Elizabeth Gilbert’s newest doesn’t create much ‘Magic’
The greatest strengths of Elizabeth Gilbert ( Eat Pray Love) are the potency of her descriptions and loveliness of her storytelling.
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear has a bit of both.
But mostly it is a bearish directive to pursue your passion. And, as it turns out, as a coach/podium pounder she is far less adroit.
There’s very little new or fresh about the advice she gives: Just Do It and Be the Best You Can Be is pretty much the sum and substance of her exhortations for making sufficient room in your life for creativity.
She urges us not to be afraid of the unknown. She tells us that allowing fear to be a roadblock is, if nothing else, boring (though she acknowledges that the complete and absolute absence of fear is the purview of sociopaths and “exceptionally reckless three-year-olds”).
She reminds us that “life is short and rare and amazing and miraculous and you want to do really interesting things and make really interesting things while you’re still here.” And she asserts that “you have treasures hidden within you — extraordinary treasures — and so do I and so does everyone around us.”
Our lives (and the world) will be much better, much richer if we embrace whatever creative ventures we’ve been ignoring, avoiding or minimizing, she insists.
Words to live by, as self-actualization pundits by the scores have long preached.
In the midst of all this evangelizing, Gilbert offers tiny stray morsels of the writing stuff that made her famous. Her passages about her unconventional parents, her unexpected friendship with writer Ann Patchett and a recap of an interview with Tom Waits are charming.
She also offers some fun insights into her writing history and her sources of inspiration and shares a tale of a drunken effort to entice elk during breeding season in Wyoming. But these threads of gold are too rare, overshadowed by Gilbert’s desire to be a creativity guru.
That she is unlikely to move, enchant or influence many of her readers with this book is apparently of no concern to Gilbert. She is evidently one of those rarest of rare authors: one who cares not a whit whether her words resonate for a single other human being. “I did not write this book for you,” she declares, “I wrote it for me. I wrote this book for my own pleasure.”
Enough said.