Elizabeth Gilbert Discusses The Signature of All Things

we're here right now with elizabeth gilbert who everybody knows from me pray love and the follow-up but now you've written a brand new book the book is called the signature of all things but first why don't you talk about the fact that you're writing fiction well um i'm writing fiction again that's the weird thing i don't expect for people to know this about me but it it is my heritage like my first two books were works of fiction my first book was a short story collection and then there was a novel and all i ever wanted to be my whole life was a writer of fiction and i was on that path and then my personal life as everybody who has 10 bucks to buy a paperback nose totally fell apart and i used my writing for other things i used my writing to kind of write my way out of a whole that i was in in my life and then i use my writing to figure out my feelings about marriage and i use my writing for a bunch of other stuff but next thing i knew 12 years had passed and i hadn't written a word of fiction and i felt like i had lost track of some really important fundamental part of myself um my own origin story in a way so it was time it was time to go back to writing a novel and i just felt liberated like do what you want like write the book you would want to read go go really off and uh in in some very unexpected direction and enjoy and that's what i did well that's the thing when you write when you write a memoir there is that boundary that you're not supposed to cross and here you can run what did that feel like being able to go back to that again just being able to run i had forgotten the joy of fiction i had forgotten the power of fiction i had forgotten that if you decree it it is so if you can make it plausible you know my my main character alma whitaker um grows up in tremendous luxury because her father is a self-made millionaire one of i i decided that he was one of america's first self-made millionaires i decided he had made his fortune in the botanical trade and i decided it was in the quinine trade um working on malaria and he was an early pharmacist and and all i had to do was just make it convincing that he could have risen um very quickly to such great wealth and suddenly because i decreed it he's the wealthiest man in the new world and i was like oh my god i forgot that you can just do that you know um if you can get away with it you can do it you know and you can't do that when you're writing biography or certainly not when you're writing autobiography you know you're bound by the truth and you're bound by your own introspection so and just to reach big that's what i wanted to do with this book too like just do like write a big 19th century novel a big galloping swooping epic write the kind of book that that you love i mean by the time i started the book i had six shoe boxes filled with index cards categorized by subject about everything that's in this book um and and i remember sort of opening them and looking at them and i'm like okay i think i have everything i need here you know i hope i know everything i need to know about shipping about the pharmaceutical business about you know philadelphia the turn of the 19th century about women botanical illustrators about sex and marriage in the 19th century about the schism between religion and science that happened in the middle of that century i mean there's so many pieces to put together but um all of that is the stuff i'm really excited by and want to know about anyway um the problem i had was not knowing whether once that research was done i could actually pull off the book until the very first page i still wasn't sure that i could do it yeah the words that one uses when you've written a book is sweeping saga epic you cross centuries you didn't just jump into fiction like and write this you wrote a big story so was that a conscious decision i'm going big yeah go go big or go home it it was i mean it's a book it's the kind of book i've always wanted to write and i was at a moment in my life where i realized that i could um thanks to the success of vray love and committed as financially stable thanks to my happy marriage and getting my life in order i was emotionally stable thanks to my good health i was sort of physically and mentally stable you know i realized like oh my god i'm stable um what what what then can you do with this you have all this energy and you have all these enthusiasms and there's you haven't like sabotaged your life in any big way recently you know um why don't you just take it on you know um i had the time to do things like go to the south pacific and explore these remote islands in the french polynesian archipelago in order to get that setting because part of the book is takes place there i was able to go to kew gardens at london and work with the botanical librarians there on discovering 19th century botanical history i was able to go to amsterdam you know all the stuff that i wouldn't have been able to do as a young novelist because frankly it's expensive and it's time-consuming and when you're working as a waitress you can't do that stuff you know so it's sort of the book for me is also a celebration of um this great moment of sort of abundance and contentment in my life like um what are you going to make out of that and this is the book that i wanted to make out of it once you start to actually write how long did it take to actually do the writing after all that research it was pretty fast i have to say it was weird um it was kind of a as maybe what did they say