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The Journey
Writer says that today's women find memoirs more helpful than novels
Photo Courtesy of Elizabeth Gilbert
Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love made her enormously popular. An earlier book, Stern Men, about Maine lobstermen, is being reissued this month.
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Published: February 20, 2009
It's probably appropriate that Elizabeth Gilbert wasn't available by phone for an interview recently. She was in Chile for a relative's wedding, and then she was off on a U.S. book tour, which will eventually bring her to Winston-Salem on Sunday. Gilbert is probably best known for her popular book Eat, Pray, Love (Viking, 2006), a memoir about a year living in Italy, India and Indonesia after a divorce and depression. Before turning her pen on herself, she wrote for SPIN and GQ magazines (including articles which took her to New Zealand and China, among other places). But she's a fiction writer, as well: Stern Men, a novel about lobstermen in coastal Maine, was originally published in 2000 and will be reissued this month in paperback.
Gilbert, 39, had time to answer some questions by e-mail, though. And a few days from now, you can catch her in real life, for a moderated talk and book-signing at the Hawthorne Inn.
Q. I've read that you decided to create your own writing program after college, instead of taking the graduate-school route. What was that program? How and why did you become a writer? Any advice to aspiring writers?
A. I took a few writing classes in college, but I wasn't sure that path was for me. Even though I have since taught writing at the graduate level, I'm still not entirely convinced that this is the best way for people to learn how to write. I think it's interesting that all the other creative, fine-arts fields -- from music, to dance, to visual arts -- have this centuries-long tradition of tutorialship. But writing never had such a history -- or at least not until very recently in the United States.
I think the general understanding is that, because writing is so private, the best and maybe only way to learn how to do it is privately. If you need teachers, you can find them in any library. Your best teachers are all the great writers who came before you, whose work you can study even if those authors died long ago. This is how people learned to write for a long while. This whole business of modern writing schools and writing programs is all very new.
I liked better Walt Whitman's advice to young writers… get out there in the world and experience as much of it as you possibly can. Collect voices, collect experiences, collect different perspectives.
Maybe I respond to this idea because I'm a traveler by nature…but in my case, it was quite clear that I needed to go wandering, to roll around in the world and experience it all firsthand, in order to collect stories and then learn how to tell stories.
So that's what I did -- I worked in bars and diners, worked on a ranch in Wyoming, saved my pennies to take trips to Mexico and to Europe, and carried a journal with me everywhere, documenting every single thing I saw and heard, and building a collection of ideas, experiences, voices and visions.
Q. With the exception ofEat, Pray, Love, you seem to write a lot about men or male-dominated worlds.Stern Men
is populated with crusty lobstermen on a pair of craggy Maine islands, though much of the book is told through Ruth Thomas, an independent-minded 18-year-old.
The Last American Man is an autobiographical look at Eustace Conway, a modern-day naturalist whoPublisher's Weekly called a cross between Davy Crockett and Henry David Thoreau. Are you drawn to masculine stories and rugged voices, and if so, why?
A. Yes -- I certainly seem to have been drawn to masculine worlds and masculine experiences (or to the women who inhabit those worlds). Much less so now, I must say, as I get older. But when I was in my 20s, I was so eager to have big, bold encounters with life -- and unfortunately, for better or for worse, once you get into those big, bold environments they tend to be fairly male-dominated.
And I think maybe I was working through some of my fascination and questions about men, too. I've always liked and enjoyed the company of men, and I liked being in those worlds -- and I think The Last American Man was almost like a final field report after a decade spent really carefully looking at men and listening to them and trying to figure them out. Eustace was so much the epitome of American Masculinity that I felt like if I could translate him, I could sort of solve the whole puzzle once and for all. You'll notice that -- since The Last American Man was published -- I've been sort of done with that whole world of hyper-masculinity. I think it sort of settled some of the questions for me.
And the next book that came --Eat, Pray, Love -- is decidedly a woman's story, and decidedly told to women readers. But it was almost like I had to settle all my questions with masculinity before I could quiet down and take a long look at the interior life of women.
My next book is about marriage -- so maybe that will be the blending of both worlds, the story about how those two entities merge, and try to live together....
Q. Tell me more about Stern Men. What inspired it? Were the islands in the book inspired by a real place, and if so, where, and had you been there before? What kind of research did you do so that you could write authentically?
A. Stern Men came into existence after a friend of mine who grew up in coastal Maine suggested to me that I look into the lives of lobster fisherman, because I might find an interesting world there. I had been writing about the American West for a spell before that, and this friend of mine suggested that my whole cowboy fixation may have run its course, and that perhaps it was time to turn my attention to a different kind of rugged American individualist. Plus, he told me about this concept of "lobster wars" -- these territory battles that can rage between rival islands -- and I loved how archaic and dark that seemed.
