It is fair to say that Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear might never have been published were it not for Elizabeth Gilbert’s unexpected soaraway success, Eat, Pray, Love, in which a woman recovers from a turbulent life event – divorce – by eating, praying and meeting a fresh life event. There was critical contention over the quality of the book; whether it was effervescently or breathily written, whether the “pray” section had any wisdom or was just pilfered new-age hocus pocus; all of which was followed by the inevitable debate over whether it deserved its popularity, which in 2006 – when the internet was younger and trend wasn’t a verb – was outlandish.
Gilbert’s own view of the phenomenon was that her book spoke to other women so universally that, if it didn’t dovetail closely enough with their own lives, readers simply embroidered themselves into it. Gilbert-fever, I thought at the time, was the high-water mark of a cultural phase in which every woman who made a choice was seen to stand as an accusation of every woman who made a different choice; a subtle instantiation of misogyny whose logic was that women were fine to exist, so long as we were all the same, and all did the same things at the same time. So if the praise for Eat, Pray, Love was fulsome, the hatred for it was overstated too: it should have been possible for a woman to write a memoir without its being taken as a template.
Big Magic, on the other hand, is expressly written as a template; lessons in how to unleash your creativity. The chapter headings are big words – Courage, Enchantment, Permission, Persistence, Trust, Divinity – not always accurately deployed. First, though, we should ask what creativity is. “Three mornings a week, Susan awoke before dawn and, in that groggy hour before her demanding day job began, she skated. And she skated and skated and skated … that’s what I call creative living.” Gilbert gives no clear distinction between this and going to the gym, unless the ice is in some way decisive, and I remain unpersuaded of that. Regardless, a bar has been set: anything is creative so long as it makes you appreciate the value of your own joy, alive and ageless, “more than a consumer”. On these grounds, naturally I am tempted to make the case for drinking myself to death as a creative exercise, but that would be self-destructive. Creativity resides in making the choices that make you happy, and anyone who tells you otherwise – your inner critic, your outer critics – is bullshitting. Originality is out, authenticity is in.
Gilbert doesn’t tell a very consistent story about herself; she writes that she was a very anxious child whose parents forced her to confront her fears – “Scared of the ocean? Get in that ocean! Afraid of the snow? Time to shovel snow!” – whereupon she realised her fear was boring. This doesn’t sound like any meaningful account of anxiety I’ve ever read or heard. One minute she has passed through seasons of “depression, anxiety and shame”, the next she has lived her entire life in a state of “stubborn gladness”. One minute she has thrown away “an entire completed book because it didn’t work”, the next she’s published a novel in which a character is “egregiously improbable”, but it doesn’t matter because “a whole bunch of people had some opinions about my novel for a short while, and then everyone moved on, because people are busy, and they have their own lives to think about”. Leaving aside why you’d populate your own work with people you didn’t believe in, her argument is sloppy, with no internal coherence. She implores the reader to take their creative juice “seriously but not seriously”, while apparently (on some pages) holding hers almost in contempt, stating that the “political lobbyist … even the ever-meaningless consultant … is infinitely more essential to the smooth maintenance of the human community than any novelist ever was, or ever will be”. She is an extremely concrete thinker – “nobody ever died because I got a bad review in the New York Times. The polar ice caps will not melt any faster or slower because I couldn’t figure out how to write a convincing end to my novel” – who can’t conceive significance outside the rather large denominators of life, death and ice caps. Yet she is drawn to talk about abstraction, and to make bold assertions about human behaviours which she has admitted, three pages previously, she has no understanding of. “Done is better than good” is her mantra, and her mother’s before her, which might explain the rough-handed parenting. Given that, a lesser spirit might hesitate before pontificating about perfectionism, imagining that it might have contours and textures they could only guess at. But no: “I think perfectionism is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear.”
The fundamental problem is the padded laziness, the sense that this loose prose has been sprayed out to fill the page, without even the most cursory revision. “No living writer has ever taught me more about plotting and characterisation than Charles Dickens has taught me – and needless to say, I never met with him during office hours to discuss it.” Yes, utterly needless. A “friend” (the book is peppered with them, popping up to reinforce the author’s points with homespun observations indistinguishable in tone from her own) writes to Werner Herzog about his film-making problems, and received a “reply of ferocious challenge”, which she then gives in precis: “Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault you wanted to be an artist.” I tried and failed to imagine the circumstances in which one could legitimately pot the words of Herzog; either this letter exists, and you find it and quote it; or you cannot find it, and you make your point some other way.
There is the beginning of an interesting discussion in the chapter Permission: “debt”, she writes “will always be the abattoir of creative dreams”. Since debt is the defining feature of American tertiary education, she proceeds to elide the two things and make the case against learning per se. Meaningless samples garnish self-satisfied anti-intellectualism. “I am not convinced that we need officially credentialed novelists… Twelve North American writers have won the Nobel prize in literature since 1901: not one of them had an MFA. Four of them never even got past high school.” An apparently genuine hostility to academic inquiry crops up periodically. “I will fall asleep with my face in my dinner plate if someone starts discoursing to me about the academic distinction between true mastery and mere craft.” Then, later, the injunction “Keep moving, keep going. Whatever you do, try not to dwell too long on your failures.” It would be good advice for a perfectionist. “We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Make space for all these paradoxes to be equally true inside your soul, and I promise – you can make anything.” You run the risk, of course, of making something like this book.
• Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert (Bloomsbury Publishing, £14.99). To order a copy for £11.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
