The Tim Ferriss Show - #430: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Creative Path: Saying No, Trusting Your Intuition, Index Cards, Integrity Checks, Grief, Awe, and Much More

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seen a perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market. Thrive Market saves me a ton of money, and it's perfect for these crazy times. Thrive Market is a membership-based site on a mission

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Starting point is 00:06:57 my job to interview world class performers from all different fields to tease out how they do what they do. what are their habits, belief systems, favorite books, et cetera, hopefully so you can apply and test things in your own life. My guest today is Elizabeth Gilbert. Elizabeth Gilbert is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Big Magic and Eat, Pray, Love, as well as several other internationally bestselling books. Although her nonfiction work catapulted her to global fame, Gilbert has been critically acclaimed throughout her career for her fiction and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Penn Hemingway Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. For those of you who don't know fiction, those are very, very big deals. Elizabeth has had an extraordinary journey, first as an award-winning

Starting point is 00:07:43 magazine journalist. She began her career writing for Harper's Bazaar, Spin, The New York Times Magazine, and GQ. She was a three-time finalist for the National Magazine Award, and an article she wrote in GQ about her experiences bartending became the basis for the movie Coyote Ugly. Eat, Pray, Love launched Gilbert into another stratosphere altogether, making her one of the most iconic and beloved writers of our time. Now with more than 15 million copies sold worldwide, that is a huge number. Eat, Pray, Love has been translated into more than 30 languages and made into a feature film in Time Magazine named Gilbert one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Her TED Talk about creativity has nearly 10 million views, making it one of the

Starting point is 00:08:25 most viewed TED Talks of all time. And this past fall, Gilbert went on tour with Oprah, speaking to 100,000 plus people along the way. Gilbert also wrote the instant number one New York Times bestseller, Big Magic, subtitled Creative Living Beyond Fear, which dives deep into her own generative process to explain where inspiration comes from, how ideas form and grow, and how to overcome the fears and suffering that inevitably arise when we push at boundaries and take a leap into the unknown. Her new book, City of Girls, is a novel set in the New York City theater world of the 1940s, and it hits all sorts of fantastic, fun, tantalizing stuff that we get into in this interview, which covers a lot of ground. And what a pleasure it was. So without further ado,

Starting point is 00:09:14 please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Liz Gilbert. You can find her at elizabethgilbert.com and also on the socials, at Gilbert Liz on Twitter and Facebook and at Elizabeth underscore Gilbert underscore writer on Instagram. Liz, welcome to the show. Hey, Tim. Thanks for having me. I am thrilled to have you. And I have messages to impart. My girlfriend insisted that I tell you that she loves you. So that's important to check in the very beginning. You tell her, I'll tell her, I love you too.

Starting point is 00:09:57 I have so many questions and we are going to improvise as we go. And I thought I would begin with the alpha wolf, if you don't mind. And this was introduced to me, and for those who don't know, this is a moth talk slash presentation story slash tearjerker slash laugh out loud at moments tale that my girlfriend asked me to listen to with her together in bed before we went to sleep several months ago. And I saw that Rhea's birthday, her 60th birthday, was just a few days ago. And I have questions about preparing for this, for the alpha wolf,

Starting point is 00:10:49 but perhaps you could give people some context. I've fallen in love with the moth, partially thanks to Neil Gaiman, partially thanks to Catherine Burns. And this was a very strong talk on a whole lot of levels, but could you speak to who Rhea was, a little bit of context, and then how you prepared for that? There's quite literally nothing I would rather talk about than Rhea. So, you started in a good place for me. So Raya Elias was quite simply the love of my life. She and I were friends for 17 years. I was married for most of that. And just very slowly and very quietly over the years fell in love with her. She was a lesbian, Syrian, Detroit-raised, rock and roll hairdresser, filmmaker, author,

Starting point is 00:11:55 musician who had always wanted to live just right on the edge of life. She had been a speedball heroin junkie on the Lower East Side of New York City in the 1980s, was in Rikers Island, was in Bellevue, was in various rehabs and rehabilitations, was homeless, was, oh God, she'd had such a storied life. And then she finally put it all down and she spent 19 years clean and sober. And when I met her, she was on the other side of that recovery. And she was the strongest, most extraordinary person I ever met. And as I said in that speech that I gave, in that talk that I gave at the Moth about her, which I shared a year after she died,

Starting point is 00:12:37 she was the most powerful person in every room that she ever walked into. And I adored her. She was my guide. She was my teacher. She was the rock, the ground underneath my feet. She was the one person in the world who always made me feel safe. And she didn't just make me feel safe. I felt the feeling that everyone had when Rhea walked into the room was, oh, thank God, Rhea's here. Everybody is safe. You know, that's what the alpha is, right? The alpha is the person who keeps the entire pack safe. And because she was the most powerful person

Starting point is 00:13:12 in the room, what I always knew when she walked in was not only would she make sure I was okay, if anybody was preying on me in any way, she would make sure the predator was okay too. Like she had everybody under her wing to make sure that people were all right. She just had this way of handling humans like nothing I've ever seen in my entire life. And I absolutely adored her. And I was a loyal wife and I loved my husband and the three of us were really good friends and there was no way in the world that I was ever going to cross that line. I just kept that love very quietly in my heart and we all just had a beautiful life together until the day that she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer. And I got a phone call from her saying that she'd gotten this diagnosis and that

Starting point is 00:14:01 they said she had six months to live. And from that point forward, it was no longer possible for me to keep that love hidden. And very swiftly after that, I had a conversation with my husband and said, I need to go and be with Raya. And no one was surprised by this. He wasn't surprised by it. He'd seen it for years. And he very, in one of the greatest acts of courage and dignity I've ever seen anybody do, he very graciously stepped out of the way and, um, and we separated and I went to be with her and I was with her until the end of her life. So that's who Raya was and that's who she was to me. As for that speech that I gave at the Moth, that talk, what I was challenged to do in 12 minutes was to try to get over the net who that person was,

Starting point is 00:15:00 the most epic human being I'd ever met. And I decided the way to do that was to tell a few stories about the experience of her death and dying, which were mostly based on ideas that I had about how she was going to become very helpless and I was going to have to be her hero and protect her versus the reality of the situation, which is that she never became helpless. She remained the alpha in the entire situation. She was a really hard patient to take care of for that reason. She absolutely refused to cooperate with my version of some airy-fairy soft hippie depth that I wanted to give to her. And instead, she died the way she lived, like the badass, fierce, unrelenting warrior that she was. And it was brutal and it was beautiful and um and she never stopped taking us by surprise right even up till the last second was it difficult for you to have the

Starting point is 00:15:55 conversation with your husband or difficult to prepare for this talk or did both come to you very naturally or something in between? It was very natural and very difficult. And, you know, I was only guided by, again, going back to the teachings that Rhea gave to me, one of her great expressions that she lived by was, the truth has legs. And what she meant by that, and she would expand on it and say it this way, the truth has legs. It's the only thing that will be left standing in the end. So, at the end of the day, when all the drama has blown up and all the trauma has expressed itself and everyone has acted up and acted out and there's been, you know, whatever else is happening, when all of that settles, there's only going to be one thing left standing in the room always, and that's going to be the truth. And Rhea's policy of life was, since that's where we're going to end up, why don't we just start with it? Why don't we just start with it? And I can't tell you how many times I heard her say that

Starting point is 00:17:12 and how many times I heard her just go right to the center of it with people where she'd be like, okay, put your truth on the table. Let me put my truth on the table. Let's skip the drama and let's just go to the truth because that's the only thing that's ever going to survive. And let's just begin, you know, right there. And that was a truth. The truth of my love for Rhea was, had reached a point where it could just no longer be hidden. I couldn't hide it from myself anymore. And I certainly didn't want to hide it from this wonderful man who I loved and still love. And, you know, there's that adage, I think, David Foster Wallace said it, the truth will set you free, but not before it's had its way with you. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:56 You know, it's a frightening thing, but I felt, I just felt like the only way that I could honor how much I loved him was to honor that great man by telling him the truth. And he honored me in return by accepting it. What did you learn about grief, your own grieving process, grief recovery plans, anything related to grief through that experience? So, everything about Raya humbled me. That was one of her great roles in my life, was to just show me how you can plan till God leaves Chicago. You can plan shit till things get better. You can plan till the end of days.

Starting point is 00:18:47 And trust me, I'm a planner. I am an organized person. My mom's lesson always in my childhood was the best thing you could be was somebody who had her ducks in a row, right? Just get it all in order, get it all organized. And life has a marvelous way of refusing to cooperate with that. And so I did not, I planned to be a good, loyal wife. And then God or the universe was like, oh, that's a great plan. You know, the way that I say it now is good guess. Good guess, Liz, good guess. like a really good guess, honorable guess, done with the best of intentions. But actually, that's not your love.

Starting point is 00:19:34 This is your love. And I spent years just being like, no, it's not. No, it's not because I have this plan. And life's like, yeah, it actually is. It actually is. And the point is going to come where that truth is going to become bigger than your plans. And that extended into the way that I tried to manage, I'm using air quotes now, manage Rhea's death. I also went into her death with a plan.

Starting point is 00:19:59 We're going to have an enlightened death. We're going to have a real hospice death. We're going to bring grief bereavement experts in here to talk. I mean, I laugh now because it's like, you know, it's just Raya, like who's such a biker chick. It's like, you're going to bring a fucking grief bereavement expert in here to talk to me? You know, like, give me a break. I'm going to go down watching football, eating chicken wings and smoking, you know, like, this is like, I have no interest in that. And so, she just waylaid that plan completely and died on her own terms. And then, I think by that point, I'd given up even having the idea of a plan for grief. I just remember, I think I walked into my grief kind of like, just naked and broken and just like, okay, what do you have for me?

Starting point is 00:20:55 And it just, what it had for me was so beautiful and so hard. I found that, I guess I did have a plan to a certain extent because I still thought that I was going to be good at it. This is like, I love when I walk into really hard things like, I'm going to be good at this. You can't be good at grief. You can't be good at it. It's not something that is to be mastered. It's something that's to be survived. And it's something that has great lessons for you, but you certainly have to drop any sense that you've got control over it or that you can manage it. It's bigger than you and it's bigger than us. It's a force of nature. It's a weather system. And what I learned in grief was you let it take you. You just have to let it take you. When those waves come, you have to let them break over you. If you try to resist, it will only hurt you more.

Starting point is 00:21:41 And one of the things that really shocked me in my grief was how much rage there was in it. I don't think of myself as a very rageful and angry person, but my grief was shot through with an absolute white hot boiling rage. And I was enraged at Rhea. I was enraged at Rhea for not dying the way I wanted her to. I was enraged at her for dying at all. I was enraged at her for leaving a whole bunch of shit for me to take care of after she died, which also felt like how our life together had been. It's like, why do I have to handle everything? Why didn't you arrange this? Why didn't you work this out?

Starting point is 00:22:17 She's like, because I'm not that person. You're that person. I lived in the moment. You make plans. You figure it out, you know? I was enraged at family members and friends who I felt hadn't shown up for her or for me in the way that I needed them to, and it was an incredibly uncomfortable feeling. I was enraged at God for taking the one person in the world who ever made me feel safe, and I had a long list, a really long list for God,

Starting point is 00:22:43 of other people who should have died instead of her. And God's like, yeah, that's adorable, but that's not how we're doing it. And I just spun in rage for months and it hurt him. I mean, it was not manageable. It was incredibly painful. And then finally, I remember one of my final pieces of rage was I'm enraged at my rage because it's interfering with my grieving. Because I had some sort of idea that my grieving would be this sort of poetic, beautiful, weepy, soft lit, you know, experience. Minor key music over candlelight. Yeah, exactly. And instead, it was like Sid and Nancy. It was just like, what's going on?

