Salon.com > Elizabeth Gilbert

Talking about God with Martin Sheen

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 23:01:00 +0000

TORONTO -- Martin Sheen is a very popular guy at the Royal York Hotel, a massive stone edifice overlooking Lake Ontario. Last week, unionized workers at the Toronto landmark went on a one-day strike, to call attention to what they view as unfair working conditions. Not coincidentally, it was also opening day for North America's most prestigious film festival, with hordes of celebrities and journalists descending on Canada's largest city.

Sheen himself was just off the plane from L.A., here to promote his son Emilio Estevez's new film "The Way," a lovely, leisurely and often highly moving odyssey in which he plays a bereaved dad walking a pilgrimage across northern Spain with his son's ashes in a metal box. (Estevez himself plays Sheen's dead son, seen only in flashbacks and visions.) But the 70-year-old actor is also a board member of the Screen Actors Guild and a lifelong labor activist. So out he went onto Front Street, amid the crowd of Latin American immigrants who work at the Royal York, to walk the picket line wearing a beautiful tailored suit and a "Unite Here" signboard.

The “Eat, Pray, Love” guru’s troubling past

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 18:01:00 +0000

When audiences go to "Eat, Pray, Love" this weekend, they will watch as Julia Roberts, blond and brokenhearted, folds her long, long legs into a perfect letter X, chants a mysterious mantra, and magically finds the equanimity that has been eluding her. Viewers will see her undergo life-changing experiences thanks to her guru's grace and the spirit of her guru's master, a man she calls a "South Indian old lion." They will perhaps be awed and enchanted by the exotic spiritual treasure chest that is India. And then they will cheer for her as she finally mends the cracks in her heart and makes her way to Bali to find love.

What they probably won't know is that the unnamed guru is a hugely controversial figure who has disappeared from public view amid allegations of manipulation, financial misconduct and intimidation. And as that guru's organization, the Siddha Yoga Dham of America (SYDA), has come under fire, her own guru (yes, gurus also have gurus), the "old lion," has been accused of sexual abuse, molestation and sexual intercourse with minor girls.

“Eat, Pray, Love”: A phenomenon goes bust

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:20:00 +0000

The enormous success of Elizabeth Gilbert's travel memoir "Eat, Pray, Love" is one of those paradoxes that pretty much define modern life. There is nothing affluent Westerners of the information-economy class like better than being told that our lives lack soulfulness, sensuality and a sense of purpose -- except, perhaps, for heaping derision on those who bring us this news. Every move in this dance is so well rehearsed that none of it can escape cliché: not the original complaint about our shallowness and materialism, not the presumptive moral high ground and false modesty of the evangelist-observer, not the exaggerated, Bill O'Reilly-style scorn of those who feel their iPhoned and Twitterized lifestyle is under attack.

As almost everyone reading this will already know, "Eat, Pray, Love" is the autobiographical and presumably truthful story of a woman who "pulls a geographic" (as some 12-steppers say) on an epic scale, fleeing first her troubled marriage and then her relationship with a hot, younger boyfriend for a year-long voyage of self-discovery to Italy, India and Bali. Gilbert is a sharp and amusing prose stylist and an openhearted critic of her own foibles and failings. She's aware that her personal and literary odyssey contains potential contradictions: The tale of a well-connected New York writer traveling the globe on somebody else's dime and sampling an array of seemingly disconnected experiences might strike many people as a symptom of our cultural dislocation and commodity fetishism, not a cure.

Elizabeth Gilbert, the reluctant bride

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 01:20:00 +0000

Back in the late '90s, Elizabeth Gilbert published her first book, a collection of strange, dark short stories called "Pilgrims," which, according to her, sold "about 11 copies." At one reading, only a single person bothered to show up, a lone man, who she was convinced just might live in the bookstore. Since the publication of her fourth book, the 2006 memoir "Eat, Pray, Love," however, it's no exaggeration to say that she generates pilgrims of her own. They trickle in, "generally women in groups of three," to her husband's small import shop in New Jersey, they take up therapeutic yoga and pizza eating and, this past Tuesday, on an evening when temperatures in New York City threatened to dip into the teens, 500 of them filled the fourth floor of Barnes and Noble in Union Square to hear Gilbert read from her new book, "Committed," which finds her wrestling with the question of whether to marry "Felipe," the handsome Brazilian gentleman Gilbert met in Bali after all that eating in Italy and praying in India. (In fact, the pilgrims so packed the place that when Gilbert relayed this anecdote about the sparse attendance in her early days, the best hope most of the audience had to see her in person came from the monitors in the cafe one floor below.)

