When the Agnes Scott calendar arrived in December, with a prominent notice that author Elizabeth Gilbert would be speaking on campus January 11th about her new book, I tossed it out. But after seeing additional notices, and being attracted to that lovely campus - used so often as a Hollywood set - my car made its way out onto streets still icy from last week’s storm. I had to go. After all, the campus is only a few blocks from my house and I have been curious to see how a popular writer handles a book tour.
The event was first come, first serve. I got there much too early but had good discussions about life, books, and my neighborhood with folks around me. There was good energy in the crowd, mostly feminist as one would expect on a women’s college campus. The audience was a third students, a third that looked like they were the age of moms of the students, and a third professor types.
Elizabeth Gilbert did not disappoint, despite arriving quite late. She was fast thinking, fast talking, bright, funny, confident, ever kind and charming, and much more animated than her reflective, thoughtful muse persona I’d seen in a TV interview. She read from what seemed to be the first chapter of Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage. I didn’t remember Eat, Pray, Love having quite so much sarcasm as this new book. But then the reviews have not been kind this go around. How easily could anyone top Eat, Pray, Love’ s success? Readers cannot help empathizing, if not identifying, with that bestseller’s plot: a broken heart and tears on the bathroom floor. Her repeated mention last night of that event demonstrated how terribly painful that divorce still is to her, and to her new husband who was avoiding marriage with her or anyone else for the same reason. But the plot of this new book, according to the reviews I have read, doesn’t elicit much empathy: woman meets the man of her dreams and is forced to marry him because of some vague rules about his Visa status imposed by Homeland Security. They still live happily ever after, just married. She talked about love in marriage as having “limits.” Love limits your freedom as much as it expands you. Not being able to take off and travel indefinitely is that limit she feels she must adhere to, to keep her new relationship with ‘Felipe’ strong and intact. I was interested that she said love relationships are full of “release and bond” cycles.
As a writer she is insightful and fun. As a speaker she is captivating, smart, gracious and compelling. I think her draw is the fact that she manages to turn lemons into lemonade in quite such adventurous and brave ways. She makes her life look enviable. Grabbing the audience from the first moment she strolled onstage – tall, straight and in hippy clothes - she held up her new book and pleaded with the audience to PLEASE buy it, not just this week, but right that minute, not so she could rival her own success with Eat, Pray, Love but to knock Sarah Palin off the best-seller charts! There were anti-Bush (W) comments as well to which the audience roared approvingly. Her humor is unbeatable even if it is, like her writing at times, a little contrived. Somehow I drew satisfaction that while not a literary genius, she is a solidly good writer who does a fine job of telling a story, and she decidedly deserves the praise she gets.
That acclaim is not universal, however, as I was waiting to see. Sure enough, a pert student stood up and asked how she would respond to critics who found her writing self-absorbed and narcissistic. Gilbert’s answer was direct and perfect, that she has just written two books about herself so, yes, she is narcissistic. But the argument is defensible, she said. How can one write a memoir otherwise? She says the people who use those labels for her probably do not like her books, pure and simple.
She gave a tip to writers: pick one person you want to write to, and your words will have universal meaning, as all very specific examples do and must. She wrote Eat, Pray, Love to a friend whom she thought would like to hear about her travels, and travails.
I admired her honest talk about her depression that lasted four to five years. And her worry that she might not end up in a happy relationship. How she always “looked over (her) shoulder to see if trouble would follow” but how she eventually learned not to worry.
An entertaining and inspiring evening. The expected energy did not disappoint, whether or not one agreed with her life, her character, her premise, or her promise. I wish her increasing success as a writer but even more so, in her very admirable personal journey.
