Elizabeth Gilbert

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/magazine/eat-pray-love-get-rich-write-a-novel-no-one-expects.html?smid=pl-share

Hi All,

I've shared a link above to an article on Elizabeth Gilbert that I think is interesting given the the conversations we've had in class. Gilbert is best known for her book Eat, Pray, Love, a book I confess I snarkily dismissed in a George Eliot kind of way when the spotlight (and Oprah clamor) was at its highest intensity. I still have not read it, but this article made me at least examine my assumptions about its author and her writing/literary/intellectual skills as well as my own limitations and prejudices as a reader, scholar, and feminist. As the article notes: "Despite having spent the first decade of her career writing three critically acclaimed books, critics cast her as a pampered solipsist peddling self-help. “Even worse — chick lit, if you really want to get ghetto,” Gilbert says. “What little respect I clawed my way to, I totally erased.” I think this article provides an intriguing look into the life of a contemporary woman writer who has found fame/money writing in a genre that can often  be belittled as a "womanly" genre of self-help/empowerment/naval-gazing privileged "finding-of-oneself" despite her background as a skilled writer and ambitious career-woman. She addresses this in the article with considerable grace. She has also become a powerful patron to other women artists (think of the questions raised by Woolf in A Room of One's Own). Admittedly, it is a long article, but I think it provides an excellent contemporary example of some of discussions that arose from our Reading Of Eliot's "Silly Novels..."