Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies, in “All the Way to the River”
Gilbert began working as a journalist, and quickly established herself as a student of masculinity who had an excess of feminine charm. In “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon,” a 1997 GQ piece, she wrote about the tough, sexy, unhinged girls with whom she had bartended in the East Village, and their regulars (“Nazi Dave, Vietnam Bob, Spit-Take Phil”), and all the ways that the former seduced and fended off the latter. (In 2000, it became the basis for an essentially perfect movie.) There was a time, she writes, “when I measured a good night by the number of marriage proposals I received.” Another GQ piece, from 1998, was about a survivalist woodsman named Eustace Conway, who ate roadkill and wore handmade buckskin. Conway rode a horse across America, sleeping under the stars and inspiring a vicarious longing that seems prophetic of Gilbert’s own path. “From coast to coast, Americans of every conceivable background had looked up at Eustace Conway on his horse and said wistfully, ‘I wish I could do what you’re doing,’ ” Gilbert writes. “To every last citizen, Eustace had replied, ‘You can.’ ” Gilbert expanded the profile into a book called “The Last American Man.” Janet Maslin, reviewing the book in the Times, noted that it “treads as thin a line between honesty and self-conscious myth making as Mr. Conway does,” and suggested that it was headed for “the kind of popularity that will only complicate Mr. Conway’s problems.”
But it was Gilbert’s popularity, driven by that mixture of honesty and mythmaking, that would lead to complicated problems. “Eat, Pray, Love” was so marketable (unaffiliated travel packages materialized around the world) and so easily caricatured (there was a “South Park” episode called “Eat, Pray, Queef,” a parody novel called “Drink, Play, F@#k”) that people quickly forgot how purely pleasurable the book is to read. Here’s Gilbert on learning Italian: “Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. I would slosh home through the rain after class, draw a hot bath, and lie there in the bubbles reading the Italian dictionary aloud to myself, taking my mind off my divorce pressures and my heartache. The words made me laugh in delight.” In a review for the Times, Jennifer Egan called Gilbert’s prose “close to irresistible,” adding, “If a more likable writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven’t found him or her.” Gilbert frequently refers to herself in the third person (“The first summer of Liz and David looked like the falling-in-love montage of every romantic movie you’ve ever seen”), describes her love affairs as world-historically magical (“We had more fun waiting in line together at the Department of Motor Vehicles than most couples have on their honeymoons”), and communes with the spirit of her ex-husband (“Hi, sweetie,” she says, after summoning his spirit to the rooftop of an ashram). All of this is made bearable not only by Gilbert’s literary talent but by her eagerness to find people extraordinary, by the frankness with which she writes about feeling broken—“I came to fear nighttime like it was a torturer’s cellar,” she confesses—and by her obvious empathy upon encountering brokenness in others.
Still, her temperament is so strong, and her outlook so positive, that she never actually seems broken on the page—when she writes about indecision and confusion, she comes off as clear and decisive. This makes her a particular sort of narrator: always freshly emerging from a dark wood, breathless with revelation that may or may not stick. This manner of self-presentation is perhaps Gilbert’s primary contribution to the culture; it shows up in the work of her literary descendants, particularly the spiky and passionate confessionalist Glennon Doyle, who published three memoirs of self-reinvention before reaching her mid-forties. Gilbert also paved the way for Cheryl Strayed, whose best-selling wilderness memoir, “Wild,” led to a career in the realm of soulful, raw-ish advice and self-help, and for Brené Brown, an academic who functions as a life coach for the “Eat, Pray, Love” demographic, writing about courage and vulnerability and shame. (In 2015, Doyle, Strayed, and Brown joined up with Gilbert and the author Rob Bell to form the Compassion Collective, and, in a little over a day, they raised more than a million dollars for aid to Syrian refugees.)
But Gilbert’s most pervasive influence can be found online, in the breathless having-just-finally-realized tone that dizzying numbers of women who narrate their lives on the internet have adopted. On social media, many of the most chaotic and emotionally lawless people you’ve ever known are posting on a regular basis about having at long last achieved inner peace. Many among us, after observing this cringe-inducing side effect of regular self-narration at mass scale, have given up altogether on sincere ideas of personal epiphany. But even those who might seek to subvert that tone, or invoke it ironically, are negotiating the same conventions. Gilbert may be patient zero for the latter-day memoirist mind-set: so many women—and I would never exclude myself—have come to believe, at some level, that they, too, are Elizabeth Gilberts, people who search hard and love harder, whose personal journeys can and should captivate millions, whose flaws and failings only make them better heroines in the end.
Gilbert’s prose in “All the Way to the River” is often strangely flat and clipped. She has given two TED talks on creativity, which together have been viewed more than twenty-four million times; in 2015, she wrote “Big Magic,” a best-selling book on the subject, which is full of spirited and generous advice for artists. The new book reads, at times, like the transcript of a TED talk—in one chapter, Gilbert introduces the metaphor of “Earth school,” in which we might envision our planet as “the toughest and most elite accredited academy for spiritual ascension in the entire universe,” and suggests that instead of asking “Why me?” we should ask “How might this terrible situation be perfectly designed to help me to evolve?”
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