Starting point is 00:23:30 And sort of, you know, just violent anger toward everybody and everything. And when I had that thought, I was given the grace of an answer. And the thought I had was, I need this anger to go so that I can grieve. And then the answer came, this is your grief. And grief is the most uncomfortable experience you'll ever have in your life. And for you, Liz, the most uncomfortable thing you can ever feel is anger toward anybody, even a teeny tiny bit. So, why wouldn't you think that your grief would come as the most battering emotion that could possibly happen to you? I'm really comfortable being sad,

Starting point is 00:24:05 you know, like I can do minor key, rainy day, sweet sadness. I can't handle anger. And so of course it came as anger and it, and it had, it had to, in order for me to feel the magnitude of the loss, um, it had to be something that was bigger than I could hold. And that's what grief is. One thing that strikes me, and there are many things that strike me, but one of the things that strikes me about your work, of which I am a fan, a big fan, is how well you use humor and lightness along with the difficulty and the darkness. And I'd love to chat about that for a minute. I've read about your, I don't want to call it position, that makes it sound too strange, but your discussions of creativity and the allure and the danger of fetishizing pain.

Starting point is 00:25:08 And then, for instance, I've read The Art of Memoir by Mary Carr, which is a book I absolutely adore, which I think touches on that also quite a lot. And what I'm wondering, I'll try to make this a digestible question, is through, say, your grieving process, certainly this comes up in the moth talk, there are some very funny, funny moments. Do you experience those or find those in the process, say, of grieving, or is it something that you unearth after the fact when you are doing your writing? Or is there another way to look at it? I'm just thinking of something that a hospice nurse said to me because we were cracking up one day. I can't remember what it was about, but there's a lot of, anybody who's ever been by it, you know, there's a lot of humor

Starting point is 00:26:02 that shows up. And it is literally gallows humor. You know, it really is like, I've got a picture of me and, and Rhea's ex-wife and Rhea's ex-girlfriend, um, who were the two women who showed up like champions at the end of her life to help to take care of me and help to take care of her because they, they loved her so much. And it was also just such a factor of what a boss Mac daddy Raya was that she had like every woman who'd ever loved her came back to take care of her when she was dying, you know, and to take care of each other. And there was a lot of laughter between the three of us about just like handling this force of nature as she was dying. Like, can we survive it? Right. She's the opposite of a good patient, you know, and so there was a lot of humor in there.

Starting point is 00:26:44 And the hospice nurse was laughing with this one day. and I said to her, it's amazing that you can laugh given the line of work that you're in. You know, like she spends her life working with people at the worst, most painful parts of their lives, at the end of their lives. And she said, we have a little motto. We say, if you can't laugh at death, get out of show business. You shouldn't be a hospice nurse if you can't find, if you can't, you won't survive. And I'm sure that's what you and I are talking right now in the midst of the COVID crisis. And I've been thinking about that. I've been thinking about the nurses that I know, and I'm imagining that you know there's some dark ass humor happening in those hospitals right now there there has to be in the same way that soldiers would tell you

Starting point is 00:27:32 about the the humor that happens when you're under fire like there absolutely has to be or you you simply won't be able to survive it so I will say that the humor is there, you know, in those moments. I mean, right after Rhea died, I mean, we had been through such hell with her. And literally, I mean, and her death was not, as I say, it was brutal. You know, one minute after she took her last breath, her last horrible breath, Gigi, her ex-wife, stood up, brushed off her hands and goes, okay, so that's done. I'm going to be on the next flight out of here like at two o'clock you know we just it was hilarious but it was also just like what ray would have done you know like because it was like okay you guys good we good we done here you

Starting point is 00:28:16 know we just all like rolled over laughing in the middle of our tears you know and i feel like that humor has to be shot through the entirety of your life or else you really are not going to make it through earth school because earth school is a hard, hard school and it's a hard assignment. And I think the humor is quite literally grace, you know, these pieces of grace that are shot through the nightmare. Yeah. Let's talk about writing, something that I'm fairly sure that you're fond of on some level.

Starting point is 00:28:52 And I was doing homework for this conversation, and it seems like you decided to be a writer very early in life and that there were supporting plans, but not backup plans, so to speak. And the line that I found, and you can fact check or correct anything that I'm saying, but I'll read a quote, which is from an interview you did on readitforward, or readitforward.com at least. And that is something you said yourself, this is what I do. And I'm willing to be a diner waitress and a bartender and an au pair and somebody who sells jewelry at flea markets. I'm willing not to have very nice fancy things. I'm willing to

Starting point is 00:29:40 give up going on vacation with my friends to stay home and write. I'm willing to give up everything for this because this is my source of light. How did you know it was your source of light? What did that feel like? It felt like, I've said this before, okay, so I'm, I would say that like, I officially launched a spiritual journey when I was around the age of 30 and going through a very bad divorce that, if you've heard of a book called Deep Prayer Love, you already know about. I have heard of this. Yeah. A couple people read it, so you might know. And I continued that spiritual journey in what I would call traditional ways, 20 years, which is sit down for 20 minutes and either think a lot or fall asleep.

Starting point is 00:30:53 Like, that's what my meditation practice has usually looked like. Right, thinking with your eyes closed. Thinking with your eyes closed or just flat out falling asleep. But every single thing that the scriptures and all the holy teachings promised me that I would get through meditation, I've gotten through writing. And I got that from a very early age. So, the main thing is the silencing of the mind. And it's really ironic because, you know, there's a state that the mystics talk about going into that's called wordless oneness, where your mind, the chatter of the mind and the languaging centers of the mind go silent and you feel yourself to be at quiet oneness with everything around you. It's also called the zone. You could call it serenity.

Starting point is 00:31:47 There's many names for it. But I like wordless oneness because it implies an absence of the chatter in the mind. It is so fascinating to me that one of the ways to drop into wordless oneness, and this has actually been studied by neurologists, is by writing, which is ironic because that's the use of words. It's the use of language. But it's a different, it comes from a different part of the mind. It comes from an intuitive part of the mind more than it does from the part of the mind that I'm using right now to speak to you. So, I found from a very early age, and I was a really anxious kid, that when I was writing, I could have a vacation from what I would now call the egoic self. So, the egoic self never stops talking, and it never stops complaining. There's nothing you can give it that will satisfy

Starting point is 00:32:38 it. It's constantly looking for ways to be unhappy. It's constantly looking for ways to criticize what is around you and you yourself and everybody in it, you know? And that is the source of all suffering, right, is that voice. But when I would sit down and write as a kid, and to a certain extent I got it too when I was drawing and making art, but I didn't have as much of a talent for it. My mind would quiet and something would happen where I would look up and two hours would have passed and I didn't have to be Liz during those two hours. Now, I can't really say that I decided to be a writer. I guess I did, but it's more like I never stopped doing that, you know? I think a lot of us, when we're young, when we're kids, we naturally gravitate toward creative pursuits that make us feel still and make us feel calm. I think for many people, the arts are an intuitive, natural way that human beings, and they pick it up as children, figure out that this is a way that I can feel good. What tends to happen is that when you reach adolescence, you discover all the other

Starting point is 00:33:52 really faster, hot-wired ways to feel good, which usually involve sex or substance or spending money, right? A friend of mine who's in recovery says, if it's not a martini, it's a man. If it's not a man, it's a MasterCard. If it's not a MasterCard, it's a muffin. The four horsemen of seduction. The four horsemen, right? Man, MasterCard, martini, and muffin. It's like, just give me something that I can stuff into myself so that I don't have to feel us. I don't have to endure the pain of being a human being and I don't have to feel my egoic self I, it's not like

Starting point is 00:34:29 I didn't do all those things because I did and do do all those things too but for some reason I was lucky enough so a lot of people put down the creativity when they find the man, the master card, the martini the muffin, the meth, like whatever it is, the workaholism,

Starting point is 00:34:46 like whatever it is that you're using to numb yourself so that you don't have to feel, the creativity is a slower, gentler way to do that. So, when you find the shortcut, you take it, you know, and a lot of people can point to the place in their life where they stopped creating because it's when they found all that other stuff. But I never put it down. So for some reason, I was lucky enough to have the good sense in a life that has been filled with a lot of bad sense and a lot of nonsense. I had the good sense to hold on to that and to notice and realize that it's something that made me happy in a way that didn't come with the great price tag that comes with those cheap hotwired ways to make yourself happy. There's always a hangover and a consequence from those ways.

Starting point is 00:35:31 But with writing, it really was my place of stillness. And I think, in a weird way, it was the beginning of my spiritual practice. I just didn't know that it was. I didn't have that language for it. I just knew that it felt good. So, let's pair stillness with awe for a moment. I've also read that there are times when you'll love a sentence so much that you read that you'll start clapping by yourself where you happen to be reading. And I would love to know what type of writing, what writers have done that for you, if you could name even a few of them, and what it is, what are the ingredients that lead to that one woman standing ovation? Often in the bathtub.

Starting point is 00:36:24 Yay! Yay! That one woman standing ovation. Often in the bathtub. Yay, yay. Well, they say that great art has to contain two features. It has to be both surprising and inevitable. So that's the great paradox. Oh, that's good. That's good. That's the paradox is that you have to go, oh my God, I didn't see that coming, and that is the only way that could go, right? I'm thinking of the ending of Breaking Bad, that whole show, but the last moments of Breaking Bad.

Starting point is 00:36:56 Oops, spoiler alert. Yeah, spoiler alert. You've had many years to watch it now, people. I won't tell you the ending. I will just tell you that I also stood up and applauded at that because it felt both surprising and inevitable um so so that's the feeling you want your whole nervous system to kind of be like oh my god i didn't i didn't know that could be and yes of course you know um it had to be and now now it's rearranged my DNA in a certain way where I can't be the same now. Poetry tends to do it, the poets have this amazing ability to put that into such a tiny

Starting point is 00:37:34 space where it's like the encapsulation of inevitability and surprise. So, I'll give you an example of one piece that I love, which is a poem by T.S. Eliot called East Coker that has gotten me through some of the darkest times in my life. Some of those moments in your life where you don't know what to do, right? Where a human being, and this is where I think human life gets really interesting, what happens to people when they reach the end of their power, right? Because especially in this culture where we live in a culture that says you should be able to power through anything, you know, life will very generously remind you that you cannot. And it will very generously break you at times and very generously show you, as we're seeing right now in the COVID virus, we're like, oh, actually, there's a limit to our powers here. And it's very humbling.

Starting point is 00:38:26 And what do you do when you're at the end of your power? So, the poem East Coker is one that it gets me every single time. How do you spell coker? C-O-K-E-R. C-O-K-E-R. Yeah, East Coker. And there's a part of the poem where T.S. Eliot writes, Wait without hope, for hope would be hope of the wrong thing.

