Eat Pray Love's Elizabeth Gilbert on Q TV

this is Q on CBC Radio 1 across Canada Sirius 137 across North America internationally at cbc.ca and on bold TV happily ever after is a phrase that seems well suited to Elizabeth Gilbert's trajectory over the last few years in 2005 she was a well respected novelist and a nonfiction writer with four books to her credit a year later her memoir Eat Pray Love turned Elizabeth Gilbert into a household name for millions of readers they followed a little Elizabeth as she munched meditated and contemplated love through Italy and India and Indonesia in an attempt to recover from a harrowing an identity shaking divorce and recover she did by the end of the book she'd met a handsome older ultra compatible brazilian man and they skip off in unwedded bliss now the mega selling mega best-selling book is set to become a movie starring Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem with the release of committed a memoir Elizabeth the Gilbert describes as the dangerously frightening Lee over anticipated follow-up to her freakish success we get the grittier side of the fairy tale thanks to u.s. immigration Gilbert and her men are forced to marry if they want to continue living together in the United States the unavoidable unavoidable nuptials compel our skeptical heroine to examine the institution and confront her own fears before tying the knot and today Elizabeth Gilbert has committed to joining me in studio q hello hi how's it going it's a great pleasure to have you here thank you that was a really nice introduction well thank you thank you so you open the book with with the crisis that starts at all you and your paramour Felipe are separated at the Dallas Airport he's detained by US customs and the rules make it necessary that you get married and you trying and I'm quoting you unravel the mystery of what this befuddling vexing contradictory and yet stubbornly enduring institution of marriage actually is deep breath why did you decide to go public with that and make it the subject of your book um well I wanted to write about it because I knew that nothing would make me power boil my intellect more than to have to write a book on something and I knew I had a huge obstacle to overcome with this because at the moment that we were sentenced to Wed by home and security you know my biggest thought was a sense of banishment this feeling that that we had been interfered with and that we had been driven away from the way that we wanted to live our lives and I just didn't want to get married feeling like it was a forced march I wanted to find some place of comfort with in the history of matrimony for myself you've both been married before yeah not successful yeah we were we were adamantly committed to never getting married right but it was a shotgun wedding with US government holding the other amazing scene while you're in the customs office yeah he's about to be deported and this Texan security immigration officer says why did she to get married yeah starts giving you essentially married it was marital it was surreal because first of all he told us that that's what we had to do and then he saw our looks of complete horrified mutual doom and and he got really human with us and said hey what's the problem with this you know you like each other you've been living together and we sort of opened up to him we're like Ryan we've been through bad divorces and we're really scared of it and he said well you know maybe you should have a prenup and talk about getting some counseling Mike is an officer of the United States Department of Homeland Security giving us marital advice but it just it just goes to show how deeply we all feel about this you know that this guy in a uniform suddenly dropped all of that and became you know a fellow divorced person giving advice to two frightened committed commitment phobes although not so easy to do as it turns out because in that moment you actually say okay can we get married right here right now and get him into the country yeah I was like don't you guys have prayer rooms or something when airports where you can do this and and and and no it took almost a year and he had to be well first he was handcuffed and arrested and kicked out of the country and then we ended up going to Southeast Asia because it was the cheapest place we could imagine to live for the interim and we spent almost a year and what we dramatically call exile trying to get back into the country and that's the time that I used to become a student of the subject of matrimony right which you're still struggling with or still learning about um well you know I think I've pretty much solved it or might well I wouldn't say I've mastered it but I've definitely reached you know conclusions that are comforting enough okay let me get let me get to that first first of all how did Philippe feel about playing such a central role in this new book um he's a good sport about it you know he's had such an interesting life and he's lived all over the world he's had a really picaresque experience with living anyway and I think he feels like in his 50s to have become a character in a series of books it's just the next stage of oddness of living for him but but the good thing is that you know he's not an American so he doesn't need to be on TV to know that he exists so he's not so he doesn't have any interest in being part of it in any public way but he doesn't mind me writing about him in the books so soul is in in in the course of this journey of trying to learn about the master matrimony if you if you will you you go through different parts of the world you explore different cultures and even here in the West that one of the conclusions that you come to is that marriage isn't necessarily about love or is very seldom about romance can you reflect on that well actually it's it's a little it's a little trickier than that what we've done in the West