ELIZABETH GILBERT: AN INTERVIEW

 

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is one of my favorite books.  I loved the courage Gilbert showed in transforming herself and her life.  Now, she has written a new work--a novel entitled The Signature of All Things--due for an October 2013 release.  Here's an excerpt from her interview with Chantal Pierrat.

Chantal Pierrat: What is it right now that is stoking your passion? What perspective or practice is setting you on fire?

Elizabeth Gilbert: Returning to writing fiction after 13 years away from it. Returning to the rootstock of my whole life as a writer. It’s what I had wanted to be for my entire life, since I can remember, since my particular time immemorial. It’s how I got my start as a writer. My first two books were a short story collection and a novel. Then I took this weird, sharp left turn away from that aspect of my imagination, and very much into the world of the real. For the entire decade of my 30s and the early part of my 40s, I didn’t write a word of fiction. I just left that behind, this dream of my life. It wasn’t a bad idea--Eat Pray Love  came out of it. I moved into journalism, biography, memoir (in that order), and started to feel like I had left behind something really important. I made myself come back to it, even though it was frightening and intimidating. I wasn’t sure if I still even knew how to do it or why you do it. I felt like I had to return or else it was going to be gone forever. So that’s what I’ve spent the last few years doing and what I’m going to spend the next few years doing. It’s such a homecoming. I feel all abloom with excitement.

CP: Do you feel that there’s any real in the unreal? Or vice versa?

EG: I think there’s more real in the unreal than there is in the real. I think the thing that I lost in myself when I stopped writing fiction and the thing that I rediscovered and started mining again is, for lack of a better word, magic. It’s the way you can brush up against the inexplicable and the mystical. I’ve always thought of my writing as a spiritual practice. But I think that fiction is the most supernatural kind of writing that you can do -- or that I can do -- because of the ways that the real and the unreal weave together to create something that feels more true than anything. It feels like a collaboration between yourself and inspiration, a collaboration between the facts upon which your book is based and the lives you invent around those facts. There’s this great kind of spooky dance that happens that I can’t access any other way. I think most of us are given kind of one pathway to that dance, and that’s why I’m a writer -- it’s the only way I can get there. I can’t do it through art, I can’t do it through singing, I can’t do it through mothering, I can’t do it through invention. There are other ways that people participate in that collaboration. This is the only way I can do it. What happens and what you encounter, what you collide with -- it’s so exciting and revealing about how much more interesting and tricky the universe is than we think in our daily lives.

CP: Since you are coming from the world of memoir with your last two books, how are you represented in this new work?

EG: Somebody said once that when you write fiction, you’re writing memoir, and when you’re writing memoir, you’re writing fiction. When you write a novel, there’s a level at which you are much more revealing about who you are because you’re less self-conscious about how you’re presenting yourself. You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it’s all coming from you. I had a wonderful conversation with my friend, the novelist Ann Patchett, after she read this book, and she said, “It was so exciting to read that character and see bits of your hair and fingernails growing out of there! I think that what I personally know about you was showing up in this person who you invented. Who you can also embolden to do and be things that you would never do or be.”

It’s funny. So I’m all over this book. It’s about a 19th century botanical exploration. My character, Alma Whittaker, is a botanist who is the daughter of a great botanical entrepreneur, and she’s looking for nothing less than the signature of nature. She’s a real scientist and she’s stubborn about her quest. At the same time, this novel is a love story, and there are great disappointments in the love story. All of women’s stories in the 19th century had either one of two endings: you either had the good Jane Austen marriage at the end and you were happy; or you had the terrible Henry James savage downfall because of your own hubris as a woman, or you’ve made some great error leading you down a path to ruin. One is the story of love that’s successful and the other is the story usually of reckless love that goes terribly wrong that destroys the woman.

But the reality, certainly in my life, is that we all have love stories that go terribly wrong; we all have horribly broken hearts. And somehow we endure. We’re not destroyed by it. We endure and go on to do interesting things and have worthy lives, even though we carry our heartbreaks with us. That’s a kind of personal story of mine that I don’t think I would tell in memoir but I do think I can tell in fiction.

 

CP: How has disappointment changed you?

EG: It softens me. It makes me be a more sensitive, kinder person. I know what it feels like to be bruised; I know what it feels like to carry things around with you that never totally heal. There’s closure and then there’s stuff that’s kind of like, Well, I guess it’s going to be in the minivan forever. And you carry it with you and you continue on your journey with your minivan full of stuff, which I think most of us do.

