All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert

All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert is a heavy, but also beautiful nonfiction subtitled Love, Loss, and Liberation. Gilbert writes about her late soulmate, Rayya Elias, the drug and alcohol addition she had, and Rayya's death from liver cancer. Also, Gilbert writes about her own sex and love addiction, how her story with Rayya was one of friendship, romance, beauty, rage, and pain, and Gilbert's recovery from her addiction.

Gilbert had to be involved in the dramas of other people, always checking in, helping them recover, being the savior. She would also become wrapped up in relationships, them turning immediately all-consuming. She was a romantic obsessive, an enabler, and codependent. Having money from her book Eat Pray Love gave fuel to the fire, she could afford to gift huge amounts, trying to save others from their problems. 

When Gilbert and Rayya didn't know each other well, Gilbert gave the gift of free lodging to Rayya after a mutual friend said that Rayya going through a hard time from a breakup. They became close friends and after Rayya's cancer diagnosis, with a six-month life expectancy, they fell into one another and started a relationship. They went everywhere, doing everything, including drugs and alcohol. For a time it was great, then it wasn't, as Rayya had experience as a drug addict, and had returned to it.

Rayya had a horrible decline back into addiction and covered in the book is how when someone an addict, the things they do and say are said and done by someone else entirely. Rayya herself had years prior told someone that when dealing with a family member who was an addict, they were no longer dealing with them, but with a vampire. They might come back to being a person, but that was up to them alone. People have to want to get clean, they can't because someone else wants them to. Rayya lived twenty months after her diagnosis and Gilbert had to leave Rayya to save herself. She had hit caregiver collapse, with Rayya's drug and alcohol addiction and Gilbert's sex and love addiction supercharging the dysfunction and then collapse.

At the end of Rayya's life, Gilbert was there, and Gilbert in her pain spun into her sex and love addiction, and then confronted it. She notes recovery from addiction of all kinds is possible, but it's hard, and requires constant effort and vigilance. The twelve steps work as long as they're worked at and the rooms of recovery, meetings, sponsors, and check ins are all needed. Gilbert went first a day, then thirty days clean from her addiction, then added on giving up alcohol and then drugs, then a year clean, then five years clean at the time of writing. The book notes that addiction is insidious, and addicts can't do normal things like normal people. Gilbert recounts a story about how an addict will always reach a point where they might relapse, and then have thirty seconds to save their life, and decide to either go to the addiction or run the other way. 

It's a beautiful story about both Rayya and Gilbert, but also a rough one, not a story that's puppies and rainbows during someone's final magical, mystical days left on earth. Gilbert includes drawings, poems, and sayings between chapters, including about her recovery from addiction, Give in. Give up. Give over. Towards the very end, Gilbert writes as part of "A Poem for Rayya, Six Years Gone" the statement I had to stay because I'm just beginning. You had to leave because you're done.

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert was a novel that felt to spend quite a while building a backstory, and which then finished very strong.

It's a first person account by a woman named Vivian Morris, who as a nineteen-year-old left college for New York City in 1940 to go live at her Aunt Peg's theater. Morris is telling her story to a woman named Angela who wrote Vivian to ask about her relationship with Angela's father, Frank. Vivian and Angela interacted first in 1971 when Vivian made her wedding dress at the request of her dear friend Frank, then in 1977 when Angela wrote to tell her Frank died, and then in 2010 when Angela wrote inquiring about the relationship, and Morris replied with the story told in the book.

The close friendship between Frank and Vivian didn't come until quite late and Gilbert wrote beautiful prose of the interactions between them. In relation to Gilbert's usage of language in the book, there were some quotes that particularly stood out...

- Reference to British Army engineers during the Great War, who used to say "we can do it, whether it can be done or not."

- Vivian's Aunt Peg upon picking her up to return her back to New York City following young Vivian's abrupt and shame-filled departure... "once I like a person, I can only like them always."

- How after Vivian's business partner, close friend, and roommate Majorie gave birth and became a single mother, the two of them raised together "beautiful, difficult, tender, little Nathan," someone who Majorie spoke of by noting how hard it was to raise him, how much she loved him and how he evidence that "not everyone is meant to charge through the world carrying a spear."

