News & Blog

A friend of this page name Cheryl sent me this amazing picture, in tribute to the late, great Richard from Texas. Bless his memory, and bless you, Cheryl, for this. I love it.

FORZA, everyone. Strength.

Liz

via Elizabeth Gilbert’s Facebook Wall

Dear Ones –

Have you all seen this video? If not, take a moment and watch it. It's so beautiful and amazing. It seems rather impossible that this child is not a reincarnation of some long-gone Tibetan Lama. Either that, or those parents of his are feeding him a steady diet of Descartes-themed video games….

Either way: Gorgeous.

Love,
Liz

Socrates (In The Form Of A 9-Year-Old) Shows Up In A Suburban Backyard In Washington : NPR
www.npr.org
You don't expect fourth-graders to be wise. They're still boys. But one, who was playing and ruminating on his back patio, had a knack for cosmology seemingly well beyond his years.

via Elizabeth Gilbert’s Facebook Wall

HOORAY! A lovely review!

Dear Ones –

I just wanted to share with you these excerpts from a terrific (and starred!) review in Publisher's Weekly about my new book, "The Signature of All Things."

I'm not going to put the whole review here, because it contains some spoilers (you can google the entirety if you like) but here are some choice bits that made me smile:

"After 13 years as a memoirist, Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) has returned to fiction, and clearly she’s reveling in all its pleasures and possibilities. The Signature of All Things is a big, old-fashioned story that spans continents and a century. It has an omniscient narrator who can deploy (never heavy-handedly) a significant amount of research into the interconnected fields of late 18th- and early 19th-century botany, botanical drawing, spiritual inquiry, exploration, and, eventually, the development of the theory of evolution… In more detail, the story follows Henry’s daughter, Alma. Born in 1800, Alma learns Latin and Greek, understands the natural world, and reads everything in sight. Despite her wealth and education, Alma is a woman, and a plain one at that, two facts that circumscribe her opportunities…. Characters crisscross the world to make money, to learn, and, in Alma’s case, to understand not just science but herself….Alma is a prodigy, but Gilbert doesn’t cheat: her life is unlikely but not impossible, and for readers traveling with Henry from England to the Andes to Philadelphia, and then with Alma from Philadelphia to Tahiti to Holland, there is much pleasure in this unhurried, sympathetic, intelligent novel by an author confident in her material and her form."

HOT DOG! Thank you, PW!

And if any of you dear readers out there would like to pre-order this (ahem) "unhurried, sympathetic and intelligent novel", you made do so right here, my friends:

https://www.elizabethgilbert.com/books/the-signature-of-all-things/

Order today! The book comes out October 1, but, as they say on Game of Thrones, "AUTUMN IS COMING". (Or something like that.)

Huzzah,
Liz

The Signature of All Things | Elizabeth Gilbert – The Official Website | ElizabethGilbert.com
www.elizabethgilbert.com
Indiebound Amazon (USA) Amazon (UK) Bookworld (AU) Barnes & Noble (USA) Amazon Barnes & Noble Apple Kobo

via Elizabeth Gilbert’s Facebook Wall

Thought of the day: THE THINGS YOU'RE MOST AFRAID OF HAVE PROBABLY ALREADY HAPPENED.

My kind and beautiful therapist introduced me to this idea years ago, when I was trying to figure out the source of my weird, nameless, constant anxieties.

I will give you a simple example. Happily married to my loving and good Brazilian husband, I would still (for the first years that we were together) wake up in a panic that we were about to get divorced and ruin each other's lives. Why would I worry about such a thing? Were we fighting? No. Had he threatened to leave me? No. Was I lying to him about something? No. Was doom on the horizon? No — not it any way whatsoever. (Except during my irrational middle-of-the-night episodes of panic.)

So I went in to see my therapist for a tune-up. (You gotta do this every once in a while, when things get extra special freaky.) And she introduced me to this simple idea — that the things we fear most are often the things that have already happened to us. She updated me on this reality: I had already GOTTEN divorced. Many years earlier, in fact. And it was, indeed, the worst thing I'd ever been through. But it was over. Every single thing about it was over — except for my residual fear that I might get divorced. But the divorce had already happened! So I was panicking over something that was totally finished, and terribly unlikely to occur again. Which is sort of like leaving the dentist's office after getting a your wisdom teeth pulled, and then lying awake in dread for months to come, worried that you might have to get you wisdom teeth pulled. It's the one thing you DON'T have to worry about, because it's behind you. Yet we so often carry our worries forward. And like characters in some odd time-bending science fiction tale, we spend our lives trying to prevent the past from happening.

Because here's the thing — we are really slow, as a species, to catching on sometimes that the past is past. And since there is no sense of time in the human subconscious, there is part of us that doesn't always know, when it comes to certain dark traumas: IT'S FINISHED. Sometimes you have to talk to yourself about that fact (gently, lovingly) and explain to yourself the reality of the timeline. Did it already happen to you? Yes. Did you already survive it? Yes. Then try to let yourself go forth in peace. It's over. It sometimes takes so much convincing for us to believe this, but whatever you're most afraid of…? Chances are, it's over.

Try to believe it,

Liz

via Elizabeth Gilbert’s Facebook Wall

EAT PRAY LOVE in Slovenia…

Photos of Elizabeth Gilbert
Hello from Slovenia 🙂

via Elizabeth Gilbert’s Facebook Wall