Five Stars for E. Gilbert’s TED lecture.
I thoroughly enjoyed watching this video, a pastime I seldom allow myself. But for 20-some minutes I sat glued to my iBook while real work nagged at me. Elizabeth Gilbert is a genius of sorts, the way Madonna is. Both are skillful in a few areas. Most people who excel in any one of those areas normally don’t bother to be skilled in the others. For example, Madonna sings, dances, and acts, all beautifully, but you wouldn’t call her a virtuoso in any one of those arts. It is her ability to cross-over, cross-breed her talent, along with her savvy management, that adds up to her unique “madonna-ness” or what Gilbert might label “freakish success.” I am a fan of Madonna’s.
And I enjoyed Gilbert’s book, Eat, Pray, Love. I did almost put i
t down, but then I got to the part where the author begins to have crying jags over not wanting to get pregnant or to have children. I laughed out loud and thought, There’s nothing to it. Don’t get pregnant, don’t have kids, if you don’t want to. But without dramatic tension and deep conflict there is no story, in life and in literature. She wove that thread deftly.
I am grateful for a female author of Gilbert’s renown and stature, who shares my passion for the writing life and who loves kids, but doesn’t think, in her (my) case, there is room for them. She has been vilified as narcissistic. She may be, but that’s irrelevant to me. Is this label a double standard? Hers is a piece of literature where the woman is the heavy, telling the man, no, rejecting him, going off to have a torrid affair, and look for her soul. And then writing about it. Henry Miller did it. Norman Mailer did it. Hemingway . . . you can name the others. Heretofore, we had Erica Jong’s thinly-veiled fiction, Fear of Flying. But that seems to have crash landed long ago.
In Eat, Pray, Love, the writing is good, often excellent, but not great. What is my 
definition of great? Well, for one thing it would be a type of writing I felt I couldn’t achieve, like say, in Cynthia Ozick’s essays (even those with which I don’t agree). I and many others can and do write as Gilbert does. A commercial success, like hers, today or in the past, does not equal greatness. But it does merit our attention and consideration. (If her publisher wants to give me the same $200,000 advance, we can test this hypothesis—I’ll write Eat, Pray, Dance . . . )
Gilbert has done well in creative non-fiction, has written fiction, and is a noteworthy journalist. She is, like Madonna a cross-over talent: novelist, essayist, short story writer, biographer, memoirist—and, as her TED lecture proves, a standup comedian (I thought she was funny, the way Julie Sweeney is, with lots of substantial sobering commentary).
That she is not a virtuoso in any one of those above areas might well be a key to her “freakish success.” The times of sharply focused apprenticeship in one area have been over and done since the Middle Ages.
I stood in awe of Gilbert’s delivery of her talk —sans notes. Could she have memorized it all? I am fire and ice when I have to speak before a live public audience. I admired her ability to put herself at dead center of her talk: People keep asking me how am I going to top this huge success, EPL, she posits. And this, she suggests, makes her want to become self-destructive like Mailer, Hemingway, Woolf, etc. I’m sure only a small percentage ask that rhetorical question. But she made it her throughline, most skillfully.
So then, from the specific she leaps to the universal: Look at what we (society) do to our artists. It’s easy to get on board with her, because it is true we don’t support our artists/writers enough. But she doesn’t have time to cover the nuance, which maybe is the very oxygen of true greatness (something to ponder).
I’ll let you watch the lecture and enjoy her premises and conclusions, entertainingly delivered. The one assertion of hers, I’d take issue with, big time, is that we consider “genius” as an entity outside of ourselves, the way Greeks and Romans created gods for every human trait. (Never mind that I think she misrepresented the Greeks’ and Romans’ forms of belief in gods/mythology). But, the danger in this assertion is one that is highly visible today. The violence, wars, bloodshed, and incredible inhumanity today has a direct link to the belief in this one god up there in heaven who is apart and separate from our human race. It has allowed us all to abdicate responsibility.
No, Elizabeth, do not take away the mysticism of genius, creation. It dwells in me, is me, of me. If I want to harm myself, I won’t blame society. I’ll take full responsibility, not blame God or anyone else.