All the parts of us that we ever were are always going to be with us. You make space to carry them and you just try not to let them drive. But you can’t chuck them out either. I think I have more compassion than if I had led a life where everything worked out exactly as I had planned or if I had never been wounded or if I had never been betrayed or I had never been harmed. I don’t think I would be as good a person. I’m still aspiring to be a better and better person, but I think those disappointments have made me gentler with other people and their disappointments, the stuff that they have to carry around and endure.

CP: In The Signature of All Things, the character is looking for meaning through plants and nature. Is this a reflection of a connection that you might have?

EG: My mom is a master gardener and I grew up on a farm. I came back to it really late in life and discovered that despite how lazy and inattentive I was as a child, I had managed to accidentally learn quite a bit about gardening. This is a nice metaphor, too, about mothers and daughters -- that when it came time for me to make my own, I was making a completely different garden than the one that my mom has. They don’t look like they came from relatives. Hers is a very productive and pragmatic vegetable garden, and mine is a ridiculous overabundance of useless plants. It doesn’t feed anybody, it doesn’t serve any purpose. I guess it feeds hummingbirds.

It’s definitely a question of following your fascination. When you want to do something creative and you want to do something new, you have to start with the thing that’s making you want to jump up out of bed in the morning, and for me that thing was gardening. I thought, this book is going to have to be about plants, otherwise I’m not going to want to spend three years with it; I’ll resent it if it’s taking me away from the garden.

CP: What do you think the world needs from women right now?

EG: I think the world needs women who stop asking for permission from the principal. Permission to live their lives as they deeply know they often should. I think we still look to authority figures for validation, recognition, permission.

I see women who have this struggle between what they know is right, what they know is necessary, what they know is healthy, what they know is good for them, what they know is good for the work that they need to do, what they know is good for their bodies, what they know is good for their families -- all too often ending that statement with the upturned question mark: “If it’s okay with everyone?” Still asking, still requesting, still filing petitions for somebody to say that it’s all right. I think that, myself included, that has to be dropped before we can take our place in the way that we need to and the world needs us to.

The best and most powerful things that I’ve done in my life were when I decided that I don’t f***** need somebody to tell me that I can do it. To just go and make it myself, do it myself, build it myself, do the project first and not bother along the way to get the requisite paperwork. That requires faith. Primarily it requires a faith in the condition that you are allowed to exist. You are here and you are allowed to be here and therefore you are allowed to make decisions about yourself and the people in your life; rather than sort of backing up and making sure it’s okay with everybody at every turn.

CP: Hallelujah! Do you have a consistent practice or a perspective that helps you through times of contraction?

EG: I do. It all comes down to these two words: “stubborn gladness.” It’s from a poem by my favorite poet, a guy named Jack Gilbert. He’s sort of the poet laureate of my life. He has a poem called “A Brief for the Defense.” In the poem he says, “We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”

Which is not to edit him but I guess that’s how I took him in. He carefully put those words in the order that he wanted them, but somehow in my mind they just go into the furnace and come out like two ingots, sort of melded together, these two words that I keep together. Stubborn gladness.

What I love about the line is that it doesn’t deny the reality of the ruthless furnace of the world. That God wants us to be in joy, God wants us to be happy. Because of this extraordinary consciousness and this great ability for wonder and marvel, and without denying any of the terrors and horrors of the world, we also have an obligation toward joy and toward miracle and excitement. I feel like if I were to get another tattoo, it would probably be those two words. Just stubborn, stubborn, stubborn gladness.

 

For more info, visit:

http://www.elizabethgilbert.com

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/11/elizabeth-gilbert-interview-origin-magazine_n_3733069.html?ref=topbar

http://www.originmagazine.com/2013/05/25/elizabeth-gilbert-interview-beyond-eat-pray-love/

 

 

 

HOT, SOUR, SALTY, SWEET by Sherri L. Smith

Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet by Sherri L. Smith is, perhaps, the cutest book I’ve ever read.  It’s the charming YA novel about Ana Shen, a smart and sassy young girl of African-American/Chinese-American heritage, upon her graduation from junior-high school.

The book displays fourteen-year old Ana as she copes with  her many issues—her younger  brother, her parents, her nemesis at school.  Her junior-high graduation is a near ‘disaster’.  Though she has no boyfriend, Ana does have a huge crush on a boy in her class.  Thankfully, she has a loyal best friend, Chelsea, to help her navigate life.

