ABC Jennifer Byrne Presents: Elizabeth Gilbert

[Music] hi Jennifer Byrne here with a special guest who's ashamed tricky to introduce because so many people so many readers feel they already know her and that's because eight years ago she wrote a book a memoir really which went feral which sold 10 million copies and turned its title Eat Pray Love into a kind of inescapable cultural marker and such an attention magnet it rather blocked the view the prize-winning short stories books and magazine articles she had written before now she's traveling yet another path with a big bold historical novel about a plane faced sharp brained girl born at the dawn of the 1800s before we hear about that warm welcome to you Elizabeth Gilbert Thank You Jennifer it's great to be here thanks for having me um first novel in 13 years yeah feeling good yeah feel free yes no more you know it was great it's so great it's there was so much pent-up energy in me I got my start as a fiction writer and and fiction has always been my love and and then I took this very sharp detour around the age of 30 into memoir which you know obviously turned out well and I don't regret having done it you know but it was a long time that I had gone without doing the thing that I loved more than anything in the world and so to return to it and return to it in big form as I did with this book was really excited well are these a look just I've gotta say this book struck me it's got a female heroine Alma Whitaker but it's the kind of book that they used to write about great men great men adventurers right they have they forget their spouses they have their investigations they go wandering the world she's one of those great men but she's a woman yeah you got it exactly and I I wanted to also retell the great 19th century epic novels that I loved you know the the novels of Dickens trollop Eliot Austen and yet be able to have a little bit more freedom with the female characters than those writers necessarily I wanted to tell a complete female story that doesn't just necessarily end with either the happy marriage or the destroyed reputation which are usually the only endings that women got in the 19th century for stories about themselves and and so I wanted to say what about the questing women what about the adventuresome women and they existed and I wanted to write a book that honored that spirit and I liked the fact that you invented a woman who was very plain in fact I think that the housekeeper when she was born described as having a face like a bowl of porridge yes that's the face she kept for her whole life but the book actually goes prior to her birth which is due on January 18 hundred very much the dawn of the century and her father who makes all the money yes and so she's born rich he was an adventurer very much in the Australian heart because he travelled with cook yes he did Americans aren't men to know about cooker no we aren't but I happen to know about cook because I came into possession of a family heirloom which was my great-grandfather's and I don't know where he got it but it was this gorgeous 1784 leather-bound edition of Captain Cook's voyages published only a couple years after the final expedition and we had it in her house when I was a kid and we were forbidden to touch it because it was the most valuable thing in her house so of course we touched it is it what time 1784 was the publication of this book and it looked like something from the Hogwarts library you know is this just big exquisite magical looking book and I loved it Maps ethnographic illustrations botanical illustrations all the original ship's logs it's a real treasure and when I was about four years old by the looks of it I got my hands on a pen and I scrawled my name on the inside of this book thereby doing two things one absolutely destroying its value and two laying claim to it and I like to think that it was a little message that I was sending to myself into the future saying do something with this because the greatest story is in here and so my mother gave me the book eventually saying you know you you ruined it I guess it's yours all too now you know just as well bra yeah there's that too I want tonight I think they're mutually compatible I think you can be both things so it came back into my hands and then I just started reading it again and I thought I wanted I love this era that that period the Age of Enlightenment into the beginning of the 19th century was such an exquisite period for the study of Natural History even more than the exploration even more than the cartography what fascinated me was the botany and the idea that there was a trade in botanical exploration and who were these guys who were taking these bold voyages and so I started with one of those characters and then from him came my heroine I sort of imagined that you have had a tremendous time researching this book because there's so much detail so many one of my favorites is at one stage an Italian astronomer a grand maestro comes to Henry's estate with Alma restore a young girl and and he organizes the guests slightly drunk to form themselves in the shape of the solar system and Alma is given a rocket a sparkler yeah and this is the comet and she is allowed to cut across all their ellipses it's a very couple of pages but it's a beautiful description of the mood of the age did that happen or did you totally make that up well I read Keith's mentions it um you know I did I did such a wide strange pile of research for this book because I wasn't only writing about botany I also was just trying to get into as you say the spirit of the age and I was also reading nothing but 18th and 19th century writing journals letters trying to hear people's voices and there's this tiny throwaway footnote and I've never been able to get more details on it but Keats has a memory of being a child and seeing I dance held on a yard in a big lawn outside where the guests were arranged like the planets and it just was so I mean elegant and beautiful and so I needed to and I looked everywhere for the full description and couldn't find it well I had to invent it daily yeah oh he doesn't exist yeah obviously the Italian astronomer doesn't exist in real life Jonesy's so that Keith saw that or or seem to remember seeing that as a child and I thought that was exquisite and sublime we modern folk yeah we take the view that we're on some constant stage