Starting point is 00:38:45 Wait without love, for love would be hope of the wrong thing. Wait without love for love would be love of the wrong thing. There is yet faith, but the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought for you are not ready for thought. And so, the darkness shall be light and the stillness, the dancing. That's a stand up and applause moment. Yeah, that is a stand up and applause moment. And sometimes when people I know are grieving, or they're stuck, or they're broken, or everything has been taken away, I will give them that poem because that says what I don't know how to say better than that, which is, right now, you're being asked to wait without hope, for anything that you hope for would be the wrong thing and wait without love. Anybody who's been going through a horrible breakup, I'll give them that poem. Like you're being asked to wait without love right now because

Starting point is 00:39:35 love would be love of the wrong thing. And anybody who's a beginning meditator, I give them that poem because of the line, wait without thought for you are not ready for thought. You don't have the wisdom right now to have the correct thoughts. So, you need to wait without thought. And then you will see if you do that. And there's still faith, but the faith is in the waiting. The faith is in waiting without hope, waiting without love, waiting without thought. That's the definition of faith, sitting in the darkness, in that waiting. And then you will see how the darkness becomes light and the stillness becomes dancing, but only every time. In order to have it, you've got to give up hope and you've got to give up love and you've got to have faith only in the waiting. So, that's a line that makes me applaud. Another author who gets me is, well, another poet who gets me is Walt Whitman.

Starting point is 00:40:33 And Walt Whitman sang, describing himself in A Song of Myself, describing himself as standing both in and out of the game, watching and wondering at it and also being involved in it. That description of he watching himself walk through life both in and out of the game is again something that I think of as the highest point of enlightenment. Can you engage with your life? Can you be involved with your life? Can you feel all of the feelings? Can you fall in love? Can you lose? Can you fail? Can you grow? Can you succeed? Can you be involved with your life? Can you feel all of the feelings? Can you fall in love? Can you lose? Can you fail? Can you grow? Can you succeed? Can you fuck up? And also watch it from a little bit of a detached distance and marvel at the game itself. So, that line gets me.

Starting point is 00:41:18 And then as far as fiction writers go, I'm so in love with Hilary Mantel, who wrote the Wolf Hall trilogy about Henry VIII and won the Booker Prize for the first two installments of it, and then the third one just came out. And the way that I've been describing it to people is, imagine if all three Godfather movies were as good as the first two. Imagine if Godfather Part 3 was just as good as one and two, that's how good Hilary Mantel is that the third installment um and I'm reading that right now and I'm just it's just a bow down moment you know as an artist there are a lot of writers who I look at their work and I I admire them but I see how they did it you know um because it's almost like a carpenter looking at another

Starting point is 00:42:02 carpenter's work and being like oh okay see how you did the joints there and you hid that hinge there, and that's cool. I say, well done. And then there are people, I look at their work and I'm like, I literally don't believe that you're human. I don't understand how you can even do this. And that's how I feel about Hilary Mantel writing about 16th century England in a way that is so intimate. And so, you cannot read that book without thinking, this is exactly how it happened. And I don't know how she does that. And I'm very happy to say, I'm happy to never be able to do that. I'm just lucky to live on earth at the same time as somebody who can.

Starting point is 00:42:56 Well, I would push back a little bit. And I would say that you have a rare ability to blend readability with wordsmithing sentences that are very memorable and really strike a chord. I don't think that is easy to do. And I mean, I would say, you know, Kurt Vonnegut is one who comes to mind, but it's not easy to combine those two things. And I thought it was, well, I don't think it made me crack a smile when I was reading about you appreciating sentences. And the quote from you at the end of this portion of the interview was, it's part of the reason that the arts are around, to remind us that we're not just here to pay bills and die, that makes me go fuck god damn you're totally right like i need more wonder and awe i'm paying too many bills spending too much on paperwork and so i do want to applaud uh that ability and it's yeah this it is something that i aspire to do more of but you're totally right or i of. But you're totally right. Or I should say, and you're totally right. There are certain books.

Starting point is 00:44:07 I'm in the middle of Little Big by John Crowley, which is this fantastical, I suppose, surreal yet realistic tale of fairies and so on. And it's one of those books where I'm like, I don't know how this guy does this at all. Like I really, it's just like, you have to be another species to weave prose like this. It's just like, I don't.

Starting point is 00:44:35 I mean, this is the thing that's so incredible about a human life. There are only two things in the universe so far that we've discovered that appear to be infinite. Um, and one is the universe itself, um, because we haven't found the edges of it. Um, and the other is human imagination because we haven't found the edges of it. We haven't begun to find the edges of it. It just keeps surprising us. People keep inventing new worlds and new stories and new ideas. It's unbelievable. And it's not like, you know, it's not like people have been sitting around not using their imaginations for centuries, you know.

Starting point is 00:45:27 Everybody's been in this game for a long time. And you would think, you know, you walk into one of the massive libraries in the world and you see all that has been created already. And you just think, well, that, how did you, like, how did you find that doorway into that world? And it's so incredibly exciting. again to the idea of grief, I think the thing that keeps me from tanking, you know, is, okay, so the most important person in my entire life is gone. First of all, that's interesting. You know, like, I think that some a good way to diffuse drama and trauma is to just start using the word interesting a lot, you know, like, that's interesting. That's interesting. That's interesting just on a personal level for me that I would have said to the universe, you can literally do

Starting point is 00:46:31 anything and you can take anybody. You can't take this one. This is the only one I can't live without. And they're like, okay, that's cool, honey. We're going to take that one. And then I'm like, wait, so what does that leave? Well, okay, apparently I can live without her then I'm like, wait, so what does that leave? You know, well, okay, apparently I can live without her because I'm being asked to and I'm being invited to. My friend Martha Beck has a really great thing that she always does as a counteraction to codependence. She likes to take classical sort of sappy love songs that are about codependence and just add one line to them to make them to put them into context and so she'll take that song for instance this is one of my favorites she'll go

Starting point is 00:47:11 I can't live if living is without you and yet here I sit eating a sandwich it's like apparently I can I can live if living is without you because here i sit eating a sandwich like life is going on for some reason um but what keeps me here is is first of all i'm hungry and i'm gonna go eat a sandwich and and and the body wants to keep continue living and

Starting point is 00:47:42 secondly i want to see what happens next you know um i want to see what happens next it's a really interesting world where we have not yet met the limits of consciousness the limits of creativity and the limits of invention and the limits of imagination and i don't want to miss it um so my curiosity i think is is is going to always be the thing that wins. So there's the curiosity, there's the serendipity, then there's the organizing and the planning. And I'd love to bounce between those two sides of the spectrum. Let's talk about the organizing for a second. And maybe we could start with Mr. Kisko. I think that's your ninth. Do you still use an index card or note card system

Starting point is 00:48:36 during research? Could you describe what your system looks like, please? And I suppose we should probably explain who Mr. Kisko is too. You know what? I think it'd be funnier just not to. Let me just let you all just let that be the mystery in the back. No, I'll be happy to explain. Mr. Kisko, as you all should know by now, was my ninth grade social studies teacher. And I can't believe that only Tim knows that and not the rest of you. Yeah, Mr. Kisko was ninth grade Western Civ teacher and really hard ass, really good teacher, really scary teacher. And he taught us how to write term papers. And he taught this system that was very simple that involved index cards and a box to put the index cards in. And as you're doing your research on the topic, you put divisions in the box on different subjects.

Starting point is 00:49:33 And then every time you find a fact or a piece of information on a page, you would write one fact per index card, one piece of information per index card. And then there was also a system that you would use for footnoting. So, like, if the first book I would read would be book A, so at the bottom of the index card, I would write A and then the page that I found it on, so A23, right? So, and then when I went to the next book, it would be B, page 46, right? So, that way you can mix up the cards and you can still remember where everything came from. Very simple. And then each card gets one fact only, and each fact goes in the filing system under whatever subject, whatever area is. And when you start to write, you've got all your facts at your fingertips in order. I've taken that system, which was used for

Starting point is 00:50:22 researching, and I've grown it into a system that I use for writing my novels, because my novels are very research-based. and gets pulled into a group of showgirls and dancers and playboys and actors and goes on a wild promiscuity bender just as the war is about to begin for America. That book required an enormous amount of research to be able to speak the language of the 1940s, to be able to write a play. There's a musical that's in the middle of the book, and I had to figure out, like, get the language of playwriting of the 1940s correct. How did people dress? What were they wearing? What was going on in the news at the time? And so, I would get a big shoebox and

Starting point is 00:51:16 a bunch of index cards and just dive into the research, which took me about three or four years. And I would read a lot of biographies and a lot of letters and every single idea and every single fact got its own card. So, every time I had a line of dialogue that I wanted to put into the book, I would write it on its own card and I would put it for that character into their little section. Every time I found out something about, I had a little section called fashion 1940s, right? So, every time I found out something about, I had a little section called Fashion 1940s, right? So every time I found any tiny little detail, I would put it into that section that was about fashion. Anytime I had a detail about like sex, for instance, I needed to kind of figure out what the sexual culture was of New York City in the 1940s.

Starting point is 00:51:58 What kind of birth control were people using? How were they talking about sex? So anything I found on there, put them to the sex section. Anything I found out about what it was like working at the Brooklyn Naval Yards in the 1940s during the war, because my character ends up working there, would go into the Navy Yard section. So it's all very tidy and organized in box after box after box. And by the time it's done, it's like I've got a novel. I call it a novel, a book in a box, but it's really usually five boxes by then. But it's such a great gift because when you're writing, and it really helps me with writer's block because as I'm introducing a new character into the story, all I have to do is reach into the box and pull out her file. And because I've been putting notes in there for the last four years, I've got like a two inch thick file on this character of details of things she would say or what she's wearing or ideas for

Starting point is 00:52:53 character development. And so, it's an assistance to myself when I sit down to write that I can draw upon that and use it. And it makes it so, so, so much easier. And sometimes the research is tedious, but part of my sense of stewardship and friendship over myself is that I try to do really nice things for Liz. And I try to do really nice things for future Liz. I hate flossing my teeth, but I do it for future Liz as a gift. So every night when I floss my teeth, I'm like, I hate this, but future Liz, this is for you, babe, because I care about you and I love you. And so when I'm writing these notes to myself, so I might be sitting there at the New York Public Library doing research on how much theater productions cost in the 1940s and how much the sets would have cost and who would have been on hand, like boring stuff, you know, but I'll just sit there and I'll find some really great detail and I'll write it on a card and I'll be like, oh my God, future Liz is going to be so psyched when she finds this card three years from now, because she's going to be writing the scene and she's going to be stuck and she's going to reach in and she's going to pull out this detail and she's going to be like, ah, yes. Like, so, and then what happens is that while I'm writing, I'll reach in and I'll find some

Starting point is 00:54:08 amazing card with a great piece of dialogue on it or a great detail that really helps with the scene. And I'll be like, thanks, past Liz. You're the best, you know? And it's like this little salute across time where like past Liz is like, I got you, babe. And future Liz is like, thank you for looking out for me. You're the best. So, like all

Starting point is 00:54:25 of the preparation that I do is to help myself during the hard part, which is the creative, the actual creating a novel. And I want to give myself all the help I can because I want to suffer the least that I possibly can. So I really do try to like really show up for future Liz. It strikes me that you have a very productive, at times at least, of course, I don't know every detail of your entire life, but balance between this sort of egoless or ego-less, at least, meaning less ego, wordless oneness, and then the very sort of egoic, by necessity, planning side of things, right? Where you're actually creating multiple Liz's to help sort of clear the decks and steer the ship. When you look at, say, your five boxes of cards, whether it's for the fiction, like City of Girls, or nonfiction, what percentage of what you have on those cards ends up making it into finished books, would you say? I'm curious kind of what you have on those cards ends up making it into finished books, would you say?