- The partner of Aunt Peg, Olive, who said to Vivian after she ran away from Angela’s father Frank upon meeting him... "the field of honor is a painful field," and "an adult can make the choice to be in that field."

- Frank's words to Vivian that "the world just happens to you sometimes, and people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can."

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert was an excellent read with the best-selling author's ruminations on a creative life. She covers a lot of ground in the book and the concepts that I found most interesting and insightful felt to group together into a few different areas…

WHY BE CREATIVE

Gilbert writes that someone should be creative simply because they enjoy being creative. It's not about toiling away in pursuit of a goal, but rather the making of things because they’re fun to make. If they're not fun, then why make them? Additionally she covers how creativity and a creative life isn't necessarily about writing or producing art and Gilbert tells the story of her friend who started figure skating again in her 40's. She skated in the mornings prior to her day and wasn’t winning medals, but did so because she loved to skate.

CREATIVITY RELATED TO EVERYDAY LIFE

In writing about her figure skating friend, Gilbert notes that she didn't quit her job to pursue skating, bur rather maintained her responsibilities in life, and skated as a vocation. Also, Gilbert covers how her father would hold down a normal job and then outside of work pursue whatever was interesting to him, with one example beekeeping. The idea covered in the book is that people have responsibilities and once those are met, there's usually still going to be time that can be made available for creative side endeavors that are fun. In fact, Gilbert also writes of how creativity generally shouldn’t be expected to pay the bills as it’s not a fair burden to put on those pursuits.

SOURCES OF CREATIVITY

Another concept that Gilbert writes about is that creative pursuit doesn't have to be about pursuing a passion. If someone is passionate about a particular thing and pursues it in a healthy way (again, with also meeting the responsibilities of life) that’s great, but it's also great to simply pursue things of interest. Through seeing what's of interest, then learning about and working on that thing, a lot of cool learning and work can develop. Maybe it'll become a passion, but maybe remain an interest until that interest replaced by something new that strikes the fancy, and that's totally fine.

EXPECTATIONS OF CREATIVE WORK

Gilbert also covers about when working on something, the result isn’t always going to be great. I found particularly cool her writing about creativity and particularly creative genius not as character traits, but as things, which sometimes you've got and sometimes you don't, no big deal. With this the case, people should be willing to just do and produce stuff and not get too hung up on how great a particular output is. The important thing for someone who enjoys to create is that they just create. Sometimes the work great, but if not, you finish it and then move on to the next thing. Gilbert makes the case that perfection can be the enemy of good and that heck, if there has to be a choice made between them, done is better than good. Related to this, Someone shouldn’t dwell on their failures or successes, but simply create and move on as motion always beats inertia.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CREATIVE WORK

Additionally noted in the book is that creativity as a pursuit isn't essential, it’s not medicine or subsistence farming, its fun and people being creative shouldn't take it too seriously. This is especially the case if someone worried about what others might say of their creative work. Gilbert writes that people really aren't paying that much attention so those who want to be creative should relax, find things of interest, learn about and pursue them, make stuff and put it out there for others. Whether others are long captivated by work isn't as important as the person doing the work enjoying the creation of it, and believing that what they do has value. Covered in the book is the importance of someone having a sense of entitlement that they're allowed to be there, and perhaps this sense of entitlement is delusional, but Gilbert writes of how if you're going to live your life based on a delusion, as many of us do, choose a delusion that's helpful to you.

On this topic of people and their reaction to work created by others, Gilbert notes how when something created, people are free to do with it what they may, including completely misunderstand it. The artist free to create what they want, and receiver of the art free to consume it as they want.

The last thing to note about Big Magic is that toward the end of the book, Gilbert writes about her first published story, "Pilgrims" from 1993. She wrote the auto-biographical piece and Esquire bought the finished story, but then needed to cut pages from the magazine and gave her a choice to either cut 30% or hope it would run later. She choose to cut and Gilbert wrote of actually finding value in the process of cutting the story and how the shorter version neither better not worse than what she started with, just different. That story getting published in Esquire, and it may never have if she hadn't been willing to cut it for that particular issue, wound up getting her an agent and on her way to success in writing. All from viewing the story not as a sacred thing that couldn’t be revised, but rather something she enjoyed writing, put out there and then moved on from.