of advancement and that things are always getting better but when you look back at that time yeah it seems not necessarily so it's tricky as a woman I get I hold that there is no better moment to have been born then now it's very difficult as a woman to look back nostalgically at almost any hair in history because there wasn't really room for you I mean that moment that we just discussed about Alma being handed the sparkler and being allowed to run through is sort of a dream where her father says you know make a place for yourself run across the universe that wasn't really the message that women were given until very recently so from that perspective I am delighted to be here and I am delighted to have access to education to literacy to birth control you know to all of these advances that a that I do love as a reader and as a lover of of language and my personal feeling is that the middle of the 19th century was the human peak in the English language for for beauty and and with all apologies to Shakespeare you know I I do prefer you know I do think that and there was a moment where there was a great deal of literacy and where everybody spoke well if you if you could read you read well if you could write you you wrote well when you read the the letters that Civil War soldiers wrote to their families in the United States in the 1860s their beautiful and and people wrote constantly it was their email it was their instant messaging it was their phone conversation they were in this beautiful literate correspondence with each other and the literature of that time represents that sort of heightened appreciation for language and and they were I wanted to join that you know and they were also discussing big issues they were discussing evolution was being virtually created I mean as a theory religion versus science slavery was under discussion they and they weren't screaming at each other they were actually just discussing it sometimes they were screaming at each other and sometimes they were burning down each other's homes I mean it did get impassioned but but that idea that I replicate in the novel of these dinner table conversations this sort of salon that that Henry Whittaker and his wife ran in there a state where they sought out the greatest minds of the agent there were great minds to be found in that age and they brought them to the table and they put them sometimes in open combat against each other or they they forced their daughters to be able to sit and hold place at that table and if you couldn't you were asked to leave you know if you couldn't articulate yourself well enough to deserve a place at that table you were off and I I had a I had a love of that and a sort of nostalgia my family was a bit like that I'm not so much with intellectual levels but comedic Lee you know if you weren't funny enough to hold your place at the table if she couldn't get the laugh at the table you you know you were really welcome but if you could then you could join into this very raucous conversation so so I'm comfortable with the idea of a dinner table where there's an edge and I like that but I did learn how to tell a story and how to appreciate a good story because there was a lot of that going around and you were always gonna derive so I assume yeah always yeah that was never even a consideration for anything else was there any other writer in your family no but we were all readers and well my sister who's three years older than me is also a writer and a novelist so I think our family was a bit of an incubator for for that kind of thing and we you know our second home was the library when we were growing up and I had a mother and a father who felt very strongly that that reading was important and we learned from an early age because we also grew up on a farm and we had a lot of arduous chores the only thing you could be doing where you would not be taken out of it and put to work because if you were playing it looked like you were bored so it's like oh you're bored enough to play you then you can stack wood you know I'm like whatever the job was but if you had a your face in a book there was some regard for that they both had a kind of holy reverence for that and and I think that made reading both a refuge and a passion from a very early age when you didn't go up to one of those fancy writing courses you you were a can-do girl you went out and had experiences you worked in bass you worked as a cowgirl yeah I'm I'm told when you were working on the magazine that you actually you worked as a man you became a man after a while yeah a psychiatrist would have an interesting time taking that apart wouldn't they but yes when I worked for GQ I wrote for years this is why it amuses me that I'm known so much as a chiclet author now for years I wrote exclusively for and about men I wrote for Spin Magazine ever for GQ magazine my first books were about very masculine topics I was sort of fascinated with masculinity to the point that I did a feature for GQ where I spent a week as a drag king dressed up as a man including a sporting hidden in my pants a condom stuffed with bird season which which the drag king said was the best way to do it I had a head coaching from an actual drag king but that was a really fascinating oh that's what that's what that's what oh yes that's what it's called I mean she knew she said this is the way to you know get the appropriate um and to sort of feel like you're a dude so yeah it was a fascinating experience to walk her in New York City for a week as a guy I enjoyed what I learned from it although I didn't necessarily enjoy being that it was interesting I love that fact that you you did you went on to become the chick lady queen of a self-help jar yeah yeah um but it was blocked she always wrote about man what did you learn what are the smart things you learn about men when you study them you wrote that book the last American man and about a super hyper macho modern-day cowboy yeah you know there's a line that Ursula K Le Guin said she said the the flipside of heroism is sadness women and servants know this I always thought that was a really beautiful line and I learned that when I the guy that I wrote about for the book the last American man is this you know uber masculine outdoorsman woodsman and who I really admired when I met and who everybody really admires when they meet but there's something sort of deeply lonely