At the end of January, a much younger friend told me how much she enjoyed Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert. My friend loves to paint and found inspiration to keep painting even if her life feels overwhelmed with grad school and a full-time job. It doesn’t matter how good she is, or what may come of it. All that matters is that she paints.
Having just completed the final (maybe?) draft of a memoir I’ve spent ten years writing, I needed inspiration for what comes next. I downloaded the audiobook and succumbed to Gilbert’s exuberance for creative living of any kind, whether it be creating art, crafting gifts, canning vegetables, or cruising thrift shops. Gilbert does all the talking, but you’ll be having a conversation with her in your head as she anticipates your questions, fears, denials, complaints, and hopes for your own creative life. She scolds and encourages, uplifts and sets you straight. (You don’t need an MFA to be a writer.)
I’d never heard of Elizabeth Gilbert before the publication of her memoir Eat, Pray, Love. Whether you loved it or hated it or have never read it, you might be surprised or inspired by the story in Big Magic of Gilbert’s lengthy apprenticeship—the years she toiled as a writer, honing her craft, working at various day jobs, and dealing with rejection before EPL took the bestseller lists by storm—and how and why she kept going without much early success.
At age seventy, I can say that a book like this might have encouraged me to keep writing back in my early thirties, when making a living and becoming a parent seemed to be more important commitments. How much farther ahead in my craft would I be now, if I’d kept writing then? How many more ideas might have found me? Chosen me to be their “willing human partner”?
Because this is what Gilbert believes: “When an idea thinks it has found somebody—say you—who might be able to bring it into the world, the idea will pay you a visit.” And then you have two choices.
This is the Big Magic of the title.
I think back to the many ideas that paid me a visit over the past decades. The many times I said, “No, take it to someone else.” And how some of those ideas did find other willing partners. (Gilbert tells the story of an idea for a novel that she found and then lost, an idea that went on to find a willing partner in Ann Patchett.)
I have no time for regret, but I do have time to say “Yes” to a few more ideas, should I be fortunate enough for them to find me.
— Laura Wershler's creative nonfiction is anthologized in You Look Good for Your Age, Wonder Shift, and Musings on Perimenopause and Menopause, which she also co-edited. “To Whom It May Concern” distills key elements of a completed memoir about Erna and Laura’s excellent (and harrowing) adventure into deep old age.
You can find Laura Wershler’s story "To Whom it May Concern" in Issue 299 Spring 2024. Order the issue now:
