This episode was recorded on cameragle Land. Hi guys, and welcome back to another episode of Life on Cut.
I'm Laura, I'm Brittany, and I'm excited.
Well, okay, you might remember we did an episode with Tory Dunlap a couple of months ago. Now, now, she's an incredible money expert, has loads loads of follows on Instagram, and she said, quote unquote on that episode, if you ever get the chance to spend all of the money that you have to see Elizabeth Gilbert live, you should do it. And now let me tell you this, you don't have to spend a single penny because you're going
to get it for free. Right here today, Elizabeth Gilbert is joining us and she is one of the most brilliant authors of our time. She authored Eat, Pray, Love, which sold over twelve million copies and then, as so many of you would know, it was turned into a massive movie starring Julia Roberts.
She's also written.
Books like Committed, Big Magic, and City of Girls. Elizabeth shares so many teachings throughout her books around vulnerability, connectedness, and living a life that is led by love. And now how also to become is what she describes a relaxed woman, which is pushing back on the expectations of what society wants from you.
Liz, Welcome to the pod.
Hi, that's so nice to be here. Thank you. Gosh, that's a really nice thing to hear that somebody thinks you should spend all your money. Better money expert thinks that you.
Should spend She is the biggest money expert female lad money expert. She has the biggest podcast in the world. And she was like, every dollar you have spend it on Liz.
So there you go.
Wow, listen, listen, the return on investment is enormous. On that. It's so lovely to be here with you both. Thank you, thanks for inviting me.
Just to double down on that, we just like ten minutes ago, finished an interview with a psychotherapist in New York who's just written a book on toxic productivity. Her name's isra Here, and we were like, hey, we've got to go. We've got this interview. She's like, who are you interview? We said, oh, this is Gilbert. She goes, no way, She's like in the book that's just released. She's like, I quote Liz in the book. She's like, please tell her.
So you've got a lot of super fans out there.
Oh that's so sweet. Thank you.
Well, now that we've puncturitized up enough, it's time to take the gas out of them. So we did just mention to you that we do accellent and filtered stories, and then I could just see you crumble into the shell of what I think is coming. Liz, Please share your most embarrassing story with us.
Okay, so I will share that. When you asked me this, I immediately had one. But I was like, yeah, that was kind of a cute one. And then I thought of the real one, and I was like, oh, no, I can't. I can't, but we're going to go. I'm going to tell you the real one. So when I was in high school, my best friend Jenny, and she and I are still friends all these years later, we got invited to a party from a girl who was way above our status and who was also in college
and she was home for the summer. And I don't even know how we got invited to this party. We had no business being there. It was cool older kids, and it was outside in a lawn and people were hanging out and drinking. We were trying to act cool, and this is such an awful story. He had brought with her her two roommates from college home who didn't know any of us, and they had just come from the funeral of their best friend who had drowned. This is a great way to start a comedy podcast. So
they were grieving. Those two girls were grieving, and everyone else and they didn't know anyone else at the party, and everyone else was trying to have a good time, and every time a song came on that reminded them of their friend who died, they would start crying. Oh anyway, at one point, we were all sitting in a circle of lawn chairs and there was one empty lawn chair next to them, and somebody walked in and said, is
anybody sitting there? And I said there was somebody. There was somebody sitting there, but she died.
Why did she say, you just forgot?
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know why I said that talk about I don't.
Know why I said that to those two girls whose friend said died. And that was a thing I thought that I thought would be funny. I thought, I think I didn't I don't know. All I know is that they both started to cry.
Was that when your career in comedy ended?
It's like you say it like I watch, It's the worst thing I've ever said. I watched it was like I wanted to reach through my mouth with my arm and grab me by the neck and pull me back into myself like I was like, I can't, why would you? It was just a completely uncensored, unfiltered thought. And then we re Jenny grabbed me and my friend grabbed me, and we ran into the bathroom and she was like
what the fuck did you just why what? She was like she I remember her falling into the bathtub with laughter, like what And I'm like, I don't know. I was screaming. I'm like, I don't know why I said that. I don't know why I said that. And then we had to figure out how to leave, but we had run into the like the party was in the front of the house, so there was no escape other than to walk through the whole thing again with the car. It was that's the most. It's so beyond embarrassing. It's like
the definition of mortifying. Wrong thing to do. I don't even I can't answer for it.
Sometimes something sounds really great, in your head and it just doesn't land. But sometimes words escape and you have no control over it. It was like that was an internal thought and somehow my mouth started moving and it came out of my body.
Well, i'll tell you just to make it this conversation. Fancy and literary Gertrude Stein told a story about how in Paris between the Wars, when all those cool people were all hanging out, they had a friend, an acquaintance who was a Frenchman whose father had been in the
French Foreign Legion and he had been trampled. The man's father had been trampled to death by a camel, and Gertrude Sein said, you would think that you don't bring up camels very much, but every time this guy was in the room, somebody would start talking about animals, stop talking about camels, Stop talking about camels. But they it just happened every single time, Like there's some sort of deadly magnetism that we have towards the most inappropriate thing
that you could possibly say. So it's not just us, it's also fancy literary people and France between the worst.