Starting point is 00:55:46 I'm curious kind of what makes the cut eventually. Tim, I am so happy to tell you that I can give you that percentage because I can see it very clearly. Because once I pull a card out, I put it into its own separate box once it's done. So when I'm finished, I can actually see how many I used. And I'm really interested in that myself. And it is about a fifth. A fifth makes it into the book. Yeah, yeah. That's a good, strikes me as a good percentage. Yeah, you know, and you definitely need all of it, because you don't know what you're going to

Starting point is 00:56:20 need, right? You want to kind of over prepare. And, you know, all of it, I like what you're going to need, right? You want to kind of over-prepare. And, you know, all of it, I like what you're saying about the bifurcation of selves, of the egoic, less wordless wonder creator and the one who's preparing. But I actually think that there's an egolessness that's in the research as well. And that is the humility of feeling like I'm a servant to this book. I really do feel, and you know this it is that ideas are formed, that ideas, as I like to think of them, ideas are these bodiless gigabytes of consciousness, and they have desire, and they have will, and they want to be made manifest. And anyone who's ever had an idea knows this. The idea itself has an urgency to it. It wants to be

Starting point is 00:57:25 born. It wants to be nourished. It won't leave you alone, right? It's waking you up in the middle of the night. It's nagging at you. It's sending coincidences to you and serendipitous, you know, reminders of it. And it just starts to become sort of an obsession. It's almost a viral infection of an idea coming to you and taking you over. I think it's such an honor to be given an idea, especially if it's a halfway decent one, that I feel like my life is in service to that. And when I don't have an idea and I don't have an idea, and I don't have a thought for a book, I think of myself, the image that I hold of myself is, is literally of a servant, like one of those very proud British servants, you know, who doesn't see their servitude as, as being demeaning and sees it as a great, as a great craft, a great skill to be a good servant, right?

Starting point is 00:58:22 I see myself in uniform, white gloves, hands behind my back, standing outside the door of the muse at attention, waiting. You know, I'm like, it's not passive. I'm like waiting for the next idea to come and so that I can be of service to it and be ready for it when it arrives. So, there's a certain, yeah, there's a certain humility in the research process too of just, I'm just working for the mothership. You know, and I don't know what the mothership is. I don't know where the ideas come from, but I am a grateful servant to it. Pete So, this may seem like a forced segue,

Starting point is 00:58:58 but I'm going to force it anyway. I don't think it's forced. You're mentioning being of service. A number of things have come up grieving death this active waiting if i could give it that phrasing one book that came up in my research and feel free to confirm or deny because you can't believe everything you read on the internet but are you a fan of meditations by marcus aurelius yes is that? What is the meaning of this book for you? Or what role does it play for you? Okay, so Marcus Aurelius was, of course, the great philosopher king. Plato had always said that the ideal society

Starting point is 00:59:38 would be a society where the king was also a philosopher. We have that right now in America. I was excited to see where that was going. I kid. I kid because I love. Anyway, Marcus Aurelius was that. He was a great scholar and he was a great leader. And he was, like all philosophers, somebody who spent his life in examination of the human condition and of his own existence. And his meditations are what

Starting point is 01:00:14 survives of his journals. And they're so beautiful and they're so immediate. I mean, the other thing that great art is, is that it's eternal, right? So, the way that Marcus Aurelius speaks to himself in his journal feels like it could have been written yesterday. He is struggling through the same eternal questions that all of us are struggling through. What is the meaning of my life? How do I serve without being destroyed in service? How do I handle failure? How do I handle difficult people? How do I handle the limits of my powerlessness? You know, what happens when there are situations that are beyond my control?

Starting point is 01:01:00 And he was a Stoic as well. So, a lot of it is just about um can i survive my emotions um can i and and stoicism in in that philosophical realm doesn't mean you know white knuckling your way through pain and pretending not to feel it it means achieving going back to whitman achieving that sense of being both in and out of the game at the same time. Being involved and like up to your neck in the messiness of life, while at the same time achieving a tiny bit of detachment to watch the, I guess what in Eastern philosophy they would call the karmic dilemma that you're in,

Starting point is 01:01:43 and recognizing that there may be limitations to how much you can control that. And I love the way that he speaks to himself directly in his journals, the way that he'll say to himself, come on, come on, man. Like, come on, Marcus. You know, like, dude, get it together. Like, it's time, like, this is a moment for you to act. You can go down now, or you can find your strength, you can find your resilience, like the way that he coaches himself. I find that incredibly inspiring. And I also think my friend Martha Beck, who I talk about a lot because she's a great teacher, but she has a great teaching that she gives people when they're full of anxiety and full of fear. There's ways that you can learn to speak to yourself that will actually mitigate that. And one of the ways that

Starting point is 01:02:26 she teaches is that she tells her, coaches her clients to write down, let their fear speak. So you just give your fear its day, right? You have to respect it. It exists. It's part of you. You don't want to cast it away or attack it. You just open up your journal and you invite your fear to write down everything that it's afraid of. And you listen politely and with nonviolent compassion to your fear as it speaks. And then once it's done and it's had its say, you say, thank you so much for sharing that. I'm really grateful that you trust me enough to be this vulnerable and to tell me everything that you're afraid of. And then you say to your fear, I'm now going to ask you, now that you've had a chance to speak, if you'll step aside and I'm going to bring another aspect of myself forward,

Starting point is 01:03:13 and I'm going to ask it to speak. So, if fear, if you would just step aside for a moment, I'm now inviting wisdom into the room. And now I'm going to ask wisdom to write down what it thinks and what it suggests in this case. And it's extraordinary to see the wisdom that people find in themselves, that you're not just made of fear, you're also made of grace and of wisdom. And those meditations of Marcus Aurelius, it feels like that's what he's doing. You know, he's writing to himself from a place of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty, and then he's writing back to himself from a place of wisdom and saying, okay, this is what you're upset about. I recognize that. I see that. And now I'm going to ask wisdom to come into the room and this is what it would suggest.

Starting point is 01:04:00 So, it's so beautiful and intimate, you know, to get to see a great mind like that working with itself in such intimate setting. to put the philosopher label also in perspective from the leadership or within the sort of mesh of leadership, he was the last of the rulers known as the five good emperors and also the last emperor of the Pax Romana, which was an age of peace and stability in the Roman empire. So, so very highly effective, highly revered, and also highly reflective. And so, I definitely second the recommendation. I would love to chat.

Starting point is 01:04:54 Thank you so much, Tim, for putting him into, of course, because I'm so fascinated by spirituality and philosophy, I forgot to mention that he was also a badass Roman emperor. He also had a job. He also had a really, really good job, and he was excellent at it. So, yes, thank you for pointing that out. Of course. He wasn't just a really thoughtful guy. He was also running the world's greatest empire. Yeah, he was, I mean, fascinating character, and in some ways, a reluctant leader also, much like Cincinnatus and some others who, George Washington comes to mind. Fascinating, fascinating guy. And I would love to leapfrog to Martha Beck, because you mentioned this parts work, which would be one way to put it, letting the fear speak, which makes me think also of something called internal family systems or IFS, which-

Starting point is 01:05:51 That's exactly what it is. Yep. It's super, super, I'll use the word interesting, and also incredibly effective. I've seen IFS and, well, I don't want to actually say this about IFS, but cognitive behavioral therapy has a lot of its roots in Stoic philosophy, which has been used for trauma and PTSD. And then IFS does as well. That's just as a bit of context for folks.

Starting point is 01:06:41 And I'd love for you to speak to what else you've learned from Martha Beck. I mean, what are some of the other things that have really stuck for you? Yeah, well, I'll give you one. When I met her, I met her years ago at an Oprah Winfrey event. If you don't know of her, she's a life coach. She's a writer. She's actually the person for whom the term life coach was invented. She was the original life coach. And I always say, she's Oprah Winfrey's life coach, everybody. So if you just want to know some credentials, that's Martha.

Starting point is 01:07:20 And when I met her, I met her around the time Rhea was sick. I had reached out to her. There are no coincidences, but we had met years ago. And then she wrote a book called Diana Herself that landed on my desk. And I read it. And I was like, this is so dazzling. And I need to reach out to her personally and tell her how great it is. So that reestablished our contact with each other.

Starting point is 01:07:43 And then very shortly after that contact was established, Rhea got sick and Martha was right there for us and really walking us through that death and dying experience in such a remarkable way. I can truly say that it would have been a very much more painful experience without her help. One of the things that I said to Rhea about Martha once I first started having conversations with her was, I said, I've always felt like I play the game of life pretty well. Martha took the ball and just left the arena. Like, here I am struggling to play the game well. She's just like, no, I'm not even going to play the game by its rules.

Starting point is 01:08:31 And I didn't even know that you could just leave the game. And she's so wild off the charts. And her wildness is that she has this very strong belief that your intuitive nature will take care of everything. But in order to listen to it, you have to step away from trauma and you have to step away from culture. And that often means you have to unlearn every single thing you were ever taught by your family and by your culture about what is right and wrong. And you have to become a completely natural, wild, intuitive being. And you have to become a completely natural, wild, intuitive being. And you have to guide yourself purely based on, essentially what she would say is based on what your body tells you. So any time that you, and that's located, like I'm putting my hand on it right now, but it's that center located between like your navel and your sternum that's often extremely emotionally reactive. So, if I don't want to do something, if I don't like somebody, that thing knows.

Starting point is 01:09:34 It's a compass that's never wrong. And culture and trauma and family and training have taught me to override it constantly, right? So, somebody invites me to an event, and my sternum, navel area starts to feel sick because I don't want to do it, but my training and my culture tells me that I have to, that's me overriding the only navigational system that is truly my own in order to be a good member of society. Or it's my fear that's overriding it because I say, oh, I have to say yes to that invitation because I have to network. And if I say no to this really powerful person, and that overrides it. Anytime you say yes with your mind when your body says no, you will lead yourself farther and farther and farther away from your path.

Starting point is 01:10:31 And so the work that Martha does is about teaching people how to trust that and only that. And she has navigated her life based on that and only that. And she started navigating it that way, not for fun, but because she was dying. She was literally dying of several autoimmune diseases. And she was dying of being a good person. She was dying of doing everything exactly right as she had been taught by her Mormon upbringing and then by Harvard. She went and got three degrees at Harvard.

