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When I walk up the chipped steps of the First Parish Church toward the balcony, a host of women greets me at the top. Some seem to be in their late 20s—grad students, perhaps, who are beginning to realize that, at this point in their lives, they should probably forego Saturday morning hangovers in favor of Friday night motivational speakers. Some seem to be older: parents who might have just sent their last child to college, grandparents who may have just put their grandson to bed. Some are donning tight-fitting black turtlenecks. Others are dressed fancier: sequin-covered dresses, pearl earrings, knee-high boots.
I squeeze into the first pew I see and, a little out of breath, ask the person to my left if I’ve missed a significant portion of the event. She shushes me and points down to the podium where a tall and wiry blonde woman in a white blouse and black pencil skirt adjusts a mic. “What a beautiful place,” breathes Elizabeth Gilbert, acclaimed author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” as she begins her speech. “This reminds me of the austere New England church I was raised in—it makes me think I should be more serious than I intended to [be].”
Since Gilbert is here to discuss her latest book, “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear,” she reads us an excerpt from it first.
“There are two people in the world, really. People who are doing and making really interesting things with their life. And people who are not doing and making really interesting things with their life because they are afraid.”
Gilbert explains how, for most of her life, she fell into the latter category. “I was an exceptionally freaked out child,” she says. She tells us that anxiety isn’t entirely genetic, though—her mom certainly didn’t seem to have it. She tells us how her family called her “Pitiful Pearl.” She tells us about her town’s sprawling blue ocean and her certainty that it would swallow every bikini-clad person in it. Why, a young Elizabeth would lament, can’t people resign to lying on their towels and reading books?
As Elizabeth turns grave—“Argue for your limitations and you keep them”—the woman to my left, the shusher, mutters under her breath. “YES! Oh my!” she softly squeals. “Oh! Oh my god. Yeeeeeeeeeee.”
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There’s a performative element to Gilbert’s recitation: Her pauses are measured, her jokes prepared, her voice a mix of high and low intonations. She draws a metaphor between our world and a petri dish filled with a squirming tadpole who has “a brain the size of a punctuation mark” but still flinches under a human’s shadow. “It cannot draw or write or sing. But it still knows fear. I know fear. You know fear.”
She references her good friend Susan as an example. Once a teenage figure skater, Susan stopped the sport once she realized she wasn’t the most talented at it. “Because why on Earth would you continue doing something when you couldn’t be a champion?” Gilbert pauses, waiting for a response. Someone coughs.
Gilbert moves on, explaining that Susan is now 40 and recently began skating again. She’s energetic when she’s on the ice. She’s living creatively, “making something of herself, with herself.”
Of course, Gilbert qualifies, Susan was afraid of returning to her pastime. “But creativity is a path for the the brave, not the fearless.” There are a few solemn nods, some snaps.
“The only fearless people I know are sociopaths and a few 3-year-olds.” A woman in the audience giggles at this change in tone and claps her hands with such force that a ring flies from her finger, missing my head by inches and landing with a soft thud on the brown floorboard.
If you are fearless, Gilbert cautions, you meet men who, entirely serious, tell you this: “I do not necessarily believe we are biologically predisposed to be monogamous.”
The pews shake as the audience erupts. I watch the man below me frown, as if guilty, and pull out a lighter. The woman next to him catches me watching. She sheepishly grins, then grabs it from him.
Gilbert believes in monogamy, she assures us, just as much as she believes in having equal doses of “reverence and irreverence” for her craft. “When I write, I know that I’m serving God, answering this very ancient, very sacred call. I also know that this is a bunch of bullshit.”
“You have to think both because otherwise you start saying things like, ‘This is my baby,’” she continues, as she chucks a copy of her book on the ground. There is a gasp.
“If that were a baby I would be, like, arrested right now.”
Gilbert has arrested the crowd’s attention, and it rises to its feet. And, after most everyone returns to their seats, three people on the opposite side of the balcony are still clapping and standing. They’re holding a sign that reads “#beerwithLiz.”
The audience murmurs. We’re unsure if this is part of the act.
“Let me explain!” Gilbert shouts. “These crazy fools drove all the way from Canada tweeting ‘#beerswithLiz’ along the way. So I brought beer. Six bottles.” She hands them each one.
Gilbert then announces it’s time for audience questions, and a fiction writer asks for a beer. She doesn’t get one. A student from Boston University gives Gilbert a book she wrote about grief. One woman from Brazil announces that she’s “received a call to divorce.” Another woman says she’s already received the call and hasn’t found happiness yet. “Now what?” she asks Gilbert.
One grim-looking woman approaches the mic to speak. “In your book, you mention the idea of—”
Gilbert interrupts. “You read my book?” The questioner is confused. “Yes?”
“Dude, it’s been out, like, four hours!”
The woman smiles hesitantly and asks if Gilbert will sign her copy. She does.
Another woman rises. “I’m from Turkmenistan,” she explains. “And I’m here because, well, I’m gonna be brave and ask—will you take a selfie?”
Gilbert cringes. Somebody starts to protest. I hear the word “unfair.”
“OK, guys, I will, but this is the only one! I’m only doing this because she’s from Central freakin’ Asia!”
At this point, a gray-haired lady in front of me clicks her tongue disapprovingly. I ask if she thinks Gilbert is giving in. Yes, she says. “Does she not realize where we are? She’s cussing! In church!”