it's that we've made marriage about love and the conclusion that all historians come to when they look at the trajectory of that is that it's an extremely dangerous thing to have done any time you take a traditional history of people married for what sociologists call communal reasons you know something that benefits the entire collective and where the decision is made with that in mind and you replace it with an individualistic expressive idea of people marrying based on romantic attachment you weaken the institution in terms of the fact that divorce rates will immediately begin to skyrocket anything that the heart chooses for its own mysterious gossamer reasons it can unchoose later for the similar mysterious gossamer divorce rates increase if it's about love immediately it's happening in India right now even as we speak you can you can chart it you can set your clock to it and and it's almost as though divorce is the tax that we pay for choosing to risk our property our family our future our investment in the community all on something as mysterious and ephemeral as we as mere romantic affection and for most of history in most parts of the world people would think that we were insane to do so if it's not about romantic affection and you go to great detail in in researching what marriage has been all around the world throughout history what is it about well that's changed you know that's changed over time I mean in the West at least in the trajectory of Western history initially it was a kinship building device right in the the ancient cradle of civilization what you wanted was not to be alone because to be alone was to be marked for death so marriage was a way of increasing your number of in-laws to make yourself as safe as possible and then it became a more of a financial arrangement in in medieval Europe where marriage was the safest way to pass wealth from one generation to the next and to legitimize certain children and eras well D legitimizing others in order to make ascension very clear and then with the Industrial Revolution marriage finally became more of a mark of affection when when people could have the economic luxury to risk everything on live and that's what it's been pretty much since and now I feel like the next wave what's happening in the West is that we're entering into a period of what I call wifeless marriage which is this idea that just about every woman that I know wants me married but nobody wants to be a wife from and the men don't want to be wives either so it's this new negotiation on but this is partly because you say that women that marriage is not has not been good for women it's it's been better for men yeah always and not just in the West but but everywhere and and the statistics on that are actually kind of chilling the fact that that marriage benefits men to such an extreme married men outperforms single men in every possible measure you can if you if you want to be president you better be married if you want to live long if you want to be healthy if you want to be affluent if you want to not suffer from alcoholism and divorce and sorry depression and your man get married and if you're a woman and you want all those things stay single because single women live longer than married women they're healthier they have more money they're less likely to have alcoholism and depression problems and they're less likely to die violent death it's horrible but there are ways to mitigate that and that the gap is narrowing what they call the marriage and benefit balance what you're saying this as a married woman um yeah and it's it's it's horrifying to read that as a woman it makes you want to crawl under the desk and weep you know but there are when you look at you break down the statistics it does seem that you know women who wait for as long a time as possible to get married have fewer children have them later in life establish their own economic stability gather their own autonomy they seem to be the happiest wives I don't hate a sidebar and I also hate to tire my listeners with yet another example of my romance romanticism but is it not possible that marriage can be about I mean look I know these these folks who a man who's around 65 years old his wife now is in her late 50s yeah they met about 30 years ago on the night that they met within for his true story within four hours they met at a party and he said you're my life partner I want a man we're gonna get married they got married and they still consider each other soul mates I look at examples like that and that's that's what that's what makes me still believe part of me believed in marriage and there's no reason not to aspire to that it's you know obviously they set the Olympian ideal that we all want which is you know some enchanted evening you may meet a stranger and 40 years later your heart still skips a beat when you see that person is obviously what we all dream of and what we all aspire to and obviously sometimes it works and and I believe in that as well so you're not saying that's impossible I'm not saying it's impossible I'm what I am saying though is that the expectation that the instant soulmate recognition should then lead to a life of delirious bliss I think sets people up for something that is not necessarily possible for everybody and and I think you know the the the fact that we hold that as the ideal means that when we have any sort of relationship that's less than that we feel as though we've somehow failed and the great Jerry Maguire fantasy of completion through the other and I and I think that that can cause suffering and pain in people yeah I wanted to ask you about where this this story and and this book now fits in with your whole trajectory not just in your romantic and your personal life but as a writer and you gave this talk around this time last year at the prestigious Ted series and I would encourage people to see this this on YouTube it