Well, I hope you've forgiven yourself now, I hope you've gotten too a place where you're okay with the things that you've said in the past. But speaking of the things you've said in the past, the success that you had with Eat Prey Love is something that most authors, well every author can only dream of, Like people can't fathom that level of success, especially on something that's been
written about your own life and your own experiences. Can you tell us a little bit about who you were before that moment, because I have this picture of just like being a struggling author that's just.
Going to every corner of the world to try and write a hit.
What was life like?
What was that before that? I mean, right before that, I was like practically suicidally depressed, you know, total failure, divorced. The love affair I had left my husband for had crashed and burned. I was so full of shame, you know. I was really a wreck, heavily medicated and very lost. So that's what I was right before that. And then I went on that journey and it shored me up and kind of boosted me up, and then he Pray
Love became me Pray Love. But the weird thing for me, like the thing that felt like such a cultural and emotional disconnect that I had to figure out how to kind of absorb is that prior to that, I had been a woman who wrote only about men, and only four men. I wrote for all these big men's magazines back in the nineties, for Spin magazine and Esquire, GQ,
back when magazines were king. I'd written three books. Two of the books I wrote before He Pray Love had the word men in the title, like one was called The Last American Man, and one was called Stern Men that was about lobster fishermen. Like I was known as a woman who was very sympathetic to the male experience, and I never wrote anything about women, and I never
wrote anything about myself. And when I quit my really good job at GQU to go travel the world for a year and sold everything that I had, what I felt like as I was writing that book was this is something I have to do for myself, and nobody is going to want to read this because it was so out of character from what I had been doing.
And I even felt apologetic about it, like I'm sorry I have to write this like super emotional, vulnerable girl thing, but I have to do that in order to save my life, and then suddenly I was catapulted into being like the ultimate chick lit writer and suddenly like a voice of for women. And I was like, whoa, I'm all about women now, okay? Cool. I used to all like be all about masculinity, and now it's all And that was the really wild shift, and then learning how
to how to respectfully hold that space. Because another thing that happened is that even though I wasn't a wealthy author before that, I was an award winning author before that, and I got all the big awards and the big award nominations, the National Book Award nomination and the National Book Critic Circle Award nomination and National magazine awards, all of this stuff because I was writing about men and
so I was considered serious and important. And when I wrote about myself and sold twelve million copies, I've never gotten another award since. Wow, I've instantly lost all my literary legitimacy, you know, and instantly got shunted into like, oh, she's a lady writer for ladies, so nothing important can it possibly be coming out of that mind? And I
would do it again. I would do it again. I would give up all my literary legitimacy in order to have written a book that inspired untold members of women to get divorced, that inspired them to leave jobs that they hated, that inspired them to realize that they didn't have to have children, that inspired them to travel alone. Like that's the award, right, Like that ends up being a thing that is so much more valuable to me.
Those felt like the sort of really startling differences between before and after.
What I think is also so incredible about EP Pray Love and the phenomenon that happened obviously after you published the book. I've heard you speak about how it went to the best seller's list for a little while and then it kind of dropped off and had like the normal trajectory that some of the books that you'd published had had in the past. But Eat Pray Love was before social media, it was before book talk. It was before how some authors now become super viral really really quickly.
But your book had this groundswell. It was like women who had read it and then passed it on to the people that they loved, and then that's how this momentum organically grew from word of mouth. How and what
does it do to you as a person. When something that you've written that's so authentically you, that's based completely on your life, that you've put out into the world, When you know that that many people have resonated with your life experience, when you go from being someone who nobody knows to everyone knows and they also know your deepest heartbreak, your your deepest traumas, how do you reconcile that it's not.
My deepest heartbreak and traumas, it's our deepest heartbreak and traumas, you know, Like that's that's where the reconciliation is. Like, I don't think that it would have had the impact that it had if I wasn't telling a story that so many women recognize themselves.
Of course. Yeah.
And in addition to that acting out, you know, there's a line in the Brain Love where I said, like I didn't want to hurt any feeling, anybody's feelings. I
didn't want to cause me trouble. This is me Like, as I was trying to figure out how to get out of my marriage, I just wanted to run out of the back door of my house and not stop till I got to Greenland, you know, like just run, like to escape this life that was so inauthentic to me, and that I had been taught and told was the ultimate of what a woman wants, which is to get married in her twenties and buy a nice house and have children. And I was about to do that third piece,
and instead I ran for the hills. And the fact that twelve million women read that book makes me know how much we want to run for the hills, like makes me know that that story that we've been sold about what makes women happy must not be true because every like a lot of people want out of like whatever they're in because they wouldn't have identified with it
so much. And so what felt to me like my private shame because I was really young, you know, I was twenty nine when my marriage started falling apart, and my whole orientation in my mind was there's something wrong with me. There's something wrong with me, because I've got everything that you were supposed to get, and I either want to die or run away. And my friend Martha Beck, who's a great teacher and writer, has described how many when she was coming up in psychology and sociology, how
essentially they were being taught how to medicate women. So that women wouldn't run for the hills, Like the question was how much medication do we have to give you so that you will be happy? Because women like me were coming into psychiatric settings and saying like, I have everything that I was told I was supposed to want. I have a husband, I have a house, I have children,
and I want to kill myself. And they were like, well, let's up your dosage of whatever we have to give you, because you're right, you do, you do have everything that you should want. And so I had so much shame about not wanting what I had. And now now I'm sixty five and I'm living like I'm like the patriarchy's nightmare the way I'm living, Like I'm like twice divorced. I'm like a woman who were taught to pity, like twice divorced, widowed, childless, living alone, you know, like I've
given up on my looks. I shaved my head like like I don't care, I'm not even trying anymore, you know, And I'm like, now this is the life, you know, Like, now this is the life like this, and like I wish I could have shown my twenty nine year old self what was coming like wait till you're in your fifties and answering to nobody, and you see how good it gets.
