From the Vault…Elizabeth Gilbert
A shorter version of this interview appeared in The Hoopla in 2013 to coincide with the release of Gilbert’s new novel, The Signature of All Things. This was her first published fiction since THAT book launched Gilbert’s career in to the stratosphere and only her second work of fiction, but what a work it is! Gilbert is a writer who has lived an extraordinary life and has become something of a rock star since this was published. I urge anyone who has previously dismissed Gilbert because of that fateful memoir to read The Signature of All Things and be prepared to be amazed. It is an extraordinarily good novel. Here is a link to the blurb, (and maybe check out City of Girls while you’re at it. Hint. Hint.)
Looking back, what still amazes me is that her Australian publisher, Bloomsbury, asked me (me!) to write a puff quote for the book jacket for the Australian New Zealand edition. So wait, right? I get to read an early copy of a book by a famous American writer, write a puff quote for the jacket AND interview her??? Pinch me.
But… like so many people, I had not read Eat, Pray, Love or seen the movie. Obviously, I had to rectify this before interviewing Gilbert. I mean, Eat, Pray, Love is the one work which gives all her future work context; there is her career before EPL and after. Nothing could be more distinct. I wondered then what price Gilbert paid for this mega success—as a person and a writer. I am also fascinated by people who, even to this day, refuse to read her fiction because of their reaction to EPL. The two might share some DNA (and they definitely do) but they couldn’t be more different. Could I ask her about EPL without being offensive but yet seeking honesty? Of course, I had to go there.
The original transcript of this interview is over 8,000 words. I whittled it down to around 4,000 before giving up and sending it to my editor. She culled it further into a more manageable read of around 2,000 words. If memory serves me correctly. I was gutted—all those pearls of wisdom scattered over the floor. But this version, my friends, is the version I handed in. I have not touched a word of it, which makes this a very rare treat indeed. Enjoy!
Elizabeth Gilbert was already a serious and successful author before her memoir Eat, Pray, Love catapulted her to international fame. Her short story collection Pilgrims was a finalist for the PEN/ Hemingway award. The movie Coyote Ugly was based on an article she wrote about her years tending bar on the lower east side. Her debut novel, Stern Men was a New York Times Notable Book and her non-fiction work The Last American Man, the true story of a modern day woodsman, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Eat, Pray, Love went on to be translated into over 30 languages, sell over ten million copies and spend 199 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. The book became so popular that TIME magazine named Gilbert as one of the Time100 most influential people in the world. In 2010, the follow up to Eat Pray Love, Committed became an immediate Number One New York Times best seller.
So in many ways, there is a lot riding on Elizabeth Gilbert’s first novel in thirteen years. Gilbert says of The Signature of All Things that she “wanted to write the missing George Eliot book that I wanted to read.” Many agree she has achieved that objective.
Spanning the nineteenth century, it is the story of Alma Whittaker born on the fifth of January 1800 on the vast estate owned by her father Henry Whittaker, an eminent botanical collector who sailed on Captain Cook’s third voyage collecting specimens for Sir Joseph Banks, and educated at the knee of her brilliant Dutch mother Beatrix who ‘was conversant in five living languages and two dead ones, with an expertise in botany equal to any man’s.” Circumstances confine Alma to her father’s estate but her intellect is free to roam and it alights on the mystery of mosses. This is a realm largely unstudied in which Alma can make a scientific name for herself and within the boundaries of her father’s estate, Alma is free to immerse herself in this miniature world.
Gilbert is excited about the release of The Signature of All Things, particularly in Australia and New Zealand. She thinks it will have a ‘different feeling’ than it has in the rest of the world because here James Cook and Joseph Banks are household names. She laughs at her recent experience travelling on the Captain Cook Highway in Queensland claiming she almost had a heart attack she was so excited but the locals were, ‘yeah…that’s a really common name for things.’ As The Hoopla’s Meredith Jaffé discovered, Elizabeth Gilbert is a woman who laughs a lot—at life, at herself but never at her audience for whom she demonstrates a constant and abundant respect.
Meredith Jaffé: After the huge media, public and financial success of Eat, Pray, Love, was it daunting to put yourself on the line with The Signature of All Things when so many people may only know you as Eat, Pray, Love Liz Gilbert?
Elizabeth Gilbert: Well, I’ll tell you what, this was not daunting. What was daunting was to write Committed, the book that came after Eat, Pray, Love. In a way Committed, poor thing—that’s how I always think of it—it had so many things it had to do, right? It had to be a sequel to Eat, Pray, Love, to give another ending to people who had come to care about me and my now husband and wanted to know what happened to us. It had to give the critics and the people who really hated Eat, Pray, Love something to get the vitriol out of their system because a lot of vitriol had built up. I remember the day it was released, I was like ‘alright everybody, just get it out. This is your chance. I know it’s been building, here’s your moment.’
