Posted by Elizabeth
When I heard that Elizabeth Gilbert had written a new book, I was nervous. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read Committed, which picks up where Eat Pray Love leaves off, chronicling her difficult decision to marry Felipe, the man she literally sails off into the sunset with at the end of the story. There was no way this book could ever live up to EPL, for I am one of those women – and I know there are many of us – for whom EPL changed my life. Although Maikael and I had already been toying with the idea of taking eight months out of our life to embark on a journey of self-discovery around the world, EPL sealed the deal for me. Inspired by her tale, we even spent two weeks lapping up life and culture in Ubud, Bali, which she details in such a mesmerizing way. For me, Gilbert’s prose captured what I was feeling but was unable to put into words at that time in my life, feelings about being caught between a conventional and unconventional life, about being unsure what I wanted from life, about not knowing who I was or what made me happy in the slightest. As different as our lives were – I was ten years her junior and not considering divorce – I identified with Liz Gilbert.
But I know not everyone felt this way. When my former bookclub read Eat Pray Love, our group was fiercely divided by equal amounts of adoration and dislike of the book. Some felt her journey was trite, her head inflated, her love story too tidy and saccharine. Other just simply didn’t “get it,” which was unfathomable to me, who had found such connection and solace in the book. As I traveled around the globe, the subject of the book often came up in conversations with fellow explorers (it really was a worldwide phenomenon), and, even amongst the highly self-selecting group of long-term travelers, the division of opinions was just as acute. Love it or hate it, the book clearly made people feel something.
However, when I learned that Elizabeth Gilbert was coming to town – and that $35 could buy me two tickets and a hardback copy of the book – I was Committed. So last Wednesday night, me and 500 fellow Liz Gilbert fans, including my former therapist, filed into an expansive ballroom at the University of New Mexico, which was stuffed to the gills with conference seating and estrogen. The audience was one loud hum, buzzing with the anticipation of a cultural icon about to speak. But a loud hush fell over the room as soon as Elizabeth Gilbert stepped to the stage, a flowy grey cardigan draped over her thin frame, her tousled blond hair pulled away from her face in a messy twist, a genuine smile etched on her face.
For the next 30 minutes she talked about the process of writing Committed, which represents the fruits of her second attempt to write a follow-up book to EPL. She spent two years writing a 500-page manuscript…and then threw the entire thing away. As she spoke these words, I’m pretty sure I heard myself groan audibly. I’ve never written anything 500 pages in length, but I’ve written something a tenth of the size, and even throwing that away is vomit-inducing. Gilbert discussed how difficult it was to ditch the manuscript, one in which she had received a considerable advance from her publisher and who, after two years of work, was soon expecting a publishable book. “But the book was horrible,” she said. “It wasn’t ‘me.’ It wasn’t written in my voice. It was written in the voice of who I thought I should be after the success of Eat Pray Love.” Her best bet, she reasoned, was to take six months off to figure out the follow-up book she was meant to write. In the meantime she gardened. And one day, with her fingers dug hard into the soft earth, a single sentence – the sentence that was to become the opening line to the book – simply came to her.
Late one afternoon in the summer of 2006, I found myself in a small village in northern Vietnam, sitting around a sooty kitchen fire with a number of local women whose language I did not speak, trying to ask them questions about marriage.
From there she “took the sentence for a walk across the page,” and proceeded to pen Committed in a mere two months.
While not all of us have the luxury of time or literary advances, as I sat in that overheated ballroom, surrounded by a sea of like-minded New Mexicans, it dawned me on me what a powerful lesson her process presented for living a life in pencil. There is nothing more important in this life than learning to be YOU – whoever you are. In fact, is it even something we should have to learn? If we are skilled and equipped to be anything, it’s to be ourselves. And yet, how difficult it can be to discover and then speak our voice, whether we are writers or not. It shouldn’t be easier to be someone else, but that is often the case. Borrowing someone else’s tastes, pleasures, preferences, and aversions is a simple game of mimicry; to truly face who we are, and not who we think we should be, is a lifelong project.
When we are living a life that isn’t attuned to who we are, it’s been my experience that things take forever to manifest themselves. Everything feels like a Sisyphean task, making it difficult to differentiate between sheer hard work towards a difficult goal and being engaged in the “wrong” thing. The difference, I think, is that when we are living a life attuned to who we are, things come more easily, more quickly. While there are bumps in the road, setbacks, and hard uphill battles, the effort feels purposeful. We feel a deep sense that, while the path is bumpy, it’s the right path to be traveling down. No amount of construction can reshape the wrong path.
While we talk often here at Life in Pencil about making changes within the parameters of our existing lives, Gilbert’s story teaches us that sometimes life requires us to start over. If a plan is born from a place that doesn’t feel true or authentic, no amount of “editing” is going to make it right. Sometimes, major revisions are required. Sometimes, we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sometimes, we have to start from scratch. When Gilbert threw away that first draft, without another story idea in sight, she was facing a problem that needed to be solved, a puzzle of the highest order. “A puzzle,” she said, “is just a crisis with the volume knob turned down.” But rather than panicking, she trusted that time – and a vegetable garden – would eventually bring order to the puzzle. “Problems are like cheap underwear,” a Buddhist monk friend once told her. “Eventually they wear themselves out.”
And it’s true, isn’t it? Over time, even the most pernicious problems wear themselves dull and raw, until we genuinely wonder what we were ever worried about in the first place. Such was the case with Gilbert’s book, and such may be the case with any dilemma, crisis, or life change that you might be facing. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is take a break and trust that the process will work itself out. I have always believed that the only way out is through. Whether we are talking about a failed book project, a career crisis, or a relationship gone awry, there is no easy shortcut or “work around” (as my computer programming husband would say). We need those seemingly impossible puzzles, those failed attempts, to push us through to the other side.
Just last week I was cleaning out my office, and I discovered a draft of the first essay I had ever written nearly six years ago. Back then, I was a graduate student in counseling psychology, and a career in writing was the furthest thing from my mind. And yet, much like Elizabeth Gilbert, I was drying my hair one morning before school when a single line popped into my head. I immediately scrambled to write it down, and proceeded to skip my morning classes – which I never did – to write an entire essay, which tumbled forth from that one line. I wasn’t sure where this line had come from, or where it was going, but two years later I submitted that essay to a local writers’ conference. I remember feeling very proud of my effort, a reflection of the best I could produce at the time. But reading this essay six years later, while there are lines that are still gems, it struck me that it just wasn’t very good! The ideas are there, but the execution is sloppy, amateur. It dawned on me how much I have grown as a writer in that time span, but how necessary it was to write those first stumbling drafts on my way through to becoming a writer. And when I read this post in another six years, I’m sure I’ll be struck by the same thought.
Gilbert’s friend, an artist, often reminds her, “The creative product is the unidentical twin of the dream you had in your head.” In other words, what we produce while pursuing the creative process – be it writing a book, baking a pie, or even living life itself – is often a flawed copy of the perfect image we held in our head when we conceived the idea. It seems to me that the purpose isn’t to create a facsimile but to simply chase after that image to the best of our abilities. Whatever we produce will never be as perfect as we’d hoped. But with time and experience, I think our image and the real thing grow closer together. Just like Gilbert’s book, this blog, as imperfect as it is, couldn’t exist without that first humble essay. And whatever goal you are working towards in your life couldn’t be accomplished without whatever fumbling efforts you are making right now.
Are you a fan of Eat, Pray, Love (or not)? Have you read Committed? What lessons do you take away from Gilbert’s process that I have missed? Do you think that sometimes starting over is the best thing?