Eat pray equivocate

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:21:00 +0000

Fairy-tale weddings, searching for Prince Charming, or even for Mr. Big: It all seems so 1990s. These days, it's women, not men, who are reluctant to commit to marriage -- with those who have committed regretting having done so -- and they're writing about it all over the place. Earlier this summer, Sandra Tsing-Loh, in an essay about her divorce, came out against the "companionate marriage" in the Atlantic Monthly. Cristina Nehring blamed such bloodless arrangements for the bankrupt state of romance in "A Vindication of Love." Only the profoundly unhip Caitlin Flanagan defended the institution in Time. (The upshot of her un-sexy argument? It's for the kids.)

Lost and found

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 12:26:00 +0000

Reeling from an ugly divorce, hobbled by debilitating depression, and suffering from a particularly noxious case of obsessive love, Elizabeth Gilbert did what most of us only fantasize about doing when our lives are falling apart: She split. Unencumbered by children or an office job, the 34-year-old writer secured a book deal and took off for a year to take in three locales she felt could help heal her battered psyche. "Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia," the chronicle of that journey, is equal parts travelogue, self-help book, and spiritual memoir. It is the story of an ambitious and accomplished New Yorker who one night finds herself on the bathroom floor of her Hudson Valley home, sobbing and praying to God for the first time in her life: Please tell me what to do.

Endangered species

Wed, 03 Jul 2002 20:19:00 +0000

Despite its determinedly sprightly tone, the chief impression left by Elizabeth Gilbert's "The Last American Man," a book-length profile of one Eustace Conway, is that of a terrible loneliness. At one point Conway compares himself to Ishi, the sole surviving member of a California Indian tribe who was taken in and studied by anthropologists in the early 20th century. "[I'm] the last of my kind," Conway laments, "stranded. Just trying to communicate. Trying to teach people something. But constantly misunderstood."

Gilbert thinks Conway is the last of his kind, too, but they seem to have slightly different conceptions of what his kind is. Conway sees himself as a woodsman, in the tradition of such boyhood heroes as Daniel Boone. As a child he embarked on an extremely methodical and focused campaign to teach himself how to live in the wild, and he became very good at it. He's an expert hunter who knows how to turn his prey into clothing as well as food. For years at a time he lived in the forests of North Carolina in a teepee he made himself. He carved his own bowls from wood and made his own pots from creek clay. He wove baskets and started fires without matches. He hiked all 2,000 miles of the Appalachian Trail, eating only what he could catch or forage along the way. He rode a horse across America.

“Stern Men” by Elizabeth Gilbert

Tue, 16 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

In this breezily appealing first novel, Elizabeth Gilbert presents us a heroine as smart, sly, plucky and altogether winning as her own prose; it's difficult, in fact, not to develop a knee-weakening crush on both. At the age of 18, Ruth Thomas has hair so black and thick "she could sew a button on a coat with it"; her face is roundish, with an "inoffensive nose," and though she's saddled with "a bigger rear end" than she'd prefer, she pays it little mind, for she's not, as Gilbert writes, "that kind of girl."

Instead, she's this kind of girl: independent, stubborn, wisecracking, laconic, self-consciously rugged -- a feminist with little interest in agendas but with scads of tomboy drive. In short, just what you might expect the daughter of untold generations of irascible Yankee lobstermen from a remote Maine island to be, and then some.

Pilgrims

Thu, 18 Dec 1997 20:00:00 +0000

Elizabeth Gilbert has made her reputation with her nonfiction magazine articles. Now, with the stories in "Pilgrims," she proves herself a capable, if at times uneven, fiction writer too.

Gilbert's favorite theme in both genres is women in the land of men, but in covering this terrain in fiction, she bows a bit too deeply before the macho shrine of Papa Hemingway. Consider the title story, with its fertile premise that Buck, a young cowboy, has a crush on Martha, an alluring Eastern girl hired to work on his father's ranch. At the story's climax, Buck and Martha sit before a campfire, having led a group of Sunday hunters on an elk shoot in the mountains. "Talk about a bunch of pilgrims," Martha comments. "These guys have never even been in a backyard." She and Buck of course are also, as the story hints a bit too insistently, on unfamiliar territory. Here's a key moment, narrated by Buck: "She handed me the bottle again, and this time I drank. We did not talk for a long time ... and when the fire got low, Martha Knox put more wood on it ... In October up there it isn't easy to be warm and I would not pull away from that kind of heat too fast."