The other thing it had to do was to free me so that I wouldn’t be wondering what I was going to do to follow that up. Once that was done and that book was out there, I have never felt so free. I just felt like there are no stakes anymore—there is nothing to be proven, there is nothing to be defended.
There’s a weird liberty that comes from people putting you in a box and deciding who you are because it means you don’t have to go out of your way to try to convince anybody of anything because its unlikely to work anyway so you might as well do whatever you want and The Signature of All Things was just simply and exactly the book that I was dying to write.
Meredith Jaffé: I listened to a TED talk you gave on creativity and in it you quote Norman Mailer as saying, ‘every one of my books has killed me a little more.’ It made me wonder what gift, if any, did Eat, Pray, Love give you creatively.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love gave me everything. To begin with it gave me that journey, which I very much needed at that moment in my life. I knew at the time that it was a tremendous privilege that very few people could have ever have been able to do and I used that journey as wisely as I could. And then, of course, the success of it. You know, there’s gratification in writing something that moves people so much. I meet those readers and sometimes it’s just ‘I loved your book, it was entertaining’ and other times it was ‘your book gave me the courage I needed to leave an abusive marriage.’ There’s tremendous gratification in those sorts of encounters.
But in the long run what it’s given me is something that very few women have had, and very few women writers have had throughout history, which is autonomy. The financial success of it, if I could be so bold to speak of it and I know it’s not considered polite to mention these things, but it matters in a creative life.
That’s the gift and that’s the gift that keeps on giving. There could be no The Signature of All Things without Eat, Pray Love. Part of the reason The Signature of All Things is exactly the book that it is, is because of my desire to honour that incredibly rare privilege—not just in my own name—but in the name of so many women who were given that freedom. I just thought, ‘don’t go small—write the book deserving of the time and the privilege and the luxury that you have to do something like spend three years doing nothing but studying nineteenth century botanical history and funding that study completely yourself.’
Meredith Jaffé: The Signature of All Things is a work of considerable volume and concept so can you tell me a little about the process of writing it?
Elizabeth Gilbert: From beginning to end it took maybe three and a half to four years. I’ve never prepared for the writing of a book as rigorously as I did for this one.
It began with the desire to write about botany. I’d become a gardener and I was interested in nothing but plants. I had also stumbled upon this book that belonged to my great-grandfather—a 1784 edition of Captain Cook’s voyages—a really magical talismanic sort of book with maps and ethnographic illustrations and botanical prints. I had not put together that there were botanical explorers on that adventure. The idea that people would risk their lives to go off on these three/four year long expeditions into the unknown just to look at plants was really amazing to me. So it began there.
Then I knew I wanted a female lead in the book and obviously there were no women involved in Cook’s or Banks’ expeditions but once I started looking into female botanists it became clear that there were a great number of them. Science was not particularly open to women but that was the only field that was a little bit open to women on account of flowers, vegetables—you know, ‘womanly’ objects.
The women who made an impact in the botanical world tended to be the daughters, wives or sisters of prominent natural philosophers. They also tended to do a lot of the illustrations—the fine womanly hand made a lot of those botanical prints and lithographs that are attributed to men but the women did the finishing touches and the drawings. Initially I had wanted to write a book that I imagined would be about a woman of tremendous towering intellect who has terrific contributions to make to the scientific world but is unable to because she’s a woman but when I did further research I found that wasn’t really accurate. A lot of the women were really well regarded. There’s a woman in New Jersey, my home State, named Mrs Mary Treat who Darwin corresponded with for years in tones that are nothing but respectful peer-to-peer scientific conversation and she’s not the only one. So I thought, it’s not fair to the memory of those women to have this be such a simple story as ‘nobody listens to me because I’m a girl’ because people were listening to really reputable female botanists and so the story had to be more psychological and emotionally complex than that. And it was out of the brewing of those notions that Alma was born.
Meredith Jaffé: Who is Alma Whittaker?
Elizabeth Gilbert: The simplest way to describe her, to put her in botanical terms—which is what she would have liked—is that she is a tree among flowers. That’s where she differs from other women of the day. She is towering in every sense; she’s physically towering, she’s intellectually towering, she’s emotionally towering, she’s brave, she’s stalwart, she’s disciplined and it makes her not resemble at all what was considered the feminine ideal of the moment. Then deep inside that kind of tree trunk of a woman is this incredible eroticism, passion, lust and it’s a lust that is not only physical—she’s a very lusty woman— but she also has a lust to know, to unravel the secrets of the natural world and to unravel the secrets of her own emotional life. It’s that push in her that makes her somebody who’s a seeker and an explorer and an adventurer.