Big Magic was a really enjoyable read for me and one of the things I found I kept thinking throughout was that Gilbert's advice on creativity reminded me of writing on life produced by the late public policy expert John Gardner. With this the case, it was fascinating to me to see that when I wrote in 2013 about Gilbert’s book The Signature of All Things, I referenced part of that novel reminding me of writing from Gardner.

"The Signature of All Things" by Elizabeth Gilbert

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert was a novel that featured great prose from Gilbert on an interesting subject and may have been a bit longer than I would have liked, but definitely finished strong.

In terms of the overall plot, there's excellent reviews out there that describe it, like that by Clare McHugh for the Wall Street Journal and what struck me from the book was both the description (including a cave scene that brought to mind a somewhat similar setting in the Bryce Courtenay book The Power of One) and a piece of the story that was introduced towards the end.

The primary character in the book was named Alma and tremendously interesting to me was a scene where she fought off drowning, and then had that serve as a partial foundation to her writing an unpublished treatise very much in line with On the Origin of Species that was being written by Charles Darwin. Also interesting on this topic was Alma's struggle with how human behavior that goes against the idea of natural selection (or competitive adaptation) relates to the concept written on separately by herself, Darwin and another.

Back to the scene in which Alma had to fight to survive, it brought to mind past writing that I found to be excellent. The late public policy expert John Gardner (who I wrote about in 2009) wrote (among many other things) about carrying on in the face of adversity and Esquire writer Mike Sager in a piece on mental heath (which I wrote about in 2011) provided the powerful and true words "how much can one man take? As much as need be."

Writers on writing - Jones, Montgomery, Lake, Tullis, Lamott & Gilbert

I frequently post about writers on writing and there's been a few recent compelling pieces about writing from three different sources to note here.

The first was "Getting the Story: A roundtable discussion", an e-mail discussion from the magazine Creative Nonfiction moderated by Matt Tullis with writers Ben Montgomery, Thomas Lake & Chris Jones. Topics covered all dealt with nonfiction writing and while the entire piece had some great content to it, below are some of the notions that stood out the most to me:

From Tullis on whether creative nonfiction and journalism operate on different ends of the nonfiction writing spectrum...

"Some of the best creative nonfiction I've read over the last five years was actually journalism, and by that, I mean stories written about the lives of other people, reported by people who know how to report and synthesize what they have reported, then craft a story that captures a place, a time, a person—sometimes all three—to give readers an experience they won’t soon forget, one that reaches truths which fiction and memoir strive for but often fail to reach."

From Montgomery on the question of whether the right term for this type of writing is "creative nonfiction" or something like "narrative journalism"...

"I’m not really concerned with how we categorize it or what we call it. Seems like there’s a new name for it every year. In the end, it’s a stack of facts and reported detail and dialogue ordered to give life to a story. It’s journalism. Narrative journalism seems redundant."

From Jones on the import & process of reporting...

"True nonfiction, the sort of nonfiction that might last and has a chance to matter, is built on a foundation of reporting. And not just a little reporting. Whenever anyone asks me what I do, or whenever I have to fill out a form that asks for my profession, I usually answer “reporter.” A writer can be any number of things. A reporter can be only one thing: a finder of facts. That’s what I love most about my job, that’s what I think I’m best at, and that’s what I most want to be. I want people to read my stuff and think, That guy’s a reporter."

"Reporting really is a two-step process: find your sources, and then mine your sources for material. I usually try to make a list of the people I want to talk to. That list will change because it’s useful to ask the people you talk to who they might talk to if they were writing the story, and they will give you names that you've never heard before. And then I talk to people, a lot."

From Lake on when to stop reporting...

"When you see the story in your mind, from beginning to middle to end, and you can write down that structure on a blank white sheet of paper and there are no gaping holes. I should clarify: This does not actually mean you stop reporting. What it means is you can start writing. But you keep reporting as you write because the act of writing reveals these little pinholes in the reporting, these places where you don’t know quite as much as you should. So you keep making phone calls right up to the end. You solidify, you deepen, you seal all the leaks. You may never actually be done until the thing shows up in print."

