FIRST, SHE TOLD US TO EAT, PRAY, LOVE. AND NOW? TO CELEBRATE SEX Elizabeth Gilbert on life after pain
She’s loved and lost and grieved – and loved again. Elizabeth Gilbert’s story is a remarkable one that’s been followed by millions ever since her smash hit Eat Pray Love. Clover Stroud sits down with the author to find out what she’s discovered about pain
There’s a special swoon of envy that comes from friends when I say I’m interviewing Elizabeth Gilbert. ‘Her writing shows me the way through dark times,’ says one. ‘She’s courageous in searching for the truth and answering difficult questions,’ remarks another. Her novels and non-fiction books sell by the millions and, along with her TED talks and Instagram feed, have earned her the status of ‘guru’; someone fearless in the face of what she calls ‘the hammer blows of life’.
However, when she arrives for our interview, slightly breathless, and flings her arms open to hug me in the bar of The Soho Hotel, her laughter and energy cause several people to look round, wondering, perhaps, who exactly is the tall blonde dressed all in black? We move tables twice, searching for a quiet spot, enraging our waitress, who furiously slams down our tea at the inconvenience. ‘Oh poor girl,’ says Gilbert. ‘I want to hug her and say, “Come, sit on my lap. It’s okay, my dearest, tell me your pain.”’
This is classic Gilbert: healing heart pain is her mission, and one that took her from a prolific but relatively unknown writer to a global sensation in 2006 when Eat Pray Love was published. The memoir opens with Gilbert on her bathroom floor contemplating divorce before embarking on a voyage of self-discovery. Her wise, funny, ballsy voice is one that’s given countless women the courage to change their lives, even if it has meant leaving a partner, changing careers or packing it all in to travel the world; in short, making bold decisions that define moments of crisis. But Eat Pray Love was just the start because, in her writing, Gilbert continually returns to a fundamental question: how do I manage the pain of existence while living a good life?
‘It’s our quest in life, right?’ she says, pouring the tea. ‘Earth school is tough. This planet, this life, isn’t an easy place to be; everyone has a story of pain that would stop your heart. Feeling happy has nothing to do with wealth or conventional success. At some point, we’re all pacing the halls at 3am, trying to understand the dilemma of our own existence,’ she says. ‘And believe me, I’ve opened the medicine cabinets of some very privileged people and always found anti-anxiety medicine.’
She often returns, in both her work and in conversation, to the idea that existential angst is part of being alive, but that such a crisis shouldn’t be feared, since it doesn’t signify a life gone wrong, but of having reached a moment of spiritual evolution.
‘We’re afraid of pain, but all the great spiritual teachers say that to be human is to exist in a state of anguish and suffering.’ She nods discreetly towards our waitress. ‘It’s hard for me to
‘I’M IN A NEW RELATIONSHIP AND I’M NERVOUS AND TERRIFIED, BUT AT THIS MOMENT I’M HAPPY’
feel anything but sympathy for humans, because the war in our brains never stops. It’s my spiritual belief that working through the war is our human mission. Living with that pain still totally sucks, and we’re right to do everything in our powers to lessen our suffering, but there’s consolation in the knowledge that we’re forged into what we’re meant to become in that crucible of suffering.’
Gilbert’s own experience of pain is what gives these proclamations legitimacy. In 2016, she left her second husband, Jose – who she recorded meeting at the end of Eat Pray Love – for her friend Rayya Elias, nursing her through pancreatic cancer before her death in January 2018. ‘I couldn’t see Rayya die without her knowing she was the person I loved most in the world,’ she says. ‘Leaving my happy marriage, and changing my sexual identity to be with Rayya, then losing her, has taken me to the darkest grief. And yet my despair was never greater than that moment on the bathroom floor in my late 20s, when I was utterly lost. Back then, I was a young woman alone in the tundra, with no psychological understanding of herself. So, although the pain of losing Rayya has been incredible, the difference is that I now have the tools to withstand pain, which start with a fundamental sense of friendship towards myself, without which I would have sunk into despair.’
I suggest this sense of friendship to oneself is similar to the trend for self-love, but Gilbert scoffs at the notion. ‘Self-love? That’s a tall order, isn’t it? I’m happy to get to non-self-loathing, as my mind, like most people’s, will do anything it can to hurt itself. But I am aware that in contemporary life we’re missing a voice of gentle kindness from one human to another. We have to teach it to ourselves.’
She compares this compassionate internal voice to ‘a kindly nanny in my head, who stops me injuring myself or throwing myself to the wolves, which I often did as a younger woman’. She’s describing a predicament familiar to so many of us, namely that impulse to dwell on our failures rather than celebrate our successes. But it’s consoling to hear that a bestselling author with a devoted global following is just as hung up on her own neuroses as the rest of us. ‘Honestly, my brain,’ she says, tapping the side of her head. ‘It’s a madhouse inside there, every day. The only peace I’ve learned is to surrender to the inherent mysteriousness of life, and reach out to myself in love.’ She describes this as the ‘central, most important practice of my life’, found during the years leading up to Eat Pray Love. ‘I was in despair, but one day I opened a document on my computer and wrote to myself from a place of complete love, saying the things I urgently needed to hear, that a perfect mother might say, such as, “My dearest darling, I love you, I got you, I won’t leave you, however much you screw up; you can cry all night and I will be with you, little one. You are not alone.”’