The book has a contemporary feel as it depicts, in Ana’s teacher’s words, a “‘marvelously biracial, multicultural’ family,” as they prepare for and participate in a celebration dinner.  Among the likable characters are Ana’s parents, grandparents, and best friend—featuring dialogue that sounds modern and authentic.  For instance, when Ana says:

“We’ve had exactly three family meals with both sides together. . .  We eat out together.  We have to eat out together, or else there’ll be a fight or a disaster, or the end of the world. . . .  This is no longer a dinner, it’s a competition.  That means you’ve made my life hell for the next’—she glances at her watch—four hours.  Four hours!  Holy crap, I’ve gotta go!”

Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet  is a YA novel that will resonate with both older and YA readers, alike.  This is a book I’d have loved to have read as a young adult.  I found myself reminiscing  on my own junior-high/high school graduations, and that time in my life.  I think Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet will evoke pleasant memories for other readers as well.  (This is a book both mothers and their daughters will empathize with and enjoy reading.)

I so enjoyed reading this book!  Young adult readers will just think, This book is awesome!

A delightful little book, Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet is by an award-winning author.  It’s witty, engaging; its cuteness knows no bounds.

--Yolanda A.  Reid

For more info:

http://www.randomhouse.com/teens

http://www.randomhouse.com/teachers

VINTAGE CISNEROS by Sandra Cisneros

Vintage Cisneros is the perfect introduction to the legendary writings of Sandra Cisneros.  A graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Cisneros is a poet and novelist.  Vintage Cisneros  is a compendium of her poems, stories and several chapters from her first novel, The House on Mango Street.

This YA novel is the story of Esperanza, a Mexican-American girl growing up in Chicago.  The thirteen-year old’s  tone and language suffuse the book with authentic emotion.   In a series of vignettes, Esperanza assesses her block, her friends, her universe.  Though her name means ‘hope’ in Spanish, she says: “I would like to baptize myself a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees.”  Of the world, she says,  “You can never have too much sky.”

Vintage Cisneros  also bears selections from Cisneros’ poetry and stories, such as “Eyes of Zapata”  (a long story in the voice of his beloved that serves as a form of tribute to Emiliano Zapata),  “All parts from Mexico, assembled in the USA or I am born,” “Someday my Prince Popocatépetl will come,”  “Love Poem for a non-believer,” “You bring out the Mexican in me,” and others.

The writing is personal, specific, with beautiful imagery and sentiments that are searing in their honesty.  Most times, Vintage Cisneros reads  like a memoir.   For example, in  “Preface from My Wicked Wicked Ways,”  Cisneros writes,

“What does a woman

willing to invent herself

at twenty-two or twenty-nine

do?  A woman with no who nor how.

And how was I to know what was unwise.

I wanted to be [a] writer.  I wanted to be happy.”

--Yolanda  A.  Reid

http://www.sandracisneros.com

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emiliano_Zapata

THE COOKED SEED by Anchee Min

The most poignant moment in The Cooked Seed is when Anchee asked her lover, Qigu,  “Do you love me?”  They had been in a relationship for several months, but he had never said the words, I love you.  It was not  “the Chinese way,” he said. “You know how I feel about you, . . . and I know how you feel about me.  Isn't that enough?”

They wed, had a child and remained together for six years.  Qigu, an artist, was the grasshopper to Anchee’s worker-ant (although, she also was an artist).

Born into a middle-class family in Shanghai, China, Anchee Min survived a painful and heartbreaking chidhood.  This was during the Cultural Revolution.  Min’s parents  “were teachers, and thus regarded as bourgeois sympathisers.”  They lived in cramped quarters, in which the kitchen doubled as a bathroom, used not only by Min’s family but also by several neighbors.

Anchee as a child subsisted near starvation.  Her mother pawned the family’s clothes and  “the backs of her feet bled” as she walked in the snow. 

Later—once Chairman Mao’s formidable widow, Chiang Ching, lost political clout—Min became a pariah.  “I was considered a ‘cooked seed’—no chance to sprout.”

So Min was determined to emigrate to the US, in order to expand her life opportunities.   She applied to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was accepted and managed to obtain the necessary visa.

In Chicago, armed with her “English-Chinese dictionary and  English 900 sentences book,”  she struggles to learn English.  Once her college classmate explains the meaning of  “What’s up, dude?” Min switches from the stuffy  “How do you do?” she had learned in language class and which no one used. 

Early on in the process of learning English, Min makes many language mistakes.  Once, she tells Qigu he is “full of booloony” (she means baloney).  “The big moving room—the elevator” fascinates her, but she confuses the word with “refrigerator.”  One of the first phrases she understands fully is from Mr.  Rogers: “The best gift you can offer is your honest self.” 

