The Very Late and Completely Unnecessary Review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic

(And after not publishing one thing in 2022, I’ve started to read it again in January 2023, hoping to write fearlessly.)

In 2020, I have walked more than I have run. Today, while I write this, it is mid-December 2020, and in mid-December 2019, I hurt my knee while running with my dog. He yanked one way; my knee twisted the other way. For the next four months, I could not run. For runners, this is hard. Running is our way to decompress and to push away anxiety, but this is not an essay about running. This is an essay about shifts. A shift from running to walking and a shift from being a pretentious writer, with absolutely no grounds for pretention, to a storyteller.

I found Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love in the seatback pocket on a flight from Utah to Barcelona in 2016. I’d never planned to read it, but by the time I landed in Spain, I was a new Eat, Pray, Love fan and an even bigger fan of Gilbert. I share her Ted Talks and interviews with my students. When I teach memoir, I always include Gilbert. In my profession, some may scoff at this and raise their high-brow literature noses away, but let them scoff. Let them scoff away.

At the time, I had just published two books and published a dozen essays in well-respected journals and in glossies that paid…