I knew I qualified.

I started the very next day.

‘Do what your ancestors did.’

Someone in the audience on Monday asked about getting your work into the world, and this was where Elizabeth gave one of my favourite answers, that had Rachel digging her elbow into me saying ‘this is you!’

‘Do what your ancestors did.’ Elizabeth said, then went onto explain what she meant. She was taking the phrase from a 12-step context, meaning follow in the footsteps of the other people who got into recovery, and applying it here - but specifically calling out that our ancestors had to hustle.

In selling their work/getting art out there, our ancestors had to go out into the marketplace and sell it/show it to people. We are not exempt from that, and to think that we are shows a level of (and I will use the word Elizabeth used here) ‘entitlement.’

I have always seen it this way too (hence Rachel’s elbow). The promotional aspect of being published isn’t something I always love (though sometimes I absolutely do) and it is tiring, but I also see it as necessary, like doing my taxes is necessary. It’s part of the job. As Elizabeth herself says in Big Magic ‘You don’t just get to leap from bright moment to bright moment,’ and that is true of life, let alone the writing life.

There is ALWAYS the option of keeping your work to and for yourself, and just for the love of it. I felt somehow vindicated by Elizabeth’s perspective on this - not that she is right about everything - but because she too doesn’t see herself as somehow above the hustle. I know I’m not.

On that note (!) I will be travelling for various events this week at Truman Books in Leeds, Sip and Swap in Glasgow and Toppings in Edinburgh. I know the Glasgow event is sold out, but there are a handful of tickets left for the other two.

Until next week.