So much of what you said I have lived myself like, I went through a horrific breakup bort Awa, my ticket, moved to Italy for a year, went around the world for three years.
I live alone.
Now I'm thirty seven. I'm constantly fighting whether or not I have kids and settle down and have life, because deep inside, I'm not convinced I still even want it. But the internal battle comes from society telling me that you should want it and you should.
Have it, or you're going to miss out if you don't.
Or you're missing out on something. And I still can't reconcile with.
That within myself.
And I know that I'm not alone.
And everything that you have written has just hit so many women so deeply. Did you get to cast Julia Roberts to play you?
Like?
Do you get to pick who gets Because that's the.
Biggest question, right we all ask our friends at dinner parties if you were ever in a movie, who would.
You cast to play yourself?
Because like, I'd probably choose Julia too.
No, I don't have that kind of power no, here's how it works, ladies. Julia Roberts chooses you right, like, like, I don't have that kind of power. Like that was a phone call that I got one day saying that Julia Roberts wants to make this film and wants to be when I was like, oh, you have my consent. That's how that conversation went.
Watching something that's so precious to you back and being involved in the production of it. Was the movie adaptation what you wanted for yourself? Was it something that you felt deeply proud of in the way that you feel about your own book or were there variations in it that you kind of, I don't know, reflect on and don't feel as though there as a lie?
And how do you see the two projects?
The movie is exactly aligned to the book. They were so incredibly loyal to the book, and that's very rare, I think. And I wasn't involved in the production at all. I've had other instances where things that I've written have sold the film rights, and I learned I'm lucky enough that I learned very early on to just stay out of it because you don't really have any power or control. I mean, they don't even really have. The director doesn't even have all that much power control. It's such a
different art form. Like I get to sit in this exact room that I'm talking to you guys, with my bookshelves and my plants and my and the door shut, and this is where I spend my life doing what I want, you know, like doing what I want and making what I want and creating what I want, all within my own imagination. And then when you sell that thing to have a film made out of it, you're suddenly selling a singular, very intimate art form into a mass,
collaborative hourt form. Like when you look at think the credits rolling up at the end of that film, how many people are involved in making that vision. It's entirely different from the way that I work. And I happen to know that they don't really want me there, you know, like they already have enough, the producers and the director and the actors already have enough people with opinions. Like the last person whose opinion should be there is mine.
So I stay out of it, and I'm like, i'll see you, I'll see it at the premiere, I'll see you on the red carpet. I actually just sold that. Recently, I'd sold the movie rights to City of Girls, and I think the producer was a little shocked because we went to lunch and they were trying to say, will include you, and I'm like, well, you don't need to like it's yours now. You know it's yours now. And when you sell something, I feel like you must let
it go, you know. Just it's like selling a house and then driving by the house every day for five years and being like, they took down the perg a lot. You know, it's not yours anymore. You sold it. And so that was the decision I made with You Pray Love, was to just like it's yours. You guys, do whatever you want. But what they did was so true to the book that it ended up working out really nicely.
Your writing is so deeply personal to you, but it's writing something that you've always had an affinity for. Has it always been something that's been purposeful for you?
Yes? Always. I mean there's never I've been really lucky. There's never been anything else that I wanted to do. And it's been like thirty five years now that it's the only thing I've had to do to make a living. And that's extraordinary and far beyond what I ever could have dreamed. But I was writing the entire time. I always tell people it's not that I When people say, like, when did you start write, I always say, it's not
about the fact that I started. It's about the fact that I never stopped because I grew up with a lot of a lot of your kids are intuitively creative, and all the people that I grew up with when I was kids, we were all doing, we were all writing, we were all singing, we were all dancing, we were all creating. And then as people get older, you know, they drop one art form after another, and I never dropped. I wouldn't drop it. So it's been with me.
Always, LIZI, you've spoken a lot and written a lot about pouring yourself wholeheartedly completely into relationships and giving everything to that relationship, and then, as we know, they hadn't worked out for you a few times.
What do you think you've learned.
From heartbreak and from those experiences, from being in such a relationship like that and putting the pieces back together.
Well, I just want to say I really did the research, y'all, Like I, like I have committed I went out there.
I really did the research out there, all bent to find like the platonic ideal of a romantic love, to find a soulmate, to find perfect love multiple times, you know, and I've tried like every possible kind of combination of ways that you can do it, you know, Like I've been with men, and I've been with women, and I've been in open relationships, and I've been in closed relationships, and I've cheated on people and I've been cheated on.
And I've tried to be with somebody who loved me more than I loved them, and been with people who I loved more than they loved.
