Her short story collection Pilgrims won the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her novel The Last American Man was a finalist for the National Book Award. She’s been an award-winning journalist for The New York Times, GQ, and SPIN, among others. She was the first unpublished short story writer to debut in Esquire since Norman Mailer.
But she’s also a really good writer, and it kind of sucks that that fact is lost on a lot of people.
EAT PRAY LOVE AUDIOBOOK PART 11 PROFESSIONAL
She’s still the person who ate, prayed, and loved her way to a career as a professional TED Talker.
Is Gilbert still a little bit annoying? Of course she is. Whether or not Williams likes Elizabeth Gilbert is irrelevant (and to be clear, she quite obviously does not), the question that must be answered when reviewing Big Magic is this: can this book help unburden people of their stifled creativity? My answer is a resounding Yes. But it also confronts this impulse and shows how self-destructive, restrictive, and cowardly it is, and how, by yielding to our creative fears we never become the greatest versions of ourselves, versions that are in there. It’s understanding of the impulse to abandon a project or not even start it in the first place because you’re afraid that it won’t be as good as you want it to be, or as good as another project it will be competing with. Do I really want to be the guy who likes the new self-help book from the Eat, Pray, Love girl? But then I read Williams’ piece and saw how she completely missed the point, and it became very clear to me that this book not only has something to say, but what it says is important.īig Magic confronts the very real battle between creators (both amateur and professional) and the fear that prevents them from fulfilling their passion(s). Until that point, every part of me wanted to dislike it. I realized how much I liked Big Magic after reading Zoe Williams’s ridiculously biased review in The Guardian. She was funny, she was relatable, she wasn’t at all the obnoxious mystic I’d built her up to be. Sure, she said a few things that made me roll my eyes (“I believe creativity is a farce of enchantment, not entirely human in its origins”), but when I got past those petty irritants I realized that what she’s really good at is looking creators, or wannabe creators, in the eyes and saying, Get Over Your Fear You Narcissitic Milksop. She talked with passion and clarity about her life, the nature of creativity, and about getting over creative hangups. But then I listened to her 2-hour appearance on my favorite podcast, You Made It Weird, and I found myself strangely becoming a fan of Gilbert as a person, if not her as an author.
EAT PRAY LOVE AUDIOBOOK PART 11 GENERATOR
Sentences like, “There’s a crack (or cracks) in everyone…that’s how the light of God gets in,” are the norm, not the exception, as evidenced in zingers like, “I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water,” and “God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies.” Someone should could make a Truism Generator based on Gilbert quotes alone.īig Magic–the newest cultural phenomenon from the writer of Eat, Pray, Love–is a book I normally would have avoided like the plague. She writes as if every sentence is an opportunity for an empowering, resonant phrase destined for immortality on Google Images.
I don’t usually have time for self-help books or the kind of platitude-spouting quasi-spiritualism that Gilbert’s become famous for.
(It’s a romance novel, so, naturally, she loved it.) Published in 2015 by Riverhead Books | Hardcover: 288 pages | Goodreads Rating: 4.00 based on 4529 ratingsĮlizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic may be the most atypical book I’ve ever blogged about, and that includes my read-along of Dragon Bound, a book about a woman getting brutally fucked by a dragon.
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