and tragic about that guy and and about the constant quest to prove your strength above all others and the way he treated women the way he treated anybody subservient to him was was not to be admired and you felt that was the other side of being so hot the matches you like he gave me the navy seal of a cowboy yeah I think so and I've known some Navy SEALs and I don't think I would there aren't a lot of them I've met who I would want to be married to or the child of there are certain there's certain other aspects of humanity that I think are sometimes lost in that quest for ultimate male dominance and and after a while I stopped being as interested in that and I started to be more interested in the different kind of heroism of women's lives which was something that I had kind of neglected to pay attention to for a while as I was essentially trying to live like a bloke you know as much as I could for as many years as I could and then pray love which was of course the very opposite direction as much as possible yeah and did you fund for all the fantastic results that came the 10 million sales that um you know you basically don't even get to work again you eat Pray Love woman yeah but it changed the way people thought about you I mean I mention you yeah you had a life before that you were a writer before that and I personally preferred last American man myself but thank you yeah yeah how does it change the way people thought of you well I mean I definitely got ghettoized um you know I got stuck into the the chiclet ghetto and and once you I also do find it really interesting that when you write about an America at least when you write about men's lives and men's journeys they give you nominations for the National Book Award and when you write about women's lives and women's journeys they shut you off into the realm of chiclet you know never to be taken seriously again which is it could be depressing but I find it more amusing and and I also feel like I didn't drew this oh it's dead true and I and I also feel like it's interesting that I'm at a point where I don't care like I can afford not to really care I don't need the approval of the ten people in New York City who decide whether you're see literary figure or not because I have first of all my own sense of my own journey that I'm content with and and secondly I'm I'm a little embarrassed by the fact that I spent my 20s trying so hard in so many ways to gain the approval of men whether it be the men who I was writing about or the men who I was writing for you know that I wanted to be seen in their eyes as being a legitimate whatever you know that that it still meant something more when a male critic liked my work than when a female critic did and I'm deeply embarrassed to say that now you know it's it's it's it's so dumb and the fact that these millions of female readers took me in and embraced me and trusted me means so much more to me now than than anything else and so I'm much less concerned about who's including me in some sort of rarefied circle that I have about Who I am including in my writing and and I will bring those female readers with me I hope I'm for the rest of my life in whatever literary journeys I take and never again somehow consider them second-class readers you know they I'm much more interested in them that I am in whoever is deciding who's a serious literary writer at this point in life but the sadness that I feel tends to be for younger writers who are breaking their spines to try to impress those 10 or 15 people who are that sort of guardians of the cultural gate and I just think oh honey if you knew him and that's the person that you're trying to win like that's the person whose admiration you're looking for Oh find find somebody else to write about would you feel that and would you feel the confidence that you do yeah had you not written a super best-seller I don't know because it's you know that's going back and saying if your life had taken another path I've always kind of followed the work that I was really passionate about and that I'm proud of nobody's immune to the way criticism makes them feel but I did write on a multi-million dollar best-selling book but I also took a lot of crap for it you know I also kind of got flayed in a way that has made me just not it doesn't matter as much you mean to him critically critically yeah yeah not personally no person that's been created oh you know but but critically yeah I mean and and to watch myself go from being somebody who was on a path to literary respectability and then well as you say you and your previous book was nominated yeah miserable yeah yeah I'm the National Book Critics Circle Award and the pen Hemingway and the pen/faulkner I mean they were throwing all that kind of stuff at me until I dared to say what would happen if I wrote an emotional journey about a woman's life and then it was like you know like they're holding up crosses and throwing holy water at me I'm like I've done something really despicable and and and I even now when my my dear friends who are in the literary world come out in my defense I just think even by you defending me you're implying that I've done something transgressive when in fact I did something that was really helped to a lot of women and and why is that something that means my reputation needs rehabilitation you know I think I can stand by that the big problem being of course and you've acknowledged is that you're unlikely it possible but you're unlikely to go to those Heights again I mean you may hit again yeah at that sensational it's not many people do get there twice yeah you can Thomas Harris did you get bit the definition of a phenomenon is that it's once you know um and and you know to be aware of that is to appreciate it as it's going on and I think that I was so fortunate in that this didn't happen to me when I was 22 it happened to me when I was much closer to 40 you know it happened on my fourth book it didn't happen on my first book it happened when I was in my good marriage not my dumb marriage you know it happened kind of at the right moment where I was old enough and had been around enough to know this doesn't happen you know and it isn't going to happen again so love it and enjoy it and then go and do whatever you need to do with your life but certainly don't demand of destiny that this get repeated and I also feel like I love my readers um and I