was a fantastic talk that he did and it's become something of a sensation I mean lots of people are watching this I was drunk on gin when I was giving that did well so since you made it to the next book answer your own question please how have you survived success as a writer um well it's you know first of all I want to clarify that that is a champagne problem you know like it's it's not the worst thing that could ever happen to somebody but it can be debilitating to people we all know this that there are people who have huge creative success and then it becomes crippling because the expectation is always that you're supposed to be out mastering yourself at every turn that the next question becomes how are you going to outdo it the assumption being that that that's natural or inevitable that you should somehow always be outdoing yourself right I feel like the only way to get through that is to take the long view and you know all I have ever wanted to do and all I have ever done with my life is to write it's been like that since I was a kid I wrote before I was successful and I need to write after almost with the same blinders on that I either had to have when I was 20 and I was writing and nobody wanted to read what I was writing you do it because the work itself is its own reward but how do you fight that impulse that societal idea that if you're not selling as many books today or tomorrow or three years from now as you were when he Pray Love get out you're somehow diminished well I don't think I can take that away from anyone else misleading ocean on their own but in my own life which is of course where my concerns lie I feel like there's a little bit of a relief in the fact that Eat Pray Love is so unattainable unrepeatable you know like if it had just been moderately successful then maybe I would have been driven to try to outdo it but you I can't do that again I it's simply not possible it was it was this weird viral phenomenon and and whether that means that I'm you know it should never write again you know I don't know what I would do with my time I would have to be like work in a shop selling candles or something yeah in that talk I've gotta say you you discuss how Tom Waits approach to creativity yeah was instructive for you how did he help I I was so lucky I got to interview him once for GQ long ago and and I remember him saying that that he you know you are neither the master of your muse nor are you its servant it's a relationship it's it's a sort of a collaboration and a conversation that goes on for four decades and how he was never really free as an artist and silly-- started talking back EMU's and he told this great story about driving down the freeway one day and this little piece of a song came into his head and he had no way to record it and he had another way to write it down and he got this panic that he was gonna lose it but instead of panicking he just looked up at the sky and he said excuse me can you not see that I'm driving knowing that great Tom Waits boys he's like if you're serious about wanting to be a song come back at a more opportune time you know and that's sort of the negotiation that I think that a creative person has to have with them with that weird mysterious source of inspiration with committed with this new book you said that one day a sentence came to you and the writing started to flow again because there was a first draft of committed that you got you got rid of didn't yeah do you remember what the sentence was that got the radio it was the first sentence of the book in in late September of 2006 I found myself wandering through the mountains of North Vietnam with a man who was not yet my husband it was so simple and it was so you know it reminded me of how easy it can be to tell a story if you get out of the way of the story and you simply say what happened and when it happened and who had happened to and and that was the liberation that I needed to start writing the book again in my own voice that I currently inhabit and not in an imitation of my Eat Pray Love voice from five years earlier Liz the subtitle to Eat Pray Love was one woman's search for everything across Italy India and Indonesia everything being the word and committed you write that and we've talked about this women are less happy than men in their marriages because they hope for more yeah however the last couple of years changed your ideas of what searching for everything or what hoping for more means well I think the difference is its I think it's for bringing that up because no one's noted that but I think the difference is that when I was seeking everything in Eat Pray Love I was doing it alone you know so it was really a sense of coming to terms with with my own self and and narrowing down what was important to me and seeking it out with with the fervor and creating it committed is of course about a relationship and I think the difference is what you're allowed to aspire to in terms of what you want from yourself and what you're allowed to inspire to aspire to in terms of what you expect from another human and I think the mistake that I made in my 20s was that I was looking for everything through someone else you know I was looking for somebody who would provide that and and the answer was to to go solve that in my own way and then look for somebody to go see movies with you know and to to share my life within it in a more modest way you've described yourself as an avatar asking questions about life and marriage on behalf of millions of other women and you seem to be doing that successfully and perhaps men but you haven't prescribed to the marriage plus children narrative yeah that so many women still followed you feel like you still have to defend your choices well it is interesting that when you don't have kids everybody insists that you defend why and and it's rare that people are asked to defend why they want to have children and