A happy moment in the book is when Lloyd, her beau and husband-to-be, says he loves her and she says she loves him.

In The Cooked Seed, Min offers us an unflinchingly honest self-portrait.  She does not exclude anything unflattering.  Moreover, the book depicts an extraordinary metamorphosis, from loyal Chinese worker  to an American woman.  The book also depicts Min’s struggles as a single parent, and later, how she and her husband, Lloyd, prepare her daughter for the SAT’s and other college entrance exams.

The Cooked Seed is a compelling portrait of life in contemporary  China and of the US immigrant experience.  It is also the story of a strong pragmatic woman as she perseveres from “Chinese fatalism” and a propensity “to dwell on the literature of misery, exile, imprisonment, and despair” to American optimism, the “tomorrow-is-another-day attitude” of Scarlett O’Hara.

“Truth,” Min writes, “would lead to real beauty.”  In The Cooked Seed, the language is spare, utilitarian, and true.

--Yolanda  A.  Reid

For more info, visit these websites:

http://www.ancheemin.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4WY24y-7Es

https://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Qing

LUNCH IN PARIS by Elizabeth Bard

Memoirist Elizabeth Bard states that there are two kinds of croissants.  The first is a “brioche”;  the second,  flaky.  “I like flake, a croissant with an outer layer so fine and brittle that you get crumbs all over yourself from the very first bite.”

Bard’s delectable memoir, Lunch in Paris, features multiple recipes—for swordfish, ribs with honey, mackerel, duck and blackberries, French onion soup, carrot soup, and salmon.  Also, “Fennel Salad with Lemon, Olive Oil, and Pomegranate Seeds,” “Goat Cheese Salad with Fresh Figs,” “Choux Pastries,”  “Summer Ratatouille,” and more.  To top it off, an essay on French cheeses and lots of chocolate.

But the main course of  Lunch in Paris is the story of how Bard met, romanced and wed her French husband, Gwendal, in Paris.  She was twenty-five years old at the time, a graduate student in art history, in London.  Gwendal was a graduate student in computer science, who longed to be a filmmaker.

Their first meal together—at his tiny studio apartment—was an impromptu lunch concocted of onion, carrots, ham, and tagliatelle pasta.  “It was the best thing I’d ever tasted,” she writes.  “This is amazing,” she said. “You have to give me the recipe.” “ ‘There is no recipe.’ he said, smiling.  ‘I use whatever I have.  It never tastes the same way twice.’”

That first lunch, on their first date, was one of many featured in the book.  There is a sumptuous lunch at L’Hermès—a fancy restaurant with an offering of  “duck with braised  cabbage and apples.”  There is lunch with his parents.  There are lunches during Bard’s stint as a tour guide, and a pre-wedding dinner  with  both sets of parents, at which—except for the bride and groom—no one spoke the other’s language.

Even so, Bard purports to have decoded the reason French women are slim.  Petite portions.  “A French portion is half of an American portion, and a French meal takes twice as long to eat,” she writes.  She concluded this after she  analyzed her slender French mother-in-law’s eating style:  no snacks, drinks lots of water, no soda, drinks wine, and eats petite portions.

During the courtship, as Bard shuttled back and forth between London and Paris, she was a bit off-kilter: “The boys I’d been out with before went to the same schools, came from the same towns. . . .  Although [Gwendal and I] were roughly the same age, we didn’t have the same cultural references.”

It’s a tale of love in two cities; but  Lunch in Paris is not a Charles Dickens novel.  For this is a modern story, a modern love (he  cooked for her!).  It’s love, dating, a wedding and marriage, Parisian style.  When he proposed, Gwendal said, “I know what I want.”  He just wanted to be  happy, and to share his life with her.  (Bard and her friends wanted success.)

Lunch in Paris is a delectable, delightful hybrid memoir—travel and food.  (The language is wonderfully descriptive—not just white, but “the color of warm milk.”)  A chick-lit memoir—with recipes and romance—that depicts the realities of living in Paris, and the romantic ways of one Frenchman.

--Yolanda A.  Reid

Check out these websites: www.elizabethbard.com

www.facebook.com/LunchinParis

www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens

WAITING TO BE HEARD by Amanda Knox

Waiting To Be Heard is the  eagerly awaited memoir by Amanda Knox.   In 2009, Knox was convicted—then later acquitted—of murdering her housemate, Meredith Kercher, while both lived and studied in Italy.  During the trial, one reporter dubbed Knox the “angel face,” because she projects uncanny innocence, truth and beauty. 