This creative, spiritual experience of channelling a compassionate internal voice is something she practises every day. ‘I have thousands of pages on my laptop of myself talking to love, because we all have an infinite need for reassurance. My definition of true autonomy is providing that for myself. It helps me quieten my internal panic, to be able to breathe, which is then when a paternal, practical voice says, “Hey, kiddo, what are we gonna do about this?” And from that, some kind of answers come, or at least a momentum [does], and then choices, flow.’
It’s a practice she says ‘saved’ her during Elias’s terminal prognosis. ‘She was the person who made me feel safest in the world. No one gave me better advice, so now, when I write to love, I also write to Rayya, and I type her answers. Now, that might be her spirit communicating with me, or it might be an internalised sense of Rayya I carry with me. But I have a mystical enough bent to believe her soul is communicating with me, using her powers for my benefit.’ She pauses, suddenly looking crumpled in grief, her eyes glistening. ‘But I miss her, too. I would give anything to see her. I sometimes feel like if I wait a second longer, she will walk through the door. Writing to love allows me to continue my relationship with her. I cannot live without Rayya, so I don’t.’
This raw yet redemptive journey through grief is something she’s shared with her 730,000 Instagram followers, who clearly draw consolation from her wisdom. ‘I don’t post about everything, but if I find something that makes the strange shape of my life feel less weird,
I’ll share it. We owe it to our sisters to help each other feel better.’
Gilbert is often grouped together with Cheryl Strayed, Glennon Doyle and Byron Katie as a spiritual warrior who specialises in confronting darkness. ‘I think curiosity is key to navigating dark times. There’s nothing you can say to someone in a place of deep grief that doesn’t sound shallow, other than, “I am here with you in the room. I am here for you in your pain.” Grief is
serious and it deserves presence. The most warrior-like stance I could take as Rayya was dying was to say, “I am open to this pain, I am present for the thing it will alchemise me into, and I am willing to be altered by it, even if the pain seems intolerable right now.”’
We are still talking about love when Gilbert suddenly breaks into a grin as a tall, handsome man approaches our table. ‘Who’s this gorgeous, wonderful man bringing me noodles?’ she says, introducing me to her English photographer boyfriend Simon Macarthur, who has arrived with her lunch. They smooch a little, looking smitten. He was an old friend of Elias’s, and the chemistry between Gilbert and Macarthur is palpable (afterwards, she shows me a funny, sexy text message he’d sent her). Does she still believe in marriage and monogamy after all she’s been through? ‘Oh god, I don’t know. All I do know is that everyone is trying to solve the dilemma of sex: the single people who aren’t having it are trying to solve sex; the single people having loads of it are trying to solve sex; Tinder is trying to solve sex; marriage, monogamy, polygamy, gay, straight – we’re all trying to solve sex. Desire is the inherent dilemma at the heart of sex, as it’s always changing and we’re all trying to keep it satisfied. All I know is that, right now, I’m in a new relationship and I’m nervous and terrified, but at this moment I’m happy. But if you figure out the dilemma of sex, you tell me, right?’
Female sexual desire is also a major theme in City Of Girls, her new novel, and Gilbert says that she’s put a lot of herself into the hero, Vivian. ‘I wanted the book to be a celebration of women and sex, but I’m also conveying the fact that desire is complicated: sometimes it’s great and sometimes you fuck up and hurt yourself and other people. But all of this is the seasoning process of becoming a woman of a certain age who can look at her life and say, “Well, that didn’t go as I planned, but I would not have missed it.”’
It’s a serious subject, but City Of Girls is also a glamorous romp of a tale that dazzles with sequin-clad showgirls; a feat all the more remarkable since it was written straight after Elias passed away. ‘Writing is a vacation from my mind, the one place I feel utterly confident. And writing is like going home, as creating uses a different part of my brain to worrying, and that’s comforting.’
She started writing from a place of deep grief, conjuring up 4,000 words a day for six months without a day off. ‘It was an exhilarating experience of vibrant and immersive creativity and at the end of each day, I’d just go back to bed and think of Rayya.’
Later, when we’re talking further about personal growth, I ask her how to experience spiritual evolution in the more mundane periods of life; those times that aren’t marked by epic emotions, but instead characterised by the everyday. It’s one thing to jack in your job and travel the world, but we cannot run away from the school run, bills, caring for sick parents and the 9-5 as often as we’d like. How do we take ourselves on a quest at those times? ‘You know, sometimes I think the really crazy shit happens in the quiet times. Boredom and monotony can be just as emotionally extreme as deep grief or high passion, and all extreme emotions are, I believe, a signal that it’s time to grow, to put us on the edge of our growth, or what I call the “growth edge”. Love wants us to grow, and there’s something in that term that restores in me a kind of excitement, because I get it that it’s not always the moment to leave a marriage or run off to India. And if I can’t find adventure out there, I damn well better look at myself to find it within. In difficult or stifling circumstances, my growth edge is to ask myself, “How can I find serenity here?” For me, the search for serenity is the biggest adventure of all. That is an adventure that never ends. That is the thing I keep signing up for.’