you sort of feel like it should be the opposite because you're taking on so much more to have kids than not to you know and but but it's the natural order of things and to step out of that very comforting intergenerational circle of life and the idea that you were begat and then you beget this and you'll you know you leave this legacy it's a really huge thing not to do and it's it's something that I haven't not done without a great deal of consideration and to put a lot of negatives into that sentence if that makes sense in terms of what we're talking about before that marriage through your research generally being less healthy for women that has been for men where do kids fit into them um well you know the statistics show that the people with young children in the household their marriages are more strained than childless couples or couples whose children have grown I mean there's obvious reasons for that it takes an enormous amount of energy to raise a child and there's it's a sort of a in an area that's rife with the possibility for dispute you know over power and over different philosophies and all that sort of stuff that's not why I don't have children because I'm trying to avoid those sorts of arguments I don't have children because I believe that there are women who are born to be mothers and there are women who are born to be auntie's and there are women who should not be allowed near children at all and I firmly you're very kind of myself in the anti camp finishings that's my job you you say that you your mom you saw what your mom had to go through and you're simply not up for it yeah I know what the job entails I had a really good mom I know what it means to be one and I know and I know that it's not what I'm here for there's an interesting moment in the book when you confront Felipe with a list of your most deplorable faults his response helps you develop something called a theory of tiny acts of household tolerance what is that well he had this great response to it um I felt like I had to you know give it like almost like a sellers disclosure on a house here's what you need to know about what happens to the roof when it rains and here's you know this is who I am and and you know he was very sweet he said is there anything you'd like to tell me about yourself that I didn't already know oh you know we'd been together for three years by that point but he also made this point he's a a gemstone dealer and he said when he's buying gemstones and in Brazil one of the things they do to try to trick you is that they they couple up really bad cheap stones with a couple really good dazzling ones and that what happens to amateurs is they get they get so inspired and excited by the really pretty ones they don't look at the the flawed gems and then they get you know sort of ripped off and he said that often happens in relationships too were you you fell in love with the highest most glittering delightful pieces of the other person and it makes you blind to their flaws and as in gemstone dealing with relationships you have to look at the worst parts and say can I work with this can I make something out of this can I work around it and if you can the good stuff is always going to be there you need to learn how to deal with the bad stuff what a beautiful way to put it it was not a flaw Jim yeah the crap I get it now Philippe I care what the whole you know it reminds me Tom Waits told me that he wanted to write a song called semi-precious you know there was just about the idea of semi-precious love and semi-precious stones and you know it's the semi-precious parts of yourself that you need to have accepted and forgiven in order to have long-term intimacy if there was some magical way for you and Philippe to live together now in America without being married right would you dissolve that part of your relationship um oh now that we are married you know if there was some no no constitutional right says by the way you know retroactively Li you can not be just out of bohemian stubbornness we would get divorced and then stay together forever you know you spent a lifetime it's a good question yeah um no I don't think we would and and and to be honest probably but inevitably even if officer Tom and the Homeland Security Department hadn't gotten involved we would have it would have occurred to us that there really we probably would have gone that way anyway um you know it it's because of the citizenship issue mostly but also there you know you have to work harder to protect you know what I've learned let me give back on this what I've learned about marriage through all this research is that the reason we still have it the reason this thing's still exist at all when it can seem so archaic and outdated is because people stubbornly continue to insist on creating intimacy with each other you can't have intimacy in the long term without privacy and you can't have privacy without rights and you can't have rights without some sort of societal governmental recognition of the fact that this couple has drawn a circle around themselves that's inviolable that the family has to respect and the neighbors have to respect and the law has to respect and we don't have another system for that yet and it's an act of rescue in a way to protect your partner you know to enter into that circle and that's why we have it and and we are benefited by that and that's why you just made the case for marriage there it is it took me three hundred pages in three years but I found it come back Thanks Elizabeth Gilbert the author of committed a skeptic makes peace with marriage is published in Canada by Viking a penguin she's been with me here in studio cute

Channel: q on cbc

Views: 61,815

Rating: 4.8170733 out of 5

Keywords: pray, love, cbc, author, jian, tv, eat, married, book, gilbert, qtv, committed, elizabeth, divorced

Id: RGXP0bCekoE

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2010