Although it was also very important to me that she not go see the world till she was a post-menopausal middle-aged woman. I thought, ‘let’s keep her at home until she’s fifty and then unleash her on the world’ because that’s a different sort of adventuring woman and I liked that she came into her own journey at that age, which I think is not uncommon.
For the first fifty years of her life she lived on her family’s extraordinary estate and she had the hunger to understand the botanical world. The only thing that she can study rapaciously, that’s in walking distance and very complex, is the moss world underneath her feet. Also, nobody else has studied it so it’s open to her. She’s able to make her mark, very modestly, on the botanical world with her very disciplined and accurate taxonomy of mosses. But later, as time goes on, they become a clue into the developing argument of evolution that’s going on in the larger scientific world around her.
Meredith Jaffé: Do you think the tension in the novel between the belief that God’s hand is everywhere, the signature of all things, and the scientific quest to make everything quantifiable, provable, explicable is a good thing?
Elizabeth Gilbert: I think it’s a natural thing to have occurred when it did. I have this theory that religious yearning, scientific yearning and artistic yearning are really the same thing. For most of human history they’ve come from the same source and it’s the source of somebody who wants to know what’s the code that’s hidden behind the apparent? You want to break down the material world and find out what’s organizing it, what’s making it, why’s the sky blue? These are all the questions that artists ask, that people who study divinity ask and scientists ask. For most of human history, and certainly for most of Western history, those were not incompatible ideas.
What happened in the nineteenth century was that all of a sudden there was that schism where the scientific record got ahead of everything else and it started to be the authoritative record and it contradicted so many religious ideas that all of that fell apart.
Meredith Jaffé: In Eat, Pray, Love you quote Gloria Steinem as saying, she once advised women that ‘they should strive to become like the men they wanted to marry,” which Alma very much embodies by virtue of both her nature and her circumstances. Is there a connection between the two?
Elizabeth Gilbert: It’s tricky because the book is a contemporary novel in that I wrote it now and I wasn’t trying to pretend that I wrote it in the nineteenth century. While wanting to fly my feminist flag, I also had to be careful to be authentic to the conversation that was going on in the day.
The thing that was most important to me was not to tell a story that had the two endings that are the only two endings that women usually get in novels—and certainly the only two endings that women ever got in nineteenth century novels. The one ending being you get the good marriage to landed gentry and the other ending being that you are dead—dead under a train wheel, tragically dead, by suicide or murder on account of a serious mistake. The reality of women’s life, then and now, is something much in between there. Most of us don’t get a fairytale ending but most of us don’t get the horrible tragic ending either. Most of us land somewhere in between and then try to carry on with our lives with as much dignity as we can, working around our disappointments. So I wanted to make sure that even ahead of being a political novel or a feminist novel, although I am both political and a feminist, I wanted it to be a plausible woman’s life and that felt to me like plausibility.
Meredith Jaffé: If you parallel the path her sister Prudence chooses where she marries the tutor, she lives in very modest circumstances and sacrifices all for the abolitionist cause, that equally is a female statement.
Elizabeth Gilbert: I think the triad of feminism is to permit women to have a political voice, to permit women to have control over their biological destiny and to permit women to have control of their work, in addition to things in the household. Those are the three most important things that determine whether or not a woman has power. Obviously, controlling biological destiny in the nineteenth century was not really on the table, which is why Prudence ended up with so many children. That was something that was not available to them. But both Alma and Prudence have very strong voices in their fields; one in a field of activism, to put a modern word on it, and the other in the field of scientific research.
Another thing that was really important to me was to write a novel about a woman who is defined by a life long love of her work because the novel celebrating women’s work is not really one that’s readily available. In my own life, work has saved my life at times when my personal life collapsed. We see nothing but examples in the media of how your story ends when you find the man. The reality is that I have found and lost the man many times in my life and sometimes it’s been thrilling and sometimes it’s been terribly, terribly disappointing but the thing that has served as a beacon, that has defined who I am, is how much I love what I do. At the end of the day, when the heartache is there from the relationship that failed, the work supports you, both financially and emotionally, if you’re in the right line of work. So to a large extent, this is a novel about people whose lives are saved by their sense of mission, by their work. Prudence has a very unhappy marriage but she has a very powerful presence in the abolition world and that defines who she is and what saves her and Alma’s work is what saves her. What’s unusual is that the women have found ways to be productive and to feel as if they were making contributions and that is the goal and the achievement for Alma.
Meredith Jaffé: Tell me what travel means in terms of this novel.
