‘Eat, Pray, Love’ author Elizabeth Gilbert explores fear of failure in new book

Back when author Elizabeth Gilbert was in her 20s – before she ever traveled to Italy, India and Bali as part of a quest for self-discovery that inspired her best-selling memoir, “Eat, Pray, Love” – she worked on a dude ranch in Wyoming.

One day an older couple on vacation asked her what a young girl from Connecticut was doing on a ranch.

“I’m just exploring things,” she recalls telling them. “I want to know more about the world, and I found this job, and it’s really cool and interesting.”

“Well, it’s a good thing you’re doing it now,” the man told her. “Because within a few years, you’ll never be able to do anything like that again.”

She kind of understood his point, Gilbert says. But she didn’t buy it.

“I remember even at the time thinking, “Hmmmm, I don’t know about that,’” says Gilbert, 46. “What a weird message: ‘You have two more years to be inquisitive. From then on, you’re just going to have to buckle down and be productive for society. And then it’s over.’

“Like, what if you spent your whole life being inquisitive?” she said. “This implication that there’s a short time period when you’re allowed to be curious – that just kind of broke my heart.”

Gilbert’s newest book, “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear,” was released last month. On Monday, she’ll visit Wichita for a reading at Grace Presbyterian Church.

The book – which you’ll find in the Self-Help & Personal Growth section of the bookstore, not among the novels or memoirs – digs into the creative process itself and the mysterious nature of inspiration.

“Somebody said to me the other day, ‘Does the world really need another book on creativity?’ And my answer is, without a doubt, no,” Gilbert said in a telephone interview before her nationwide book tour.

“But the world hasn’t needed any of the stuff I made. I needed to do it, because I want to engage with that mysterious impulse within me that calls me to do completely irrational things.”

One topic Gilbert explores in “Big Magic” is the fear of failure that followed the raging success of “Eat, Pray, Love.” Her two subsequent books – “Committed: A Love Story” and “The Signature of All Things” – “were not tsunamis in the way that ‘Eat, Pray’ Love’ was,” Gilbert said.

Fortunately, she said, one-upping herself has never been her motive for writing.

“I wrote for years before anybody bought it, because I like doing it,” she said. “I have to draw on that same impulse that says, ‘Look, you’re going to have to do this when people love you, and you’re going to have to do it after they’ve stopped loving you. Otherwise, you’re just going to be bored and blue.’”

Gilbert said she already is brewing her next project: a novel about New York City dance hall girls in the 1940s. “I want to write about promiscuous women … in a way they haven’t been written about,” she said.

Her message to readers of “Big Magic” – and listeners of her new podcast, “Magic Lessons” – is that they should explore whatever topics interest them and create whatever they’re inspired to create.

“You do not need a permission slip from the principal’s office in order to live a creative life. … Making art is part of the full human experience. No one is excluded from that.”

This story was originally published October 8, 2015 at 5:37 PM with the headline "‘Eat, Pray, Love’ author Elizabeth Gilbert explores fear of failure in new book."