From Jones on writing a story...

"I usually have a rolling Word document filled with contacts and ideas and sentences that have popped into my head. I don’t outline, but like Ben, I write from memory first. I don’t go back to all that stuff until after I have a first draft. Then, I go back and correct my mistakes and find plaster for the holes. Otherwise, I get too bound up, reading back over everything. I want my story to feel natural, not constructed, if that makes sense."

Excellent content from this piece for Creative Nonfiction Magazine and another interesting piece on the subject of writing was from Gretchen Rubin who wrote the self-help bestseller The Happiness Project. On her Happiness Project blog Rubin posted "14 Writing Tips from Anne Lamott" with wisdom from Lamott's book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. The tips from Lamott that Rubin passes along are very solid and reminded me of reading and reviewing Bird by Bird last year.

Final piece on writing to note here was from Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, with her essay for the website Bookish. Gilbert offers a response to novelist Philip Roth who spoke of how writing an "awfulish field" to work in. Roth is a renowned author of many books, including The Plot Against America that I enjoyed quite a bit, and it's certainly his prerogative to be down on the field of writing, but was also interesting to read Gilbert's thoughts in support of writing as a profession. The part that struck me the most was the following...

"Writing is a voluntary act. Becoming a novelist, then, is not some sort of dreadful Mayan curse, or dark martyrdom that only a chosen few can withstand for the betterment of humanity. Writing is just a thing. It is a lovely thing, mind you, and it personally means the entire world to me, but I still recognize that it is just a thing. It is a thing that you can choose to pursue with your life because it excites you, or because you have a flair for it, or because it seems more rewarding than toiling away in an office. Sometimes it even works. Not always, but sometimes. If you're lucky, you might be able to make a small living out of this thing. If you're exceedingly lucky, other people might come to appreciate your gifts. If you are phenomenally lucky, you might become lionized in your own lifetime, like the great Philip Roth himself."

Some really great material on writing and the producing of it from these three sources.

Best Time Magazine Writing: Parenting & Family

Over the last few months, I've done multiple blog posts aggregating some of the best magazine stories I've linked to... including my favorite writing from Esquire & Sports Illustrated, BusinessWeek & Fast Company, and Time Magazine... specifically around the topics of Politics & the Economy. In addition, I've linked to a Sports Illustrated piece on their picks for Best SI Writing.

-----

With all this, though, there's another category of great writing that I wanted to aggregate in a post... that of writing around family. It's not by design, but all of the best magazine writing I've come across in this area of family has been from Time.

Included in this category were pieces from two of my favorite Time writers. As a cover story, David Von Drehle wrote "The Myth About Boys"... a really interesting piece that basically says "the kids are alright." Additionally, Nancy Gibbs penned a short back page piece titled "Listen to the Kids" about children, tradition and establishing family traditions.

Also in this Family Writing area was an essay by Elizabeth Gilbert (author of the bestseller "Eat, Pray, Love") and a book excerpt from Karl Taro Greenfeld.

The Gilbert piece is titled "A Family Divided by Obama and McCain" and about her reconciliation of differing political beliefs from her father. A compelling read not so much about politics, but rather about this idea of close family members who don't agree on everything.

From Greenfeld is "Growing Old with Autism"... an excerpt from his book "Boy Alone: a Brother's Memoir". All about the struggles associated with his adult brother's autism, it makes one think of the circumstances that some are dealt and also how that impacts their loved ones.

Just great writing all...

Obama Articles from Time Magazine

Couple of really interesting articles from the October 20 issue of Time Magazine...

The first is essentially the cover story by David Von Drehle titled "The Limits of Race". With a subtitle of "For White Working Class, Obama Rises on Empty Wallets", it's a very well written and interesting look at voters in the key swing state of Missouri and how the economy appears to be trumping everything for voters looking at their Presidential selection.

Also in this issue is a commentary written by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the bestseller "Eat, Pray, Love" titled "A Family Divided by Obama and McCain". Gilbert is an Obama supporter and the piece is about her relationship with her McCain supporting father.