Me, you know, like like tried to be with people I didn't really love but liked, and then tried to be with people that I was obsessed with. And I really do feel that I put the years in, you know, like I really put the years away, and.
Some of those I really did. Man, I did the work, so you don't have to. But I guess, you know, we all have to do the work that we have to do. This wonderful thing happened after my second divorce. My mom wrote to my grandmother, who at the time was almost one hundred and said Liz is getting divorced, and must have said Liz is getting divorced and my grandmother.
I was going through my grandmother's things when she died, and I found this note that my grandmother wrote back to my mother that I cherish, and she said maybe Liz just doesn't like being married. And I was like,
you know, Grandmama, I think you're right. I think that maybe all that trying to make it work with like one person after another person, after another person after another person, and just always finding disappointment somehow, always finding heartbreak or disappointment or boredom or ambivalence or shadowedness or devastation, like it might be that after thirty five uninterrupted years of doing that, the universe was like, are you getting the pattern?
Are you starting to notice that maybe you just don't like this? And have you noticed that you really like being by yourself and all of that sort of shatteredness and boredom and ambivalence and trying and striving. When I'm on my own, I don't have any of that, Like I don't.
Have ambivalence about being on my own, and I always have ambivalence about being in a relationship, always like, no matter how passionate I am about the person, there's always a part of me that's like.
But is this the right person, the right time, the right thing, the right way. And because I'm passionate, and because I'm intense, and because I haven't had great boundaries, my answer to ambivalence is to just double down. It's like, well, just pour more of yourself into the like make it work by just pouring even more yourself into this person
until there's really nothing left of me. So I'm starting to get the message that where I seem to really bloom is the way I've been living for the last almost six years, which is single and solitary and emotionally autonomous is the word that I keep using, because all of that energy and emotion that I've poured into the other I suddenly have freed up. It's like it's like a reserver reservoir of like just this massive amount of energy, like this massive amount of energy that I'm pouring now
into my spiritual work, into my creative work. Evert in three books in the last six years, like I used to used to take me four or five years to write one book. But it's because I was shunting and draining so much of myself into creating, sustaining, leaving, managing these intimate sexual and emotional relationships. I feel like I'm
having this tremendous renaissance. I have a friend who wrote a book about menopause and said that in some African culture's menopause is called second childhood because you're not menstruating anymore, you're not sexualized, You're free, you know. That's the feeling that I feel right now is just I'm going to Costa Rica for three months in two days and I don't have to ask anyone I can do that. It's like I don't have to I don't have to run
it by anybody. I'm just like, oh, well, you know, people invite me to thing and I'm like yeah or no, Like there's none of this negotiating, Like it's this so emotional autonomy is what I think the second half of my life is going to be all about. And I think there's a blossoping happening that feels more ecstatically alive than anything I've experienced yet.
The way you just sell the fact that, like you're so comfortable in your own skin and in your own company it's such a beautiful thing that I don't think a lot of people ever get to truly experience.
Well, traditionally, women have never gotten to experience it. Women's jobs throughout history, in all traditional societies, which is all societies, have been jobs of service. And it's chilling. And I knew this when I wrote the book Committed, and I got married again anyway, and I don't regret it because I love the twelve years that I spent with my Brazilian husband. I loved those years, and then it was
time to move on. But I did this research when I wrote the book Committed, because I had such ambivalents about marriage. And it's devastating to see the statistics what marriage does to women. You know, there's not a single sociological data point at which married women do not fall so far below unmarried women. Married women don't live as long as single women. They're more likely to report being
depressed and anxious. They're more heavily medicated on average, they weigh ten pounds more, they have more autoimmune diseases, they have more addiction. They're more likely to dive suicide or homicide. Most likely person to kill them being their partner, like it's so freaking grim. And it's because we pour our life, our actual life force into the people that we love.
It may be from just having all this estrogen that tells you to nurture, but it's like the job of women like biologically and traditionally has been empty into you, know, like, out of your body will come life. From your breasts will come milk. From your hands will come food for the entire family. From your heart will come the love that nourishes everyone. And deplete yourself and just be depleted into love. Right. And on the other hand, married men fucking thrive. It is the best idea that a man
can have to marry a woman. They will live on average seven to ten years longer than single men. All the opposite things will happen. They are healthier, they are less likely to suffer from addiction, they take care of their health better. They're more likely to hold property. Married women much less likely to hold money and property than single women. Like it's incredible the benefit it's called the marriage benefit and balance about how much more strongly a
marriage benefits men than women. And yet culture because it's opposite day into women like as though they are like fois gras Geese force these women this story that without this union you are incomplete, when in fact be wary.
I think it's taken me fifty five years and two marriages and many many more relationships and watching myself again and again and again deplete, deplete, deplete into the other and see them shine and rise because I'm uplifting them and I'm supporting them, and I'm encouraging them, and I'm
loving them. The really big important question to ask in any relationship is who in this relationship is doing the traditional work of the woman, And that includes emotional work like who is the one nourishing, encouraging, uplifting, sacrificing, tending, nurturing, and what is the cost to the one who is
doing that. My friend Mark Beck was telling me about this sociological debta that says the happiest people in culture of married men right at at the top, right underneath that unmarried women, right underneath that single men, right underneath that married women lowest, lowest, right. So like to know that that's true and then to see every fucking romantic come in the world, be like, the messaging is completely
opposite to the reality. And I think that's why so many women in relationships feel crazy because they're like, wait, I was told that reality was this, But what I'm experiencing in my body and in my life and in my bank account and in my energy and in my moods and in my mind is the opposite of what I was told, So I must be crazy, like I just I mean, I remember going to couple's therapy with my first husband and him saying to the therapist, were here because my wife is going crazy?