like a feud state i mean it was um and and part of that was that i had a momentum that i was very afraid i was going to lose i had it i felt like i was had a tiger by the tail and if i let go for one second to even brush my teeth i was going to lose it and um there's a line in the book about alma my character where she's writing the great scientific treaties of her life and it says that like a drunk who can run without falling but cannot walk without falling she was propelled to do this work really quickly and that's kind of how i felt when i was writing the book i was like i can i have to do this full speed or else i'm gonna i'm gonna lose it i'm gonna lose my confidence i'm gonna fall off it's like a tightrope that if you if you slow down you're just gonna topple off it so um i don't know four or five months i mean a a very short amount of time um and a very driven train and the really cool thing too that i've never done before was with this book every night i wrote all day and then every night i would read to my husband what i had written that day so it became like a serial novel the way dickens wrote because every day he was expecting the next installment you know and so i was aware of his waiting and i wanted to entertain him and delight him and so he would come up into my library in the attic where i work and he would bring a glass of wine and he would sit down and say what happened what happened what happened to alma what happened to henry what happened to ambrose what happened to these characters and and so i feel like that really helped the novel stay speedy too where i didn't want to i could tell if i was boring him um i felt an obligation to tell him a great yarn and so i'm hoping that the readers will feel that the idea that i just want to bring them on a big trip that they're going to enjoy and not get bored by your personality is large you're excitable you like to talk about your work and others and and you're fun and you like to laugh yet for so many writers it's a really solitary life yeah and so how do you as a person who's that's not you i mean how do you then bust out so that you're not that i'm sure then talking about the book is a blast because you're finally out in the world but how do you deal with it when you're in that writing moment it's tricky i sometimes wish i had more of a writer's temperament um i think i would write more um if i wasn't so interested in human beings and life and the world and my other pursuits and things that excite me um i think sometimes i have a little bit of envy for like the brooding uh you know like i was just reading it it's just reading an article in the new yorker about that um italian writer elena ferrante and you know who doesn't ever like nobody even knows who she is she never goes on tour and she has these great kind of very deeply serious profound statements about writing like i'm not going to go promote my book because i wrote this book to free myself not to be a slave to go on tour and i'm like god i see it so differently you know like i i'm so excited like i wrote this for people and i want to take it to them you know i want to like go to their local bookstore and be like i wrote this for you guys i can't imagine you any other way i mean you know so much energy bouncing off yeah it's it's it's it's a fun moment and for me too it's exciting like this is the most excited i've been about going out and discussing a book in years um because i'm not talking about myself i mean of course when i when i go to public events there will be people who ask did you marry that brazilian guy from the movie and i'll have to discuss that or what is it like to have julia roberts play where you know like those questions will be there forever and i welcome them but for me the exciting thing is i want you to meet this woman that i wrote about um she's become so dear to me through the writing of this novel that i have ceased to believe that she never existed and i feel like it's time her story was told i want to bring her out into the world and um and and show her around so that's sort of an exciting moment with eat pray love it was about your life and the people would review it and they'd write things mostly positive things about you pray love now it's not your life and there's going to be reviewers coming at it what's the difference in the way you perceive those reviews and things that are coming your way well the reviews haven't really started yet i just got one the first one from kirkus and it made me so happy because um it's a lovely review and it's a generous and kind review and nowhere in that review does it mention who elizabeth gilbert is it's like here's this book that we want to talk about they took the book completely on its own merits there's no mention that i have ever written anything prior to this there's no discussion of that at all it's just a really thoughtful and respectful review of this book and i was like i want to write a letter to them thanking them for that for just deciding to regard it as its own thing um i don't expect that that will be the trend um i think people will have to whatever have their opinions about me and about my former work but that made me happy um it's a it's a it was a lovely gift like just read it for what it is you

Channel: Bibliostar.TV

Views: 7,386

Rating: 4.9354839 out of 5

Keywords: Elizabeth Gilbert (Author), Novel (Literary School Or Movement), Fiction, Eat Pray Love (Film), Eat Pray Love, Bibliostar.TV, Bibliostar, Rich Fahle

Id: QL_kWNiL73o

Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2013