don't want there to be any pressure on them me that they have to twice embrace me with that kind of passion you wrote a pray love to Darcy was a girlfriend of your so you said that was for how you created that tone of intimacy yeah by writing to a friend the girlfriend and to whom did you write the signature of all things such a great question I've written every one of my books to a different person because I feel like that's how you find a warmth and personal voice and and it did it shapes the way that the book goes so I wrote the signature of all things to my fourth grade teacher ms sandy carpenter the first feminist I ever met the first guard like passionate botanist I ever met and one of the most avid readers I've ever known who is still at the age of 71 one of my dearest friends we've stayed in touch since 1978 when I walked into her classroom and she ignited my mind up until that point I had had teachers who were these sort of Depression era heavy shoe cats I wearing miserable people who are one year away from retirement and who hated their children in the classroom and she was this vivid she had short hair she was the first woman I ever met who had short bright dyed red hair she wore bright jewelry she was alive and awake and and she believed that there was maybe this is where my populism comes from she believed there was nothing we could not learn and so we learned I think we as people we GUI fourth graders we nine year olds and so she read Hemingway to us she taught us the Latin names for every house plant that she brought into to teach her show us she I still know the Gettysburg Address and Wordsworth poems because of her she she fervently believed that that with the right enthusiasm and the right passion we could learn anything and so I've stayed in touch with her my entire life and she's also a fantastic reader and she sends me really I would say a broader reader than I am and so she's always giving me recommendations for novels and I wanted to give her the gift of a book that would delight every part of her and the signature of all things is every inch for her this is just a random question reading a signature of all things it's structurally you know maybe it's cuz we've done it recently for book club but it reminded me a bit of Janie I thought you were gonna say because you just did it in book club I thought you're gonna say Wolf Hall which a Hillary man tells book which I can say very much influence the telling of this story so I'm glad that didn't show but it but it is it wasn't it wasn't Jane Eyre but I'm delighted for the reference I think the main thing for me was that when I was struggling to figure out how to write a period novel which I'd never done before I read Wolf Hall twice in a row because I was trying to decode how she did it and and there was just this simple little equation almost that I that I finally got and it opened up my whole possibilities with my own novel which was she wasn't trying to write a book that was purporting to be written in the 16th century that would be incredibly affected and annoying she was writing a contemporary novel about the 16th century which did not have any anachronism in it so I thought oh that's how you do it I I'm just writing I'm not pretending that I'm writing a Jane Austen novel I'm writing Alice Gilbert novel about that era nobody's texting anybody in that book right but but you know the important thing is is to just hold your own voice in a different time so it's it's a subtlety but it it made it possible for me to do the work and in the end just like Hilary mantel had to answer endless questions about her hero yeah Henry what about what is your view of Alma Elm always it I love her I love her and I know that it's um you know I've said before and I'll say it again to that I think the most transgressive thing that you can possibly say as an other - as a creative person one is that you enjoy your work and two is that you love what you've done you know those are like it's it's so illegal to say that as a creator I mean we have been so seeped in German Romanticism that we are meant to we are here to suffer and we are meant to be at war with our muses and we are meant to be dissatisfied by by what we produce um and and I've always had such a different view my work has has brought me everything in my life and and it's filled me with I've had the most amazing adventures because I've been a writer and the most extraordinary experiences and so why would it be so horrible to say that I am grateful to have been able to do this work and that I love the character that I've invented that she's part of me and that I want the best for her in the world and then I can't wait for people to meet her you know and so and so that's the spirit with which I present Alma to everybody here's somebody I love I hope you love her too very last question why Lisa Simpson why do you love Lisa Simpson I kind of identify with I feel like the genius of the Simpsons is that I kind of identify with every single character on there including Barney the drunk you know everybody has a little bit of me in them on that show but I was Lisa Simpson I remain Lisa Simpson um I haven't the geek I'm a nerd I'm a I'm in a library right now I couldn't be happier you know I'm I'm the one who's going to be correcting the grammar of the third grader sitting next to me you know I'm that kid I was the one who laid out her her clothes for her first day of school and made by I made my mom take me to school an hour early because that they got started early for some reason I wanted to make sure not to miss anything so I loved that she should that she's become an iconic figure in and that she's sort of a role model for girls like us and remains a source of inspiration for you clearly yes I will I hope to die Lisa Simpson who wouldn't want to be in the New South Wales State Library it's a beautiful place to be it's such a pleasure to meet you how is mine thank you thank you and that is our program for tonight I hope you enjoyed it I certainly didn't please join us again on the first Tuesday of next month for regular book club until then very happy reading and [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Oswaldo Armendariz

Views: 10,436

Rating: 4.9039998 out of 5

Keywords: Elizabeth Gilbert, Jennifer Byrne

Id: OomRUnwOyx0

Length: 25min 55sec (1555 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 24 2018