Oh wow, Can I just ask that daughta that you were just saying, is that linked solely to marriage or marriage with kids?
Only's marriage way worse.
I'm going to say, the kids haven't even entered the chat yet.
How great.
It's even worse now that I get to be the crone.
I feel like I get to walk around and share illegal knowledge with young women and be like just so you know, like look at the data, you know, and.
It's it's so interesting to me because I had a very similar conversation not with the data points by any means, with my mother in law recently. My mother in law, she lives with us, She's completely single and has been for the better part of fifteen years, and everyone always says like, but maybe you'll meet someone, or maybe you'll you'll be with someone again, Like, aren't you lonely? Don't
you want the companionship? All of these tropes that we kind of expect you get from a relationship, or the expectation that you can't be possibly happy being completely single and on your own, because it must equate to loneliness. And she said, I have never been more unhappy than when I was in relationships. And I don't trust myself to make good relationship choices and not commit everything to that.
She's like, and I just love being a grandma, and I love having my friends, and I love having my time. She's like, and people cannot comprehend that that is a possibility. She's like, people cannot comprehend that I am not lonely.
They won't let you have it. It's interesting when she said I've never been lonelier. I could tell you the loneliest I've ever felt, and it was sleeping three inches away from somebody. And it's happened multiple times in my life. It hasn't happened all the time. It's not like every relationship left me lonely, but like there was there have been a couple of relationships that I was in. Two can be lonelier than one. You know where I was so lonely. I was so lonely inside that relationship that
I remember in one case, my body. What happened in all these cases is that my body, because bodies can't lie, Like, you can't sell a story to your body. You can't. It knows truth that your mind is trying to gaslate itself around. Right. My mind was like, I should be happy, I should be grateful, I should be this, I should be that. And my body was like, I can't live in this house. I can't live with this person anymore.
And then the relationship I was in where I experienced such loneliness, I remember waking up in his bed and I remember hearing. If my body could speak, what it said was, if you don't get me out of this, this is not a place for us. We should not be here. This is not safe, this is not I loved, this is not warm, like we're not being seen, we're
not being met. And if you don't get me out of here, I'm going you either leave or I'm jumping out that window, like I will jump us out that window to get you out of here because this is not okay. But the emotional autonomy that I feel now is less about I don't even want to frame it where it's like I'm happy because I'm not with someone, because that still includes them in the story.
Yeah, you know what I mean.
Like to even talk about not having a partner makes the story about me not having a partner. And what is actually happening in the ecosystem of my spiritual life and my physical life and my emotional life is a garden is blooming. You know, That's what's actually happening. It's not about who isn't here, It's about what is here.
You have this beautiful friendship for fifteen years with a woman named Raya, and you ended up falling in love before she very sadly passed away. How did you guys find each other? And how did you know that this was your person? Why was it different to any other relationship you'd had before?
Raya was so extraordinary. She it took so long for us to become what we became, which is the very opposite of all my other relationships, which tend to be like very fiery and fast and you know, and immediate. But we were friends. We were acquaintances, and then we were friends, and then she moved to my small town and we became neighbors, and then we became best friends.
And all this was happening while I was married in my really contented second marriage, and then gradually we became something that we didn't even have a word for anymore, because we would say, like, Liz is She would say, Liz is my person. You know, Ray is my person.
And what we weren't saying was this is the love of my life, because it would have been extremely inconvenient to say that, because it would have meant like, now lives have to be flipped again, you know, like and chaos has to enter, and you know, contrasts and relationships have to end, and you know, every There was just no way. And we both loved each other too much to do that, I think, to ever put the real name on it, and we loved we both loved my husband too much to do that, like all of us
would just we didn't want anything to change. But I feel like I always say that after like thirty five, I think every woman can write a memoir with the same title, and that same title is not exactly what I had in mind, or an alternative title is everything changed, you know? And then everything changed, and that's the nature of reality. Is not exactly what I had in mind,
and then everything changed. What I loved about her, and I loved talking about this because she was, when she was at her best, the most fearlessly honest person I've ever met, And it was so exciting for me to
be around her honesty. He would stale her ships straight into the teeth of the gale if there was if there was any conflict, if she sensed that there was something that was being withheld, if she sensed that somebody was having a problem with her, like she'd go right into it, like she would shoot herself right into the person like an arrow. And she used to say, like, the sooner we put this on the table and look at it, the sooner we can fix it. So like,
just what is it? What is actually going on? Like Raya at her memorial service, a friend of ours said, she didn't want your fake self. She wouldn't let you have your fake self. She could smell it from like three blocks away and she could read it, and she was like, dishonesty is happening right now? What is it? And she was one of the only people I've ever met in my life who actually meant it when she
said I would rather hear the truth. That's a dangerous thing to say, because you might hear the truth and you might not like it. But she meant it, and she could handle it so beautifully. There was a fortitude in her, in the honesty and truth that I've learned so much from and that I aspire to be, even though I'm much more frightened of the truth than she is.