The story of Knox’s life—in the Northwestern part of the U.S., before she landed in Perugia, Italy—makes for interesting reading.  A self-described “quirky kid” of divorced parents, Amanda had been  a teenager who had dabbled in new experiences.  Because she kept a journal, she describes with seeming accuracy her conversations with family, friends and boyfriends, at home and later in Italy.

Surprisingly, Knox wrote Waiting To Be Heard  herself, and her writing is exceptional.  (I had expected a co-authored book.)   She aspires to be a professional writer, so we can look forward to more of her writings. 

A causal factor in  Knox’s circumstances was that her beginner-Italian could never match the Italian of a native—so she misunderstood, misread and misspoke.  When her two Italian housemates consulted lawyers, Amanda was interrogated  mostly without even an interpreter.  Her exasperation and bewilderment are almost palpable.  The consequence is that, upon acquittal and despite her innocence, she spent four mind-blowing  years  in prison.

Now aged twenty-six, Knox is candid in the book about her lifestyle and relationships at the time.  Also, she reveals  mistakes in a few of her personal choices.  For example, her Myspace photos and writings were used in court—to her detriment.  “Looked at together,” she comments, “these latter images would have portrayed a typical American girl, not as tame as some, not as experimental as many, but typical among my age group—a group that had the bad judgment to put our lives online.”

Waiting To Be Heard projects a three-dimensional  image of  Knox as a mostly “typical American girl” who stumbled into a harrowing experience in Italy.  But she is also resilient, intelligent and—after this experience—might make an excellent  lawyer.  Knox’s  father’s statement, before she left for Perugia, sums up what was then a serious flaw: “I worry that you’re too trusting for your own good, Amanda.”  

Readers—especially law enthusiasts—who wish to psychoanalyze Amanda Knox, or parse the facts and events to “re-try” the case, should read this riveting memoir.

--Yolanda A.  Reid

For more info:

www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Knox

Note:   Linda Kulman helped to write Waiting To Be Heard.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-kulman

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/books/review/trial-and-error.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/books/review/amanda-knox-by-the-book.html?pagewanted=all

ON READING YA BOOKS

        

As a teenager, I used to read lots of books.  Our  basement had bookcases that lined the walls, end to end.  Alongside the bookcases were a couple of  boxes filled with books.  The basement was our private family library.  I'd descend to its nether world, peruse the bookshelves, then bring books—sometimes a batch at a time—up to my room, to read.  Sometimes, I’d pick a book from a bookshelf and sit as I read or skimmed  its pages, at leisure.

So the following is a list of YA books that I’ve read and been comforted by.  Each book is beautiful and a classic.

 1.  The Woman Warrior  by Maxine Hong Kingston.--I read  The Woman Warrior  years ago, and was moved and inspired by it.  It is the story of Maxine Hong Kingston, the author, as she grows up in California.  The book describes the stories of her childhood.  One monumental character is Brave Orchid, Maxine’s  mother.   The subtitle defines the book as a memoir; but  some readers might consider this a novel rather than a memoir, as some of the stories are fantastical, larger than life.  It is, after all, a “girlhood among ghosts.”  Nevertheless, The Woman Warrior contains beautiful imagery, and poignant vivid scenes.  

2.  Home to India by Santha Rama Rau—At age 16,--after  living in England for ten years—author Santha Rama Rau and her family returned to India.  Her father was a diplomat during the time of Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent coup d’état.  The modern/Westernized Rau had to get re-acquainted with her relatives, who espoused classic Indian customs and traditions.  Eventually, she attended Wellesley College and wrote Home to India  while there.  The result is a poignant, well-written story imbued with the time and magic of India—amid political intrigue.

3.  Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong.--Fifth Chinese Daughter  is the delicately told memoir of Jade Snow Wong during the 1950’s.  Born into a poor family in California, she was inspired to go to college—despite being a girl.  The book chronicles Jade Snow’s hardships and struggles—with neither help nor encouragement from her family.  Ultimately, Jade Snow triumphs by graduating from Mills College; she went on to become  an internationally-known ceramist.  Fifth Chinese Daughter  reminds us that education—now considered a right—was once thought of as a luxury.  In some parts of the world, even today,  girls are shunned or worse for wanting to be educated.

--Yolanda A.  Reid

www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/canam/kingston.htm‎

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/arts/24ramarau.html?_r=0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jade_Snow_Wong