Starting point is 01:11:02 So she went from one really oppressive culture, which was Mormonism, into another one, which was academia. And the entire time was trying to be the best, good, moral, ethical person as per culture's recommendations, and she was literally dying of it. And the way that she cured herself was that she went on what she called an integrity cleanse. And this is the most badass thing I have ever heard anybody do. Check it. That is amazing. Yeah. It all sounds good until you find out what you have to do to go at it. True for so many things. Dude, it's so hardcore. She got a watch. She got a digital watch. This was years ago before phones. You can do it now on your phone, but ask yourself if you really want

Starting point is 01:11:45 to. But she did it because her alternative was literally to die. And that's often what will make people have to change. She got this watch. She put a timer on it to have it go off every 30 minutes. And every 30 minutes, whatever she was doing, she would check and see if she was lying. And if she was lying, she would correct it. So, every 30 minutes, every 30 minutes. So, that means you're on the phone with your sister and your sister's saying, you guys coming for Christmas this year? And you say, yeah, I can't wait. We're so looking forward to beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Actually, no, I don't want to come. I don't want to come. We're not coming. Next 30 minutes, another one, beep, beep, beep, everything, every single interaction,

Starting point is 01:12:38 every single conversation, no more polite social lies, nothing. This extreme integrity cleanse. And she said, it was the most amazing thing in the world. She lost every single member of her family. She lost her marriage. She lost the work path that she was on. And what she became was herself. And what she got back was her health and her well-being and her intuition and her instincts. And then she had a few people left at the end of that, and they were her core people. And from that, she built her entire new life that she's still living in now. So, it's a massively badass thing to do, but it's pretty cool. And she said, you know, I've softened it a bit. She's like, I'll tell a social lie now just

Starting point is 01:13:22 to be nice. But it's, you know, she's got a new book coming out next year that's all about this, that I can't wait to be out into the world because it's so, yeah, the amount of integrity that she lives with and the amount of integrity that she taught me to live with are huge. And when you asked me, you know, was it hard for me to tell my husband that I was in love with Rhea, that was directly a result of seeing the way that Martha lives and just having to be in integrity at the same time as being in respect to somebody. I'll give you one more Martha Beck line that I love. She says, there are certain moments of your life where you're standing in front of a bonfire and you have to jump. You just have to jump into it. And you have to be willing to burn away everything that you've been taught and

Starting point is 01:14:12 everything that you're afraid of and just do it. And she said, and I remember her telling me this with such glee, she goes, it's such a cool moment that you're in. And she said this to me, you know, as I was leaving my marriage and going to be with Rhea, she said that these bonfire moments are so fantastic because there's only two things that can happen when you jump into a bonfire. One of them is that you find out that it wasn't actually a bonfire, that you were afraid that it was going to burn you to pieces. And it actually didn't. It wasn't as scary as you thought. You did it. You took the leap. It turned out to be kind of like warm and soft and easy. So it was no big deal. The other thing that can happen is that it is a bonfire.

Starting point is 01:14:54 And you are incinerated. And your entire life is incinerated by it. And that's even better because then you get to be reborn as a phoenix on the other side, completely new. So either way, you win So, there's no reason not to. You'll either jump in and find out it was nothing, or you'll jump in and you'll be destroyed, and that's awesome too. So, when I say Martha doesn't play by the game, that's what I mean. Like, that's what I mean about she's not even in the arena that we would call any sort of normal way of living. And for that reason, she's been one of the top three most influential people in my entire life. You're like, Martha, do we go left, right, or straight?

Starting point is 01:15:35 And she's like, we go up. You're like, what? How do we do that? That's incredible. Let's talk about the integrity check that sternum to navel area. We'll have to come up with some sort of perineum-like label that makes it a little easier. Inner compass, I think is a good one. Inner compass, there we go. That's where it's located yeah yeah uh when you do say an integrity check and i had read that

Starting point is 01:16:07 when ray was sick for instance you began deleting or archiving emails without responding as a bit of a treat to yourself and not archiving okay deleting goodbye and when you say now, check in with yourself and decide to say no to something. Let's just, to make it easy or make it concrete, via email. You get an invitation from a friend you do actually really like with something that could plausibly advance your career or be fun, but you check in with yourself and it's like, no, this isn't a yes. How do you phrase your no's or declines? Do you have any particular go-to language that you like to use? I just want to make sure everybody knows that this is not easy. I don't want to have any

Starting point is 01:17:01 illusions for anybody that this is simple. And the closer the relationship, the harder it is. The closer and more intimately I'm involved with somebody, the more stakes there are for me and the harder it is for me to tell the truth. And that feels like it should be, you know, there's a paradox. You know, the people you love the most should be the people that you are able to be the most honest with. Well, no, because they're the people who you want to hurt the least, right? And so that's where it's really, really hard. So there's a couple layers of it, right? So if it's somebody... I now treat my inbox like it's my home because I think it's an extension of my home. So if somebody walks into my home uninvited and announces themselves and doesn't say how they got a key and asks for something, I delete that email.

Starting point is 01:17:57 And I will delete that email even if they are a producer for Good Morning America. You know, I'm just like, I didn't invite you in. There are proper channels, you know what they are. I don't know how you got my personal email and I just delete it. And if I feel a sense in my sternum of offense, of feeling like this person has taken a liberty, I don't believe that I owe them anything. I don't believe that I owe them anything any more than if I came down to my kitchen and saw people sitting at my table who I didn't know eating breakfast, I wouldn't believe that I owed them to make them a cup of coffee. I'd be like, get out of my house. You're not supposed to be here. And I don't think I even owe them,

Starting point is 01:18:41 I don't even think I owe them a polite response. I owe them nothing. I didn't ask you to come into my house. I don't owe you anything. So that's the easiest. Those ones are easy. And I now treat myself to doing that. I mean, I do that every day. I clear my inbox out very quickly that way. And then I'm entertained when they come back later and they're like, just circling back.

Starting point is 01:19:00 And I'm like, yeah, just deleting you again. Circle back as many times as you want. You are not coming in. So that's simple. Just bumping this up because I know you. Yeah, I'm just bumping you back. And it's like whack-a-moles. It's like, I can do this all day.

Starting point is 01:19:18 Delete, delete, delete. If it's somebody who I care about, if it's something that I'm interested in but I'm just not going to do it because I don't want to, I will write back and say, thank you so much. I'm really honored that you invited me to this, but I'm not going to be able to do this at this time. And I don't feel the need to give a reason. I think a simple no is really, really good. And the reason, sometimes the reason it's good not to give an explanation is that if that person is an expert manipulator, as many of us are, that explanation will not suffice. So, it won't matter what you give as an explanation because they can come back and be like, well, we can do it by audio, you know, or we can do, oh, if you're, oh, well,

Starting point is 01:20:10 we can do it a different weekend. Just no. And I learned a lot about this from my teacher, Byron Katie, who teaches an amazing thing called the School for the Work. That's a whole, she's a whole nother being who's not at all living for the work. That's a whole, she's a whole nother, another being who's not, not at all living by the rules. Extra terrestrial for sure. She is extra terrestrial. She is not, she is the only fully enlightened human being I can,

Starting point is 01:20:35 I believe I have ever met. And as such, she does not have any trouble saying an honest yes and an honest no to people. And just, just to, just to underscore that, cause I did a, an in-person training with her.

Starting point is 01:20:46 I mean, literally no hesitation, no struggle, no conflict. None. It's bizarre and just mesmerizing to watch. And she loves you. Yeah. And she loves you. Yeah, yeah. There's also no hostility. And no offense, no hostility.

Starting point is 01:21:10 Somebody came up to her at an event, handed her a book that they'd written, which people do to me all the time, too. So I really marveled at this. And they said, I wrote this, and I want to share it with you. And she said, oh, sweetheart, I'm never going to read that. True. It's just true. I'm never going to read that. And I'm like, oh my God, I didn't know you could say that. Right? It's so, that's amazing. And she said it so lovingly, like, oh, no, I have no interest in reading that. So, she teaches, I don't know if you did, when you took her training, did you do where she teaches a simple no? And she does the training on how to give a simple no.

Starting point is 01:21:47 I don't think we actually spent much time on that. So I would love to hear you say more. So we, we worked on the emotional one pages and the turnarounds. We did a lot on the turnarounds, which, which is probably, we could do a whole episode just on that.

Starting point is 01:22:03 But, but everybody look up Byron Katie. She's amazing but and if you have the means and if you have the chance to ever take her nine day school for the work um it's the most it's the most important thing I've ever done for myself so oh wow say that quite simply um but she has a whole day in the nine day school for work which is about the simple no um and the simple no is um ways to say no. And it always begins with thank you. And there's never a but.

Starting point is 01:22:31 Because she feels that the word but is very cruel. And it's just an and. So it's thank you and no. And that's it. That's a simple no. And then if they come back, you can say, well, hold on just to pause for a second.

Starting point is 01:22:47 Is that literally the phrasing or is it just, yeah. Okay. No. Yeah. That's it. That's it. That's simple.

Starting point is 01:22:53 No. And it just, it still makes my stomach ache. Cause I'm like, Oh my God, you can't just do that. You've got to give, you've got to like do the dance.

Starting point is 01:22:58 And she's like, you don't have to do the dance. And, and she's the one who taught me if the person is a good enough manipulator, it doesn't matter what you bring. They're going to manipulate it, right? And the beautiful thing about a simple no is that it gives, in the jujitsu game, it gives somebody no weapon that they can take and bring back at you. They can say you're being incredibly selfish. And you can say, I hear that. And you might be right about that. That's another one. She always says,

Starting point is 01:23:24 you might be right about that. You might be right about that. And no. And you just keep adding, and no, after the statement. So, then there's, you know, but you know, I really, I need you to do this. I'm desperate. And you say, I see that. I see your desperation. And no. And one other thing she'll add is you can say, if I change my mind about this, I see that. I see your desperation and know. And one other thing she'll add is you can say, if I change my mind about this, I'll let you know and know. And that's been a game changer for me. So, I just did one last week. Somebody who I have a professional relationship said, I want you to do this. I want you to do this one hour video interview to promote this thing that I'm doing. And old Liz would have thought I owe her that

Starting point is 01:24:14 because she did this other thing for me that time. And I checked in with my inner compass and I was like, nothing in me wants to do this. And so I just wrote back to her. I said, I'm so sorry. I said, I'm sorry and I'm not going to be able to do this at this time. And she wrote back and pushed in and said, oh, let me clarify. I wasn't clear about why we need it. We really need it because right now, you know, it's really hard for us to sell things because we don't have because of COVID-19.

Starting point is 01:24:44 And it's just, you know, that's really hard for us to sell things because we don't have because of COVID-19. And it's just, you know, that's why we need it. And I wrote back and said, I hear you and I understand you and know. And it goes away. You know, they don't tend to come back a third time. You know, it really does just stop and let it sit at the no. The more words you add after that, the more entangled you get. But again, I want to make clear, it's hardest closest to home and it's hardest with family. And with family, I find if I anticipate that I'm going to be asked something. I really have to practice. I really, because it's scary.