Was powerful and incredible. And then she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer, and they gave her six months to live, and it was no longer possible for any of us, I mean, not her, not me or my ex husband to anymore pretend that she and I didn't love each other and so we needed to go be together.
What impact did it have on you? And I love the way that you speak about her having this truth teller in your life. When you, I mean, I've heard you describe yourself as a people pleaser and someone who kind of wanted that affirmation from other people that you're doing a good job. You know that you're almost being
a good girl. What impact does it have on you having someone in your life who is so unapologetically a truth teller when you are on the opposite of that spectrum and you're a people pleaser.
I mean, that's why she was sent to me, and I was sent to her because she was so frightened of creativity and I'm not and I'm scared of people and she isn't. I say all this in the present tense because people, I don't know. We're still in relationship. You know, she didn't happen to be here in a body,
but we're still in relationship. And that was you know, that was what we brought to each other, was that I was able to fortify her and show her how to be really fearless and courageous with expression and with vulnerability, and with creativity and with daring to do something even if you might fail, Like that stuff is so easy for me, Like it's easy for me to do and being honest and directive people was easy for her. What was hard for her was easy for me, and vice versa.
But before she died, she said, I refuse to leave. I'm not going to leave until we're both ready, and I'm not going to leave until I see you standing on your own two feet in every circumstance in your life. That's what I want for you. And I wasn't ready for her to go because I wasn't sure that I
could do that. But the impact has been and I'll add a caveat too, as I came to no Raya, and I saw her toward the end of her life, and I saw more of her frailty and her humanity, and I saw the places where she was dishonest, you know, with her off in others, and you know, the pedestalization that I am so often guilty of of, you know, just really thinking that somebody's this perfected being who's got
all the answers, which never is true. One of the legacies I've been left with, and what I've been hearing in meditation sometimes is you have the opportunity now to become what you always thought she was, because she wasn't necessarily always what I thought she was, But that same value of radical courageous honesty, I can now embody that and make that like a singularly important characteristic of my own existence. I have the opportunity to do that. Now.
You mentioned that it took her terminal diagnosis for you both to recognize the love that you have for each other, like truly, honestly openly recognize the love and want to be together. What do you think the messaging and the takeaway there is, because I feel like there's a really powerful message in that.
Oh. I just honestly the word that just drifted into my mind was innocence, you know, because I think it would be tempting to say, like, don't wait, you know, till somebody is dying, to tell them your true feelings, you know, don't squander Like so much of my life I've made really big, bold, radical decisions because of this anxiety about not wanting to waste or squander my life or miss the opportunity. And it would certainly be tempting
to have that be the takeaway here. But the takeaway for me having gone through that extremely painful experience was how terribly innocent we all are. It was such a good guess for all of us, and I say all of us, all three of us, to try to preserve what we cherished for all those years, you know, I mean I was in love with Rea for so many years, and I loved my husband, and it was such an honorable thing that we were trying to do, you know, like let's not create chaos, and like let's not dishonor
the vows we make to people that we love. Like there are times where I would vaguely allow myself to have the thought like I'm in love with Raya when I was married, and then I would just I would put it away. But I don't want to criticize myself for that because the thought I had was, well, then love her, you know, well, then then love her. That's it. Just just love her. You don't have to do anything
about it. But then life presents all of us with these none of us get to move through this curriculum of life without these like terrible dilemmas.
I also think it hugely oversimplifies because I think it is so easy to say, well, if that's the way you feel, like, run after those feelings. But an entire life can't be lived off impulses. Not everything that you do in life can be off the back of a surge of feelings because you want to do the opposite. You know there are and I'm not saying that you should deny those feelings if they're screaming at you for
a long time. But I think if we will always just driven by the feelings that we have, we would probably be also very conflicted around what it is that
we want and how we feel in life. Something that you touched on, and I know it's been something that you have spoken about, is that Raya, prior to your meeting, she was an addict, and then when she was going through her treatment for cancer, part of that was opioid prescriptions for the pain medication, which was obviously something that can be very triggering for someone who has addiction issues.
What was it like discovering a different side of a person when they aren't the person that you fell in love with.
Yeah, you know, it was pretty shocking. It was pretty shocking because Raya was the person who I trusted more than anyone I've ever trusted in my entire life. The feeling that I would have somatically for years whenever Raya walked into the room, was I'm safe, Raya is here, you know, Like that's how my body registered her. That was the non lie that my body told is now
we're safe, Like this is our safe person. And to watch as the person who I experienced as being the safest person in the world devolve into a raging and I use that word in all definitions, a raging junkie very quickly and to descend. You know, I had never known Raya when she was a speedball heroin and cocaine addict. I'd heard stories, and the stories were amazing, but they were kind of like the heroic stories of I survived
this thing. It wasn't the true ugliness of what that actually looks like and what it does to a person's spirit and what it does to a person's personality. I remember her her nephew during the time that she was using at the end of her life, saying, I wish she was a nicer drug addict, because some are nice, some are just sort of nice and tragic, because she was not a nice drug adct. She was a mean drug addict, and she was a narcissistic drug addict, and
she was a cruel and demanding drug addict. And adding to that the immediacy and the death that she was facing, which eroded her in so many ways, but it also empowered her with a case of what I now know in the rooms of twelve Step they call like a massive case of the fuckets, Like she got a really big case of the fuckets, and nobody could blame her because she was facing a few months left to live.
