Craft Advice with Elizabeth Gilbert, Part II
On writing about others as an act of love, the emotional beat of writing, what happens after you finish your final draft, and a really fantastic prompt!
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
As promised, here’s Part Two bursting with brilliant insight from Liz!
If you missed Part One, you can find it here. Part Two picks up just where we left off.
Enjoy!
xJane
Obviously you couldn't show the pages to Rayya, but did you show them to Stacy or Gigi or anyone else you wrote about?
I showed them to Gigi, and to Stacy, and to Rayya's family, to both her nephews, to her niece, to her sister, to her best friend, Anita. All the people who were at the center of it. I showed them the manuscript about a year ago. Long before I showed it to my editors, because I felt like if there's anything in there that you don't want known about yourself, you're not going to want it known to my editors either.
The question that I had for everybody was, “Can you let me know if there's anything in here about Rayya that you don't think is fair? If there's anything in here that you don't think is true? Because I really want this to be fair and true. And you guys all knew her. And you were there.”
There were a couple things that people brought up that they didn't think were fair or true. If there was a truth question and a debate about what happened or didn't happen, I took it out. If there was a fairness question, we had conversations about it. Like, “Tell me why you don't think this is fair.” And I changed several things in the book as a result.
Was that process hard?
It's scary if you're strategizing. If you want to be in truth, it isn't. If you're strategizing and manipulating how you want to be seen, or what you want people to think of you, it's very scary. But I got to the point where I said, “I just want us to all live in truth with each other.” Then once again, going back to our conversation about truth: what is there to be afraid of? It's just asking somebody, “What is your truth?”
I was happy to see that people felt like I described Rayya. That made me really happy.
They felt that you really captured her?
Yes, Sami said, “I'm so glad that Rayya had a writer living with her in the last year and a half of her life, because you have brought her back. This is Rayya.”
That very first thing where she says she only cuts hair for people she likes! That’s so Rayya!
And she would say it! I knew couples where Rayya would only cut the hair of one of the people, she didn't like the other person. She was such a boss bitch. People would be like, “Come on, you're at our house cutting the hair of one of us. Would it kill you to cut the other?” And she's like, “Nope, not doing it.” She didn't do anything she didn’t want to do.
The way you capture her intonations, her phrasing, her word choice. It's all bang on. After Rayya received her diagnosis, you start carrying this notebook around with you, with Rayya’s blessing, and writing things down so you don't forget. What was that was like, because you're writing them down for after she's dead.
For me, or for her?
Both.
We both loved it. We were both in agreement that Rayya was amazing. And we were both in agreement that everything that Rayya said was important and should be written down. We were literally on the same page about that. That was part of Rayya, she had that grandiosity; she definitely was the hero of her own story, as we all are of our own stories. It was just a little bit more obvious with her.
But she also was deeply crushingly insecure, and had, at the bottom of all of her addiction, that awful howling tundra of low self-worth and zero self-esteem. She fronted a lot that she was super confident. She was and she wasn't.
It was so interesting when the doctors prescribed weed to her to help with the nausea, which every cancer patient I know finds to be a godsend. She had a brain that was obviously very influenced by drugs, and in extreme ways. Cocaine made her feel relaxed. And weed made her hate herself. The paranoia that you would associate with it, she called it “garbage head,”—the nausea would go away, but then what would happen is that whole underbelly of her would be revealed that she spent her life hiding. And this voice would be activated in her head that would mercilessly bully and attack her and tell her what a loser she was.
I think that the part who suffered at the hands of that internal bully was really pleased by the fact that somebody who loved her was recording everything she said because they thought it was precious, because they thought she was precious.
That’s beautiful. Do you have a stack of journals?