Starting point is 01:25:25 And I have to really practice and be like, and just practice saying, I'm not doing that right now. I'm not coming this year. I'm not doing it. And I'll say it a thousand times. I'll just go for a long walk and I'll just practice it and practice it and practice it. Because as I say, the closer the people are to you, the more difficult it is. You know, as a bit of personal digression here, I was working on a book, an entire book about saying no this past summer. And the great irony, of course, is that I came up with all the reasons why I shouldn't write the book in the process of putting it together. But what I noticed as I was practicing different ways of saying no is that it's an incredibly clarifying exercise because in a sense, it kind of brings to surface the true

Starting point is 01:26:20 character of many people you know or people who are attempting to reach you and what what i found surprising and maybe i shouldn't have found it surprising is that many of my close friends would who i anticipated might be upset would respond with you know dude good for you for respecting your boundaries. That's a great line. Like rock on. And they, they got it. And they were just like, oh, I wish I could say that more myself. Like, good for you. And it was the, it was the bonfire that wasn't a bonfire in those cases. Uh-huh. Did you ever run into a bonfire that was one? Oh, for sure. Absolutely. And then I'm like, oh, wow. Because if you, what I, what I,

Starting point is 01:27:09 what I like about, uh, what you said about the, or the sort of jujitsu analogy is that if, if you provide really specific reasons for why you can't do it and you elaborate, you've just created a potential negotiation, right? But if you don't provide that grip, that toehold, then one of the few responses someone can give you if they're upset and still want to push is some type of personal ad hominem attack or an accusation. And then you're like, oh, wow. Okay. Now it's that kind of party. Okay. This is good to know before we're on stage having a public tiff at God knows what. I mean, this is valuable information. So there were definitely some bonfires and basically people just self-immolated, right? Because I was like, oh, wow, you've just

Starting point is 01:28:08 proved my internal compass to be extremely accurate. Right. This is the reason and here is the reason I'm not working with you. But you don't even need to say that. You just know it because the body knows first. The body knows first, but only always. Only always. And it's one of the things that Martha says that I love is she's like, because culture and civilization have overwritten the software system of the body so much and told you that you don't trust that. What you trust are the rules and the mores and the fear-based, scarcity-based, you know, grasping, this is how you have to act, this is who you have to be in order to be safe. And meanwhile, your body's like, ew, you know, like, no, ew, gross. Or on the opposite side, like, yummy. Like, I want to be over there. I want to be with

Starting point is 01:29:07 those people. I don't want to be with these people. And she said, and if you think about it, the wisdom of the body is so incredible. It's such an amazing machine. It's such a fantastic machine. And it's ancient. It's been honed by literally millions and millions and millions of years of evolution into this phenomenal machine of reception, of conscious reception, of being able to respond and being able to know. The mind, the thinking mind is brand new. It's the newest update. It's only 100,000, maybe 200,000 years old. It's got a lot of bugs in it. And I think that the best example of this is if you were to break your femur, snap your femur in half, the biggest bone in the human body, if it's properly set,

Starting point is 01:29:58 that thing's healed in six weeks and you're walking back on it, your body knows what to do. If somebody tells you you're fat or that you're stupid 40 years ago, it still hurts now, right? Like these wounds, the mental and emotional body, mind doesn't know how to heal itself nearly as well as the body does. It's so vulnerable and the body is so much stronger. And so what Martha says is that if you are given this amazing body that's this incredible antenna of operating in the world and always knowing what's right for it and what's wrong for it, and you override it with the mind, essentially it's as if you've been given the brand new, fanciest, like highest speed operating, thinnest MacBook Air, and you're using it as a placemat because you don't know how to use it, right? So, that's what the body is. It's like this machine that you've been given, but you're just eating your cereal off of it and thinking that you're doing it wrong. And it's like, no, open it up and start using it because it's never wrong. It's never, ever, ever wrong. And it's a tricky thing. It's especially

Starting point is 01:31:14 tricky thing to tell to people who have been addicts because nobody trusts their intuition less than anybody who's been through addiction because they're like, oh, you don't want me doing what my body wants me to. You don't want me saying yes to what my body is. But there's a really big difference between addiction and intuition. And if you look back at your moments of addiction or your moments where you're out of control of yourself, you usually can find that your intuition was trying to tell you something and your addiction was overriding it, right? Your intuition knew that this was not a good move. But your mind, the addictive, broken, diseased mind was giving you instructions. So, truly the intuition can be trusted. I know it's so hard for us to believe,

Starting point is 01:31:58 but it does know. It does know right from wrong for you. I could not agree more. If I look back at the biggest, just to maybe contain the scope, the biggest business disasters or partnerships, I knew on day one that it was a bad idea or there was something I felt that indicated discomfort and I overwrote it. Every single one.

Starting point is 01:32:27 There was a somatic sense that something was crooked or off before I signed on the dotted line. I mean, every single time. Every single time. How many people do you know who said, I knew the night before my wedding that this was a mistake? How many people do you know say that? And yet, why did you do it? Because you were 29 and it was time to get married. Because you'd been raised in a culture that said, this is what you do now.

Starting point is 01:32:59 Because the invitations had been sent out. Because 300 people had gathered. Because your family spent $30,000 on the wedding. Like, whatever the reasons were, you knew, somewhere in that sternum area, you knew. And how much you had to drink that day in order to override that, whatever you had to do in order to shut down that compass that was saying, uh-uh. You know, it's brutal, you know, it's brutal. But yeah, that's the work of the second half of my life. I can say that now that I'm 50, that the only thing I'm interested in anymore is that. Let me ask you a question that may be leading us to a dead end, but I'll ask nonetheless, just because it keeps coming up in the

Starting point is 01:33:46 sort of deeper currents. If you're sort of kayaking on top of a pond and you see the currents shifting the opposite direction from the top level of the water to the surface level, this keeps popping up for me and I'll ask and then we can edit it out

Starting point is 01:34:02 if it doesn't go anywhere. I'm so psyched for what's about to happen because I have no, I'm like, anticipation is one of my favorite emotions and I'm in it right now. I'm like, I have literally no idea what he's about to say. Yeah, this could be like a lot of lead up for terrible punchline. But do you have any perspective on psychedelics? Do you have any thoughts at all related to psychedelics yeah yeah i would love to talk about that um i do and i've done it and i've i've done it recently um and i've done it in controlled settings with people who you know are good at it

Starting point is 01:34:42 i've done it with shamans um and i gotten a lot out of it. I've also stopped doing it recently. So I'm happy to talk about both of those things. And I don't think that that should be a condemnation for anybody's exploration of this. I think those substances are really fascinating. My experience of it was exactly as promised, that it will open up your entire consciousness where you can move through time and space. You can see things that you never could have seen otherwise. And I was given, I had one journey with a shaman's help during the time of Rhea dying that really, truly gave me what I needed, a piece of information that I needed to get me through to the end of her life that I think I would have broken if I hadn't been shown that piece of information. And I brought the shaman in specifically because I said, I'm at the end of myself and I need a vision. I can't sort this out myself. This is beyond my capacity and I think it's beyond the capacity of counselors. I need a divine vision. I need to see into some other realm on this because

Starting point is 01:36:00 this world is not providing the answer. And I got it and it was essential. I also had an experience of being told things and shown things in that state that turned out later not to be true. And so, I know that you can also, you have to be careful. I also had the experience of just basically just getting high, you know, just basically getting high with my friends and having us think that we were having divine visions from God, but really we were just like, basically, we weren't much more than high school sophomores sitting around being like, you know, I think the universe is... And thinking that we were having these really profound experiences. And then later, when sobriety came, being like, oh, we were just high. So all of that needs to be taken into account, I think. And I've also seen people think that they were great healers and great spiritual leaders and be a little bit deceived in that and lead people into stuff that maybe they weren't ready for. I think it's very hard

Starting point is 01:37:22 to take a Western mind and try to make it into a 14th century Peruvian. And I think that when people go on ayahuasca journeys and they go to Colombia and they think that's what's going to happen, there's a lot. The rot is deep in the Western mind. There's a lot of ego. There's a lot to untangle. And so if you bring an egoic mind into a sacred circle, I think you can go in some possibly mistaken directions. Okay. All of that is to say, people do what you want and do what you think is best for you and follow your own intuition on it.

Starting point is 01:37:58 I followed my own intuition into psychedelics and then I followed my own intuition out of it and i don't regret having done it um i may i may do it again it's not a fully closed door it's just that right now in my life i'm at a place where i want to have a clear mind and um and i want to see whether i can manage to negotiate my life without being altered in any way. And so, I've stopped drinking, and I've stopped doing anything that alters my mind. Again, that might not be forever. It's just, that's where I'm at as of this moment. So, that's my very long answer to your question. But I do think they're remarkable, powerful substances. I've had great things come out of them for me, and I'm taking a break from it. Thank you for answering that.

Starting point is 01:38:50 Yeah. Yeah, it was just sort of a whisper I wanted to pay attention to. So thank you for answering that. I will underscore— I have no dogma on it. Like, really, really, really. I may even do it again someday, but just not for now. I think I went a little too far with it. And I was like, I'm just getting fucked up now. This is like, I think you just have to be really accountable to yourself about are you using this for transformation or are you using this for escape? And, you know, only you can know that. Yeah, I do want to underscore a few things that you said, since this is a subject, an area that I spend a lot of time thinking about, have for the last six years or so, that these are very, very powerful compounds. And they create a plasticity that can be molded for the better it can also

Starting point is 01:39:46 be molded for the worst and there are just bus loads there are arena loads full of charlatans who have messiah complex who believe themselves to be able to reach into your soul and fix what is broken, who have no track record, no credibility, no training that would lend itself to that type of confidence. And you wouldn't go on Craigslist to find someone to perform neurosurgery on you. And I would suggest, particularly if you are psychedelically naive, meaning you have not used these compounds, that you take it that seriously. And that might seem like a very, an overstatement, but I don't think it is. Because there is a, I've found tremendous value in psychedelics over the years, over the past 20 years.

Starting point is 01:40:46 And nonetheless, I like to be a voice of caution because there's a survivorship bias with the positive stories, if that makes sense. It's kind of like the mutual funds you read about in Barron's. It's like, yeah, those are the ones that have survived. But if you have a, you know, a thousand orangutans flip flipping quarters, like eventually, like one of them might've flipped heads a thousand times. Wait, did you have a vision where you saw a thousand orangutans? That would be, that would, that would be very visually arresting. Something that you could see in those states.

Starting point is 01:41:22 It's kind of the, it's kind of the screensaver I want on my computer. But so I would just say people should be cautious and particularly if you have no experience to take it very seriously. That's very wise advice. And people will do whatever they're going to do.

Starting point is 01:41:39 And people are going to do whatever they do. At the very least, if you are considering that type of tool, I would suggest that you start with at least a month of daily meditation and possibly journaling, which is what I would like to ask you about next, because we've mentioned letting your fear speak. We've mentioned that in the context of Martha Beck. And I read that every few years you go through the Artist's Way course. And I just love to hear how you decide

Starting point is 01:42:18 when it is time to do that and what role morning pages have for you, if you could speak to that yeah and if if if people don't know what the artist way is it's um it's a a wonderful course that was created 20 years ago 25 years ago yeah at least a woman named uh julia cameron and it's it's a it's it's it's based on the 12-step recovery program, actually. But it's a way of recovering your creativity from its trauma. And Brene Brown has talked about this, too, a lot, about what we call art scars that people have for very good reason. Many people were mocked for their creative endeavors when they were children and they shut it down. Or you were told that you can never make a living out of this.

Starting point is 01:43:10 This isn't a responsible way to live. This is for children. Put away your childish things and take on the mantle of adulthood. course, self-guided course, where she leads you through a series of questions and exercises that are meant to liberate your inner artist from their wounds. And it's also one of the two foundations of The Artist's Way are the morning pages, which is every morning you wake up and you write for three pages, anything, no matter what, as soon as you wake up. And the second thing is the artist's date, that once a week you take yourself on a date to something interesting alone, that you go do whatever it is. It could be anything from going to an art gallery to

Starting point is 01:43:56 taking a walk in a part of town that you've never seen before, just something that you do that is entirely your own. I've said this before and I'll say it again, Eat, Pray, Love would not exist without The Artist's Way. I was in a terrible depression and in a lot of pain and a lot of emotional suffering and going through a divorce and somebody gave me The Artist's Way and I did it. And one of the things that happens when you do it is that various ways she asks on almost every single exercise, she's asking you various interpretations of if there was one talent that you wish you had, you know, what would it be? If there was one skill that you would love to learn, what would it be? If there's something you wish you had studied when you were younger, what is it? If there's,

Starting point is 01:44:49 if you could have five, you know, talents that you don't have now, what might they be? If you could have five, and she keeps asking these questions in various ways and you answer them again and again and again. And when you're done doing the artist way, you go back and you read through all your journals and you see what keeps showing up. Because that's your clue as to what the next direction of your life was. And when I did it, what kept showing up was, apparently, I really want to learn how to speak Italian, because it was on almost every page. It's like, I wish I could speak Italian. I wish I could speak Italian. And this is the beautiful thing about the way that the mind hides things from us.

