Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Elizabeth Gilbert is a journalist, author, and novelist who has written fiction, nonfiction, and short stories, including the New York Times bestselling memoir Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006), which was turned into a film. She followed the book with the bestselling memoir Committed (2010) and Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It (2016), which tells stories inspired by Eat Pray Love readers. Other books by Gilbert include The Last American Man (2002), which was nominated for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award; Pilgrims (1997), a short story collection that won the Pushcart Prize and was nominated for PEN/Hemingway Award; At Home on the Range (2012), a republication of her great-grandmother’s cookbook, with commentary; and the novels The Signature of All Things (2013), City of Girls (2019), and Stern Men (2000). She has also written articles for magazines like Spin, GQ, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine. Her GQ article “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon” (1997) about working in a New York City bar was turned into the film Coyote Ugly (2000).

In Big Magic, Gilbert offers advice based on her experiences, successes, and struggles as a writer and journalist. She discusses writing and publishing Eat Pray Love, its subsequent success, and readers’ reactions to it, as well as her experiences writing short stories, Committed, unpublished novels, and other works. Gilbert followed up Big Magic with a podcast, Magic Lessons, in which she presents interviews with well-known writers and other creative people and provides advice to aspiring creatives struggling with specific issues.

Gilbert has given TED talks on creativity, success and failure, and other topics. She has a bachelor’s degree from New York University but sidestepped a graduate education in writing. Instead, she learned by traveling and working various jobs. She describes her reasons for not pursuing a graduate education:

‘I never thought that the best place for me to find my voice would be in a room filled with twenty other people trying to find their voices. I was a big moralist about it, actually. I felt that if I was writing on my own, I didn’t need a class, and if I wasn’t writing on my own, I didn’t deserve one’ (Lee, Don. “Elizabeth Gilbert, Zacharis Award.” Ploughshares, vol. 25, no. 80, 15 Dec. 1999).

She felt the same way about M.F.A. programs in creative writing:

‘Instead of going to graduate school, I decided to embark on my own education, to travel and work wherever I could, and to set my own goals for producing stories. I didn’t want to spend any time whatsoever on a campus. I couldn’t think of anything worse. I wanted to go out into the world and meet every last person I could’ (Lee, Don. “Elizabeth Gilbert, Zacharis Award.” Ploughshares, vol. 25, no. 80, 15 Dec. 1999).

She echoes this sentiment in Big Magic when suggesting that creative people skip school due to the enormous cost. She recommends that people instead learn from life and the successful people who came before them.