Elizabeth Gilbert: It’s interesting. When I first had the idea, my plan was to write a story about a woman who never goes anywhere, which is what basically the first fifty years of Alma’s life are. It was almost in contrast to Eat, Pray, Love but so often I hear from people who say, ‘gee I would love to do what you do and I would love to see the world but I’m stuck at home, I’m stuck in poverty, I’m stuck in sickness, I’m stuck with children and I can’t leave and what am I supposed to do with my life?’ I think that is a very interesting question and I wanted to explore this in a novel.
My initial idea was to write about a woman who discovers the same thing that the great male explorers of that generation were discovering but she discovers it literally in her backyard. In another words, if you have the mind and the discipline and the creativity, there are universes to be discovered wherever you happen to be. That was going to be what the book was about and then I couldn’t do it! I couldn’t leave her at White Acres her whole life, I just couldn’t. I looked at the book again and I thought, “Oh God! I’ve got to get her out of there.” I’m sorry because I didn’t end up answering the question that so many women have asked me about how do you build a rich and fulfilling life a home. I think Alma did build a rich and fulfilling life at home but I just needed to put her on a ship at some point and send her off into the world!
The other thing is, this is a very reductive statement to make, but there’s an old truism that says that there are only two stories that have ever been told, you go on a trip or it comes to town. Those are the only two narratives that exist in human storytelling and for most of human history the woman’s story has been about being in town when the stranger arrives. I just couldn’t have that be the narrative—that Alma’s entire life was the passive role of sitting at the dining room table as one guest or another filtered through her existence. At some point I wanted her to be the stranger who arrives and shakes things up by her arrival and that’s why I had to cast her out into the world. Also, it is a book about exploration and that was an era of tremendous exploration so it was sort of true to the times to write about the amount of travelling back then.
Meredith Jaffé: I stumbled across half a sentence on Wikipedia in which you say how important Charles Dickens is to you as an influence on your writing. The Signature of All Things is written across his life span and I wondered whether Dickens had a particular influence on the writing of this novel?
Elizabeth Gilbert: Would it answer your question if I told you that I had a photograph of Charles Dickens in its frame sitting on my desk the whole time I was writing?
The Dickens connection was very, very, very prevalent. He’s been my spiritual guide through my entire writing career but never more so than this book. Really, it’s not an accident that I wanted to write a nineteenth century novel. It’s not an accident that I wanted to write a birth-to-death story or that I wanted to write on that scale. I adore him, he’s my favourite of them all, and I love most of the big nineteenth century novelists. His humanity and his generosity as a novelist is what I adore most and that wonderful confidence, that unwavering certainty that you feel when you’re in his hands that he knows exactly what he’s doing and he’s not going to take a wrong step. He is going to take you all the way from the beginning to the end of the story and you don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to worry about anything, it’s all under control.
I wanted to come with that authoritative stance that I think authors should have—‘I know what I’m talking about’, ‘I know what I’m doing here.’ It’s hard at times because I don’t know what I’m talking about a lot of the time when it comes to the nineteenth century. There’s a limit to how much I can learn but I wanted to put myself on solid enough footing that when I took the first steps into that book I felt certain that I knew exactly where I was going. And he’s every bit my model for that. I didn’t leave anything to chance, I over-prepared it, I did so much research and so much outlining of the plot I had a 70 page synopsis written before I began writing. I really just wanted to make sure I came ready for what I was about to do.
Meredith Jaffé: I imagine you had really no idea about mosses before you started?
Elizabeth Gilbert: Like zero! But I know how to learn. I think that’s the thing that I got out of my formal education, not necessarily what I learned but that I learned how to learn. Even the notation system that I used to write this book, which was index cards filed by subject in shoe boxes, was taught to me when I was fourteen years old by the history teacher in high school and I’ve used it ever since. That’s where Beatrix Whittaker and I come down on the same side. There’s a line where she goes, “a parent is inexcusable who does not personally teach her children to think.” My mother taught me how to learn and my history teachers taught me how to learn and so it was okay for me to know nothing about nineteenth century botany, that I didn’t know about evolution, that I didn’t know about mosses, that I didn’t know about the pharmaceutical trade in Philadelphia—all of that stuff was available to be learned. You don’t need to go to University to learn it once you know how to find things out. So if you like finding things out, if you’re like me who was a girl had her school clothes laid out two weeks before school started, then all the better because that’s the joy of joys.
Meredith Jaffé: Are you at the beginning of your tour or in the midst of it?
Elizabeth Gilbert: It’s really exciting for me to feel so excited about going out in the world to promote a book. You know, with Committed I just threw it on the world and shut my eyes and didn’t want to look. But with this book I feel like Alma’s become so dear to me, it’s almost impossible for me to be convinced that she wasn’t a real person, and I want her story told. I feel like I’m her ambassador and I want to bring her forth and I want people to find out about this person who’s become so dear to my heart.