I did a huge amount of research for this book, coming into it knowing exactly nothing about any of this. The islands in my book are a fictitious amalgam of several real islands off the coast of Maine that I studied pretty closely. One thing I made a point of doing which helped a lot was to go up to Maine in the winter and hang out with the fishermen and their families. I went out fishing with them in the winter, which helped convince them that I was serious about wanting to see how these things were really done.
In the winter, too, there's a lot of free time for storytelling, and everyone wants to tell stories. Mostly, I just found that if I was really candid with people and I told them, "Listen -- I'm not from here, and I don't really know what I'm doing, but I have this job to write this book and I don't want it to be terrible and inaccurate...can you help me, by telling me what I really need to know?"
Well, people were really cooperative. They have a lot of pride. They wanted their world to be depicted accurately -- as we all would want. It was intimidating for me at first to be around them, but in the end, I think they were grateful to have an interested ear listening to their tales.
Q. The memoir has become such a popular genre. Why did you decide to jump into the fray and turn your eyes and ears on your own life? Do you think your story is different from any other of the number of books chronicling change through travel and self-discovery? In interviews, I've heard you talk about
Eat, Pray, Love as a quest. Did you find what you were looking for?
A. I have a pet theory about why memoir has become so popular. When I think of my grandmother -- who was a young woman during the Great Depression -- she was a farm wife and an avid reader. Not that she had much time on her hands, but she filled those spare moments of free time with reading, and what she read were novels.
Our lives today aren't as physically and economically challenging as women's lives were long ago, but now the troubles we face tend to be more emotional. The choices that we face in the modern world are so vast and overwhelming that I think women these days get a little overwhelmed trying to figure out simply how to live their lives.
And so I think that more than ever we are interested in hearing stories of how other people did it, how other people solved the big emotional questions of their lives. I know that this is the case in my life right now; as much as I love literature, I find it very difficult to read novels anymore (contemporary ones, anyhow).
With rare exceptions, I find myself just not believing what I'm reading -- and longing for true stories, instead. I want to know how to live -- this is my all-consuming quest these days. And I think a lot of us want that. And yes -- absolutely -- living and writingEat, Pray, Love helped me enormously. To the point that you can easily divide my life into two parts: before that journey, and after. I'm still the same person, of course, with the same general personality and such -- but I learned so much on that about how to cope with the curious experience of living, and I use those lessons quite literally every single day.
Q. You seem to have made world travel a priority in your life long before Eat, Pray, Love. Is that true? And what's the value in globetrotting, especially if you find that you can't afford it?
A. Actually, even though I am in Chile right now my globetrotting has slowed down considerably. I travel now when I have to, and I do travel still for writing projects or for work, but I don't feel as compulsively drawn to travel-for-travel's-sake as I did when I was younger.
My life is a much different shape now than it ever was. I have a (happy) marriage now, and a beautiful house, in a community that I have really come to love and cherish. I live near my sister and my parents, and I'm really involved in the local pace of the small town where I live. I have cats. I have a garden. I am building a library in the attic of my house. More and more, the only place I want to explore is right where I am: Frenchtown, N.J. The only other big trip I have planned for this year is to go to Australia, and that's only because my stepson is getting married. But last year I canceled a trip to India and two trips to Italy; as the dates approached, I found that I simply didn't want to go. I wanted to be home with the tomato plants, instead, or sitting on my own porch with a glass of wine and a good book.
As for people not being able to afford traveling -- all I can say is please don't give up on your dreams because you've convinced yourself they are unaffordable. I saw huge swaths of the world on a diner waitress' salary when I was in my 20s.
And I had a great encounter in the airport in Santiago the other day. I met this married American couple who were in the middle of a bicycle trip around South America together. They told me they'd been planning the trip for about eight years. Because that's how many years it took them to pay off all their debts and save up the money to do it. But their frugality had paid off -- now, eight years later, they are seeing the world and having the adventure of a lifetime, and now they've decided to settle in Chile for a few years and teach English. I know this kind of thing isn't possible for everyone but I loved the excitement of watching this young couple for making the intensely personal decision to number their priorities carefully and forgo buying a house or a car, and instead creating the life they really wanted -- a passionate encounter with the "beyond."
My suspicion is that many more people could do this sort of thing than they may realize. But you have to make it the most important thing in your life, and you have to be willing to sacrifice for it. I always tell people who say how much they long to travel, "Pick a date. Pick a year. Even if it's a decade from now, start saying, ‘On March 17, 2019, I will be living in Greece,'" and then -- every single day, every single hour -- start working toward that." As for me, though, I think I can safely say that on March 17, 2019, I will be living in Frenchtown, N.J. -- at least I hope so!
■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.
If you go
Author Elizabeth Gilbert will discuss her novel Stern Men at the Hawthorne Inn and Conference Center Sunday at 4 p.m.
General admission tickets are $20 and include a book-signing and reception. Premier tickets cost $95 and include a copy of Stern Men plus afternoon tea and a private reception with Gilbert (beginning at 2:30 p.m.).
Gilbert's appearance is sponsored by Bookmarks. For tickets, go to www.bookmarks.org or call 1-800-838-3006.
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