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One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
by Elizabeth GilbertThis article relates to Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert was born in Connecticut in 1969 and was raised on a
small family tree
farm. She is the sister of the young adult novelist Catherine Murdock whose
first book Dairy Queen was published in 2006. Elizabeth went to college
in New York City in the early 1990s, and spent the years after college
traveling around the country and the world, working odd jobs, writing short
stories and essentially creating what she has referred to as her own MFA
program.
After more than five years of sending out work for publication and collecting
only rejection letters, she finally broke onto the literary scene in 1993, when
one of her short stories was pulled from the slush pile at Esquire magazine and
published under the heading The Debut of an American Writer. It was the first time
Esquire had published a story by a previously unpublished writer since
Norman Mailer.
She currently lives in New Jersey where she's at work on her new book. Exactly
what that is is unknown but on her website there is a picture of her in Northern
Vietnam with a water buffalo; the caption reads: "A taste of the next book to
come".
Bibliography
Interesting to know:
In an interview at BN.com Gilbert is asked what book most influenced
her life. To which she answers, "generally
speaking, anything by Charles Dickens .... When I was struggling through my own
first novel, I turned to "Bleak House again and studied it like a primer
on how to tell a story, how to differentiate characters -- basically, how to
write a novel. He is the best teacher I've ever had."
She tries not to make her "bookshelves into graveyards" so is constantly giving
books away by the dozen. She says, "the more I like the book, the
less likely that I'll keep it."
"I guess you could say I'm an overnight success who took about six years to become one. I collected rejection notes from the time I was about 18 until I was about 24. I didn't love being rejected, but it didn't slay me, either. I'd made my vows (almost like becoming a nun) to a life of writing and, while I was really hoping for success, that wasn't entirely the point. There was simply nothing else I wanted to do, or was much good at. Of course I have an ego, like everyone does, but it's not super-sized for some reason when it comes to writing. (It's much more of a problem in romantic relationships, but that's another story.) I have a reverential relationship with this work. I love the process. I think I am the luckiest person in the world that I get to do this as a career."
Q. How important does that year in your life seem to you now?
A. How important was the first breath you ever took the day you were born?
Read more from this interview at BookBrowse.
This article relates to Eat, Pray, Love. It first ran in the February 7, 2007 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
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