So there was an element at which we were all like, well, look go for it, like ride the dragon one more time? Who cares? Like you know you're dying anyway. But then she didn't die. She ended up living like a year longer than anybody had expected, and a year as a rage. Like it was a nightmare. You know. In the Zen tradition, they say, I got a back up and look at the sort of spiritual view of this, They say, like going back to this idea of not exactly what I
had in mind. And then things changed, And the Zen say, first they pulled the rug out from under you, and then they pull the floor out from under the rug, and then they pull the ground out from under the floor, and now you're ready to begin. Now you're ready to
begin your spiritual journey. There's a whole ground under your feet, right, And that was the feeling was I had expected to lose her to death, but I had not expected to experience her addiction and to lose her before I lost her to the nightmare that is addiction and It was one of the most shattering things I've ever been through. I mean, it took years for me to recover from that.
That's it's pretty powerful to say you lost her before you lost her, And I guess that's what addiction is is, right, like you're already mourning someone the person that you know before they leave. That actually turns everything we're ever taught on its head as well. Like we're taught when you get unwell to live the healthiest, best life you possibly can. And you hear all these people that do that, they don't go down the holistic path and they're getting the
treatments and it doesn't work. And here Rayer is fuck it, going to go hardcore on the drugs and she doesn't die like she she continues to extend her life.
And I wonder if that's got.
Something to do.
It's insane, Like it's insane. It goes against everything we've ever been told.
I mean, I remember the doctor at one point saying like I don't know how she is alive and not just alive, but like alive and being a motherfucker like alive and being like a problem, you know, like alive and like like a problem to everybody, and and he's
I'm like, welcome to my world. Like, I don't know how she's still He's like, how can someone survive on a diet of whiskey, cocaine, opioids, candy, beer, and cigarettes was essentially what she was eating, you know, And like, but I think what she was surviving on was I'm going to do it my way, which I actually sort of also love that she was like, no, you're not going to give me a green juice it that way.
I mean, that's not how Ray lived, you know. So there was something that was kind of epic about it, even it was as it was happening, except for that it turned into a disaster for me because you know, I was having to try to manage an unmanageable, dangerous, exploitative sort of psychopath. Was what it felt like. Suddenly, if there's ever been a lesson in like things will change, you know, like we all just long to create these lives where you can be anchored in your life and grounded.
And I feel like, I don't know, my curriculum here in Earth school is like I get grounded. I'm like, oh, I'm doing this really well. Yeah, I figured out and then the ground changes and the planets flipped, the sun explodes, and it's like, I don't know how to live in this world. You know, I figured out how to live in that world, and I think that's just maybe what life on Earth is.
You've written so much about loss in relationships, you know, about divorce, about the untethering of two humans. But what was this experience and learning about loss but through grief, about through actually losing someone tangibly they're not here anymore? What does that taught you about grief and loss?
So humbling? I mean, I will say this, I don't know that grief can be done right. I have a friend right now who just had a terrible sudden loss in her family, and she called me and she said, I just want the syllabus, Like tell me what I have to read, Like, tell me what podcasts I have to listen to, tell me what Ted talk I have to watch, so that I I mean, essentially, so that I don't have to feel what I'm feeling, you know, don't like, what do I have to do and not
go to the bottom of hell? Are there any hammocks along the way where I can take or breather and my experience with grief is that the bad news seems to be that you have to go to the bottom of hell. The good news seems to be that there is a bottom, you know. I mean, that's what Dante's
Inferno teaches us. It's like, you keep going down, and you keep going down, and you keep going down, and it can't possibly get worse, and then it gets worse, and it gets worse and it gets worse, and in the end, you know, he comes out of hell by going through the lake at the bottom of the hell that is in the center of Satan's heart, like the middle of the worst thing. And it's such an easy cliche to say that the only way out is through,
but the only way out is through it. And I think, I'm I've spent my life trying to find other ways out. Surely there's got to be another There's got to be some sort of tack that I can figure out so that I don't have to experience grief at this level. And I had to experience grief at the deepest, deepest level,
and it was so humbling. But my friend Gigi, who is actually Raya's ex wife and a beloved friend, taught me this phrase and She called it a bow down moment, and she's like, when the waves of grief come, because they come in waves, surrender immediately to it, like, don't try to evade it. You can't. It's like a tidal wave is coming. You get under it, like get under it. And the way you get under it is that you literally get on the ground. We also called it starfishing.
You get on the ground, on your face, with your limbs out as low as you can get, and you just bow down before the god of grief and you let it take you. And you just let it and you just sob and you wail and you clean, and you don't resist because the resistance actually just makes it worse.