Starting point is 01:45:32 I literally didn't know that about myself. I had no idea that it was such a big deal in my life that apparently my consciousness really wanted to learn how to speak Italian. So, for no reason whatsoever, I just started taking Italian lessons at night in night school at the New School of Social Research in New York, which I call night school for divorced ladies, because it was all a bunch of divorced women taking classes to better themselves. And I was one of them. And I started taking Italian with no plan. And I fell so in love with it.

Starting point is 01:45:58 And I said, I want to master this. To master it, I'm really going to have to go to Italy. And that was the beginning of me creating the idea of going and spending that year traveling, starting in Italy and then going to India to meditate and then to Indonesia. It would have never come up. It would have never come up. So I can't overstate what you can get out of doing the artist way. And I do it, I tend to do it between projects. Actually, I'm glad you brought it up because I haven't done it in a while. And I'm just looking over at my bookshelf

Starting point is 01:46:30 and I see that the book is sitting right there. And I may take this as an invitation to, it's a good thing to do during quarantine. It is, it is. To dedicate myself to it again and find out. And the other reason that it's important, I think, to do it again and again is you don't know what you're going to find. You know, like you change. The world changes and you change.

Starting point is 01:46:54 And I have a feeling that if I did The Artist's Way again, it's not going to be I want to learn Italian on every page. I don't know what I'm going to find. But I'm curious enough to find out. And, yeah, why don't I what I'm going to find. But I'm curious enough to find out. And yeah, why don't I do that, Tim? Thank you. Thank you for reminding me. Tim Cynova You're welcome. Tim Cynova I'm going to take it on. Tim Cynova I literally have, I'm touching it with my

Starting point is 01:47:16 hand because it's on the table where I'm working the Artist's Way Morning Pages Journal, which is a companion volume to the Artist's Way. And I've been using it. I've kind of dusted it off and said, you know, I think the monkey mind has had free reign for long enough. Let me trap some of this in the amber. See what's going on. So cool. So cool. Okay, that's it.

Starting point is 01:47:39 We're on. It's happening. I feel it. It's a full-body yes. This is the other thing I'm really into lately is getting a full body yes. Somebody mentions something and your whole body's like, oh yeah, that's on, which is actually going back to, it's actually why I started doing psychedelics because I heard somebody talking about it and I got a full body yes for it.

Starting point is 01:47:59 And I did it until I got a full body no. But anyway, so cool. Yeah, The Artist's Way, very important. Yeah, I've been really impressed with the power of Morning Pages. I was introduced to Morning Pages by Brian Koppelman. I will admit something rather embarrassing, and that is I've never taken or created an artist's date. And I would love to hear hear if you have taken yourself on artist states what maybe one or two of them have looked like i okay i'll tell you one of them

Starting point is 01:48:36 was you know the high line in new york i do um okay so before it was created, there was an article about it in the New Yorker saying that there's this weird, strange thing running up the west side of New York City. So for those of you who don't know it, the High Line is this amazing elevated pathway just one block above New York that runs from down in the Meatpacking District up until Midtown. It's expanding now, but it's what was remaining of what used to be an industrial railroad track that was an elevated railroad track that ran through the city, and it ran right through the middle of certain buildings in the meatpacking district because they would bring actually livestock in on those trains, and they would butcher them there in the city so that the meat would be fresh, and then they would move the meat out. And anyway, it had long been derelict and falling apart.

Starting point is 01:49:31 And it was one of those things that was too expensive for the city to tear down. And so it just was allowed to kind of rot there. And some very forward-thinking citizens, including Gloria Vanderbilt and some other people got together and decided to restore it and to bring it to life as a pedestrian walkway. So, it's this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful gift to the city of New York. But the first time I read about it in The New Yorker years ago, I was living on 39th Street and 10th Avenue at the time. And it was describing where this thing was. And I realized it was right around the corner from me. And it had not yet been open to the public at all. I mean, the project hadn't even begun. But I made it a point to try to find it. And it wasn't easy

Starting point is 01:50:18 to find because it's buried in like, you know, the path of it disappears at times and it goes under highways and it goes. So I spent an entire day tracking as best I could what was the beginnings of the High Line. And even climbing, even finding a few spots to climb up and see if I could look at it and get above it, trying to get into buildings. So it became like a sort of Tom Sawyer adventure that I took myself on for a day. So that was my favorite artist date. And nothing comes of it. You know, this is the really great thing about these artist dates. It's not, that wasn't toward anything. You know, that wasn't because I was working on a book about New York City. You just do something that you think is interesting and curious and you see where it takes you. And that's it. And you just make a habit of continuing to do that. And it's about kind of opening up your life to following your curiosity, even if there's no cost benefit.

Starting point is 01:51:12 You know, even if it doesn't turn into some great big project or a new business or anything, you just do it because it's fun. And because, as I said before, you're not just here to pay bills and die. Yeah, I will, you know, I'll have to figure out how to make a work in quarantine, but I do need to get on that artist state. I think that would be very good for my mental health and just my spiritual health on top of that. Let's talk about City of Girls for a minute. This is your latest novel, and I think many people know you for your nonfiction without knowing how much experience you have and how good you are at fiction. I think that's worth just saying since-

Starting point is 01:51:53 Thank you. Of course. You know, Eat, Pray, Love, the 800-pound gorilla, 15 million plus copies. I mean, it's just such a beast, which I watched, I must say, with admiration, this juggernaut, because my first book came out in April 2007, and you were still dominating and continued to dominate the lists forever. And so, I remember watching that phenomenon unfold in real time, which was really fun. So congratulations. It was fun for me too.

Starting point is 01:52:26 Yeah, I bet. I bet. Talk about being both in and out of the game. Like, wow, this is happening. Yeah. I didn't do it, but it's happening. Wow. Yes.

Starting point is 01:52:37 Anyway. How closely, this is just a curiosity that came up earlier. How closely did the book proposal for Eat, Pray, Love match the ultimate book? And were there other titles you considered? The title was the last thing I had. And the title, now it's so funny because it turned into such an iconic, it feels both surprising and inevitable, right? That title really does seem, it's all about the title, right? But that was the hardest title I ever had to come up with. I had to enlist every friend that I knew.

Starting point is 01:53:11 I had so many other titles for it, all of them bad. I kept trying to work with puns based on the fact that all three of the countries that I was going to began with the letter I, and I was going on a spiritual experience of the self. So I felt like there was something in there. It was so labored. So, all of these titles had to do with like the three I's or the I, like in search of I, like every, I couldn't get off that, you know. And finally, it was a friend of mine who came up with the title, I Pray Love, and I was like, oh, that works. It's just completely different. But as for the proposal, so again, you know, this only works because this was my fourth book. This would not work for a first-time book proposal or maybe even a second

Starting point is 01:53:51 one. But it was my fourth book and it was an editor who I had worked with who knew me and trusted me. So, I was able, I guess, to get away with this. But essentially, I just sat down and wrote him an email, a personal email and said, I have this idea of something that I want to do. And I mean, it just poured out of me as a, I think it was like, if you were to print it, it was probably a page, maybe a page and a half. And I said, I want to quit everything and I want to go on this journey and I want to look, I want to go to these three countries and I want to look for pleasure. I want to discover the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of meditation in India, and I want to find the balance between pleasure and

Starting point is 01:54:34 spirituality in Bali because they seem to be a culture that's really good at both of those things. And I want to go for a year and I want to quit my great job at GQ. I want to get rid of my great apartment. I want to stop writing novels. I want to go do this. I'd never written anything so personal in my life. Up until that point, been a fiction writer and a biographer. And that was it.

Starting point is 01:55:02 So it was, I delivered what I said I was going to deliver. I didn't say what I was going to find. I just said what I was going to look for. And they were generous enough to trust me to let me do it, to give me enough of an advance that I could pay for the trip, which was such a miracle, such a miracle. I still remember that check coming in and being like, this is, because I was recently divorced. I was like, this is the first money I've ever made that's mine, just mine. The first money I've ever made in my profession as a writer that is just mine. And I get to do with it this adventure. It just felt so incredibly miraculous and it still does. It still does. What an incredible moment.

Starting point is 01:55:46 And what an incredible feeling that must have been. Yeah. You mentioned the art of pleasure. City of Girls, as you mentioned, set in New York City theater world of the 1940s. There's one theme that I'd love to hear you explore or expand upon a little bit that is seemingly deeply embedded in this. And that is what it means to lead a free and open sexual life as a woman without suffering

Starting point is 01:56:15 terrible consequences. Can you speak to that in any way that makes sense to you? Yeah, I mean, I wanted so much to tell that story and to write that story. I, as a female reader, I've gotten so tired over the years of the trope, the cliche of the story of the ruined woman. And, you know, classically, the story of the ruined woman is a woman from a nice family, respectable, good prospects ahead of her, makes a terrible decision based on passion and ends up dead. It's like one false move and you are dead. And that is the message that those stories convey. I mean, that's Anna Karenina and it's Madame Bovary and it's Hedda Gabler and it's Daisy Miller and, you know, all of those novels written by men, I should say. And I love them as works of literature, as a student of literature. They're some of the best books that have ever been written.

Starting point is 01:57:22 But it's depressing as a woman because, you know, it really does. They're meant to be warnings. They're meant to tell women to stay in their lane. And then there's this other side, and let me see if I can get this over the net. There's another story that's told of women, often by women, which is still the story of the ruined woman, that something bad happened to a woman and her life was destroyed because of it. And in both cases, what it's saying is that women cannot survive life, that women cannot survive the dangers of being female. They cannot survive their own desire. They cannot survive their own risks.

Starting point is 01:58:09 They cannot survive men. And that just doesn't feel true to me based on the empirical evidence of how many women there are out there surviving. You know, like I like to say, if women could not survive the terrible decision-making that we have sometimes around sex and love, I'm talking about women, our own terrible decision-making around sex and love, there wouldn't be a woman left

Starting point is 01:58:36 surviving in this world. Like, all of us have just made such bad choices about ourselves and about our bodies, and yet we're here. And yet here we sit eating a sandwich. You know, we're here and we're fine and bruised maybe, but not destroyed. Not destroyed. I have tremendous faith in female resilience. And I have every reason to have faith in female resilience because the entire history of womanhood is the history of resilience. And that's a story that I really wanted to tell about somebody who, and I really wanted to tell a story about a woman who is very sexual and is very sexual from a young age and then is very sexual for the entirety of her life, who's very promiscuous and has consequences from that of all manner and still remains somebody whose sexuality is open

Starting point is 01:59:28 and curious and who wants to engage with the world at that level. And I feel like that's a very hard book to find. I don't think we've seen a lot of that. And I didn't want to tell a story about a woman who is sexual in her youth and then puts it away to get married and become respectable. I want to tell a story about a woman who's sexual for the entirety of her life. And that is my character, Vivian Morris. And there's a line in the book where she says, at some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed of herself all the time, and then she can become who she truly is. And I think that's the essence of the book. There's another line in there where she says, you don't have to be a good girl to be a good person. And that's the trap that I think so many women fall into, is trying so hard

Starting point is 02:00:11 to be good that they are not able to be who they actually are. Are there any aspects, portions of any book you've written that you wished readers would pay more attention to? Something that in retrospect was important to you or you think important to the reader that maybe didn't get enough space or that people just didn't take enough notice of. Is there anything where like, man, the thing that people missed or didn't pay enough attention to was this? Is there anything that comes to mind in any of your writing? If there is, it's my fault because it's my job to be clear. And I take that on as my own responsibility. And I also have a great sense of the autonomy of the reader to take away whatever they need and that they want to take from it. One thing that I do think is funny, and I wrote

Starting point is 02:01:01 about this in Big Magic, is the absolutely bizarre but very human phenomenon of people putting things into my books that aren't there, which I think is absolutely amazing. You know, like I spoke about this in Big Magic about a woman coming up to me and saying, you know, because you spoke so openly about domestic violence and the physical abuse that you suffered at the hands of your first husband, I was able to leave my domestic violence situation. And I was the last person in the world at that moment who was going to say to her, that is not in the book. And it's also not anything that I've ever experienced. And I don't know why you put that in there, but I'm delighted that you left your abusive marriage situation. And I, like, I, she needed, sometimes I think, and I've had this experience

Starting point is 02:01:42 as a reader where I go back to read a book that I loved and I find that it's actually not the book I remember reading, which I think is very strange and bizarre. Like the elves came in the middle of the night and took that part out of the book because I can't find it in there anymore. You know, I think it's almost like the way your mind fills in the blind spots of your vision with what it thinks is there. I think sometimes we as readers put in things in books that don't exist. But I will say that with City of Girls, one thing that I would ask you to pay attention to as you read it is that it's been marketed, and this is fine with me because it is a book about female sexuality. It's been marketed as a book about a woman who's very promiscuous and very free with her sexuality. And that's a very

Starting point is 02:02:25 important part of the book. But by the end of the book, what I would love for you to see is that it's a book about female friendship. And it's a book about the families that we create versus the families that we come from. And Vivian walks away from culture and family. She essentially walks away from trauma and culture in order to become her own woman. And in that, she finds her own tribe. And it's this group of women who she is with for her entire life. And that is 1000% based on my life and on my reality. The female friendships that I have that are decades long are the foundational relationships of my life. I think that I was taught that the most important relationship of your life is going to be the person that you marry. And I believed it once, I believed it twice. And now, at the grizzled

Starting point is 02:03:17 old age of 50 and being very happy in myself as who I am now, I can say that what I was taught you were supposed to get from one man, I've actually discovered from a multitude of extraordinary women. And I feel a lot healthier as a human being, not looking for it from one person anymore, but receiving it from a community and from a community of female friends. And that's what Vivian ends up with too. The key relationships in her life are with her aunt and with her best friend, who's also her business partner, with the showgirls who she meets in New York City who formulate her as a young woman into a sensual being. Those are the relationships that make her into who she is and that support her

Starting point is 02:04:01 through the entirety of her life. Here, here. I have so enjoyed this conversation. We're running up on time. You're a gifted writer, you're a gifted speaker. This has been just the best way I could imagine to spend coming up on two hours. Is there anything you would like to mention or talk about before we wrap up? And I'll certainly let people know before we close up where they can find you online. And we'll put everything in the show notes as well. But is there anything that you would like to share or talk about before we close up? Thank you, Tim. I've had such a wonderful time as well. I mean, anytime I get a

Starting point is 02:04:45 chance to talk to people on the subject of mercy, I just want to put in a word for it, because I believe that we live in a merciless culture, and I believe that we are merciless to ourselves, and I believe that we are very often merciless to each other, but most merciless to ourselves, because we've been taught to be. And mercy is the guiding word of my life right now, and I don't think that I'm going to be okay mentally or spiritually without it. And it's such a lovely word. It's such a gentle word. I love that it's the word that, you know, if you're wrestling with your brother, it's the word that you traditionally use as the word of surrender, right? Like, okay, enough. Like, you know, mercy is something that I have only found for myself in moments of surrender, in giving up my illusions of power, giving up my illusions that I control the world, giving up my illusions that I control anybody else, giving up my illusions that I'm meant to live some sort of a perfect life, and accepting everything as it is, and feeling mercy toward

Starting point is 02:05:56 myself for how difficult it is to be a human being, you know, within that realm. Most people who I know, I wouldn't really have anybody around me who wasn't like this, so I can say that most people that I know would say that it's a goal of theirs to practice universal human compassion, that that's something that means something to them, that they want to be a compassionate person to the entire world, that they want to be a humanitarian, that they want to think of others, that they want to take care of, that they want to be kind, they want to be forgiving, they want to be selfless, and most of all, that they want to be compassionate universally. And I just always want to remind everybody, especially if you're out there and

Starting point is 02:06:38 you're one of those people who is practicing universal human compassion as best you can while at the same time assassinating yourself and having voices in your head that are so vicious to yourself and holding yourself to such an impossibly high standard. I just want to remind everybody that universal human compassion that does not include the self is not universal. And universal human compassion starts at home by extending an olive branch of mercy between you and yourself and beginning, and I would say to love yourself, but I know that that can seem very out of reach to people. So, I would say beginning to be friendly towards yourself, to treat yourself with a certain level of stewardship and friendship that says, this is how I talk to myself sometimes, I say,

Starting point is 02:07:28 I don't know why they gave me you. I don't know why they gave me you to take care of, you know, but they did. They dropped me into your body. They dropped me into this mind. They dropped me into this family. They dropped me into this culture. They dropped me into this moment of history. They gave me these talents. They gave me into this family. They dropped me into this culture. They dropped me into this moment of history. They gave me these talents.

Starting point is 02:07:46 They gave me these mental illnesses. They gave me these gifts. They gave me these addictions. I don't know why they gave me you, but I accept. I accept that. And I accept the sacred responsibility of taking care of you. And I will take really good care of you. And I haven't always, but I will now. And that's the beginning of reaching out a friendly hand of

Starting point is 02:08:14 mercy from yourself to yourself. Without which I don't think you can actually practice universal human compassion because the hardest person in the entire world to like, to endure, to forgive, to show mercy for is, of course, yourself. And once you've done that, like, the rest of it's a breeze. I'm never going to meet anybody who's as difficult to handle as I am, you know? You're never going to meet anybody. You're never going to meet anybody, Tim, who causes you more trouble than you cause you. That's just a rule. Yeah, totally. And none of us are ever going to meet anybody whose shame is harder to forgive than our own.

Starting point is 02:08:53 But once I've learned how to just be very gentle and gracious toward myself and merciful, again, just with that word, I find that I can sit with people now who are in all kinds of bad behavior. And it's less agitating for me because I'm like, oh, hello, me. I love George Saunders says when he sees people, the writer George Saunders, who is a practicing Buddhist as well, but he says whenever he sees somebody acting out, he has a name for them, a special name for them. And that name is me on a different day. And it's so kind. And you know, and until you can really be kind toward yourself, how could you be kind toward you on a different day, which is everybody else. So, just mercy is the word. And it's the thing that the world needs. It's the thing that you need towards yourself. It's the thing that the people that you work with and live with need from you.

Starting point is 02:09:48 But mostly that you need from you to you. Liz, you are doing such good work in the world, and you're sharing many important messages. Please keep it up. And people can find you, of course, at elizabethgilbert.com. They can find you on social, on Twitter and Facebook, at Gilbert Liz, on Instagram, at elizabeth__gilbert__writer, and I will link to all of these. I was a late adapter to Instagram, can you tell? Elizabeth underscore Gilbert underscore writer underscore 14 underscore asterisk. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:10:29 And I'll link to all of these so people can just click on something in the show notes. As always, at Tim.blog.com slash podcast, including everything we've spoken about. Not the least of which is your latest novel, City of Girls, which was named an instant New York Times bestseller and is a very fun book, very exciting book, very thoughtful book, rollicking sexy tale of the New York City theater world during the 1940s. And I also owe a thank you to Cheryl Strait for making the connection and setting in ways, the ball in motion so that we could have this conversation. So, thank you, Cheryl. And Liz, once again, it's been such a pleasure and so much fun to spend time with you, and I appreciate you carving out the time.

Starting point is 02:11:17 My very great pleasure. Thank you so much, Tim. And thanks to everybody for listening. And until next time, mercy and compassion. And if you mean it to be universal, that needs to include you. Thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found

Starting point is 02:11:55 or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

Starting point is 02:12:36 This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, if I could only take one supplement, what would it be? The answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. I view it as, and a lot of you now view it as, all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it way back in 2010 in the 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I've been using it since before that, and I use it in a lot of different ways. I travel with it to avoid getting sick, or to help mitigate the likelihood of getting sick. I take it in the morning to ensure optimal performance and overall it covers my bases if I can't get what I need from whole food meals throughout the rest of the day. And if you want to give Athletic Greens a try, they're offering a free 20 count travel pack for first-time users.

Starting point is 02:13:20 I nearly always travel with at least three or four of these one-dose bags. In other words, if you buy Athletic Greens as a first-time buyer, you now get, for a limited time, an extra $79 in free product. So check out the details at athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim for your free travel pack with any purchase. This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market. Thrive Market saves me a ton of money and it's perfect for these crazy times. Thrive Market is a membership-based site on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone. You can regularly save 25 to 50% off of normal retail prices with member-only prices for

Starting point is 02:14:01 anything you can imagine, really. Whether it's keto, paleo, gluten-free, vegan, whatever, you can sort by that. You can find all types of food. You can find supplements. You can find non-toxic home products, clean wine, dog food, just about anything. And let me give you a personal example of just how much you can save. So my last order, I ordered Primal Kitchen mayonnaise, which is made with avocado oil. It's delicious. Justin's almond butter. And the first was 25% off. The Justin's almond butter was 30% off. Rau's homemade marinara sauce, which is awesome, 26% off. All said and done, at the end of my shopping, I saved $39 on my order. So members, and I'm a member, can earn wholesale prices every day and save an average of $30 on each order. I'll come back to that.

Starting point is 02:14:53 And through Thrive Gives, their one-on-one membership matching program, every paid Thrive Market membership is matched with a free one for a low-income family in need. And you can try Thrive Market a few different ways. They have the monthly membership, which is $9.95 per month. They have the 12-month membership for $5 a month, which is billed at $59.95. And right now, this is exclusive to you guys. You can get up to a $20 shopping credit when you join today. Now, remember that I save $39 on my order. So basically, with one or two orders, I pay for the annual membership, which is pretty sweet. So go to thrivemarket.com forward slash Tim to give Thrive Market a try. You can, like I said, choose between the membership models you'd like to test out. If it doesn't work for you,

Starting point is 02:15:39 you can cancel for any reason within 30 days for a full refund. And on top of that, you will make back your membership and savings as I have, or they give you credits to make up for the difference. So it's really win, win, win all around. And I would suggest check it out. Go to thrivemarket.com forward slash Tim. You can receive up to $20 in shopping credit. That's thrivemarket.com forward slash Tim for up to $20 in shopping credit, plus's thrivemarket.com forward slash Tim for up to $20 in shopping credit, plus all of the other great stuff that I mentioned. One more time, check it out thrivemarket.com forward slash Tim.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #430: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Creative Path: Saying No, Trusting Your Intuition, Index Cards, Integrity Checks, Grief, Awe, and Much More

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #430: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Creative Path: Saying No, Trusting Your Intuition, Index Cards, Integrity Checks, Grief, Awe, and Much More

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