And the really weird thing about the nature of grief is that you think, you're like, I'm not going to be able to survive, how hard I'm feeling this, And then twenty minutes passes, maybe, and the sobbing diminishes, and then you're like, I need to go to bathroom, bell like I need to get a glass of water, I have to have a sandwich. Like something changes, it moves through you, and then you have to stand up and
go about your life until the next one. Comes. And I think I've heard a beautiful description of depression, that depression is the refusal to grieve. What depression is is like I will shut down rather than feel these terrible, terrible, terrible feelings. But I actually want to find this quote. I just sent this to my friend by a fella named Stephen Jenkinson who wrote a book called Grief Walker, and he said, grief is not a feeling. Grief is
a skill. And the twin of grief as a skill of life is the skill of being able to praise or love life, which means wherever you find one authentically done, the other is close at hand. Depression is I won't grieve, and I also won't live. I will control the wild ride by not allowing myself to be fully human. And I think that I didn't experience depression after Raya died.
I've experienced depression in my life. I experienced nassid grief like level ten grief, but I didn't experience depression because I experienced grief.
Well, this might be an unusual question, but going off what you've described that last sort of year of Ray's life in your relationship, was there also a complicated level of relief that came. I don't want to cause any offense by that, but I imagine you would have wanted her to live forever. But the state she was in, with the addiction and what was happening, it doesn't sound like your relationship was quite where it should have been anyway.
Was there sort of a level of relief that was mixed in with the grief?
One hundred percent. Yeah, I want to take you out of the awkwardness of feeling like, no, it wasn't even a complicated amount of grief. And I say that openly in order to normalize when people have that feeling. I mean people who have dealt with even people who are in addicts, people who have been caregivers and caretakers of people who are dying long, painful, extended deaths where there
is a feeling of caregiver fatigue and caregiver overwhelmed. Where there does you do reach this moment where you're like, if this person doesn't die soon, I am going to die soon. I can't keep going at this pace and giving it this pace. And people always feel guilty about saying that they were relieved, and they always want to couch it by saying, well, I'm just relieved because their
suffering is over and they're in a better place. Dude, your suffering is also over and you are going to be you know, like And it doesn't mean that grief won't follow that feeling of relief, but that's one of the ingredients, is relief, like you've been freed by this person's death. If it was a long, painful, agonizing called death, often that is the case. That doesn't make you a monster.
I do want to go back to asking one question. We mentioned it, but then I don't think you gave closure to it completely. You said that Raya had said that she didn't want to leave until you were able to stand on your own two feet. You had this chance of embodying all the things that you saw in her or that you thought that she was in yourself.
Do you feel as though you have achieved that?
You know, I'll work backwards from it. I feel as though she has left, like when I said before, like we're still in a relationship. I feel her less now than I have ever felt her. And at times that's disturbing because when she in the year or two after she died, especially, she was so present, like she was as present as you are right now, like we could. She was so present and it wasn't just for me. I mean, she was such a vivid person. And the thing about really vivid people is that I think their
vividness remains for a long time after they're gone. But like, she was here, you know, she was here, and she was inside my head and she was we were in constant dialogue. I turned to her for guidance, you know, I would say, like, don't go. Don't you dare, Like, don't you dare, like vaporize off into the cosmos and become music and leave me here with all these motherfucking assholes on this dying planet to figure this shit out. Like I need you. You can't you like, like don't
you don't get to go? You know, And also you owe me because you were such an asshole for the last six months of your life, Like you better stick around and help me. I need your assistance, like and she did, you know, Like I felt like she really honored that and that she was here, and certainly, like in the last year, I can't find her, you know, like I can't. I can't feel her and I can't
find her. And actually I'm really grateful that we had this conversation because you reminding me like us going on this threat that we've gone on. It's sort of my own answer of like, oh, she said, I'm not going to leave until I see you standing on your own two feet in every circumstance of your life is left. I must be standing on my own two feet in every circumstance of my life. That's so nice.
She'd be really proud of yourself.
I think so too.
That's a nice realization.
Yeah, because it is really beautiful.
But you recently have gone through a bit of a life change. You've shaved your head, You've given up the fellers, the injectables, the botox, You're going to Costa Rica for a couple of months.
What's that about?
What has changed in your life to get you to this point.
I've been wanting to shave my head for decades. It's a fantasy that I've had for such a long time, and I always think about it. I also just want to make really clear, like I like didn't have the greatest hair, Like honestly, I'm vain enough that had I been gifted with the hair that I felt I deserved in life, that had I been given a forgeous main no hair. I doubt that I would have been quite so like fuck it, you know, I'm just going to
shave it. So it's I always had difficult hair and problematic hair, so so part of it is just the relief of not wanting to deal with that anymore. But tons of stuff in my face there for about ten years, I did like really good, you know, pretty good. One bad case of botox, but for the most part, like
you know, I was. I was doing it well enough that I looked good and I looked pretty, and it seemed to be very important that I look pretty, and it seemed to be very important that I stay looking pretty. And I remember when my last book came out with The New York Times did a profile of me, and the woman said, like, you know, Gilbert is whatever age I was forty eight, she's forty eight, but she looks
ten years younger than she is. And I remember feeling that to be like a trophy victory, you know, It's like I want to meddle. The New York Times said I looked ten years younger than I am, and that seemed to be extremely important. And also as a public figure, I was like, I'm going to be people are going to be looking at me. I'm on TV a lot
like I can't have these lines. Though that all seemed that all seemed very, very very true, and it also felt very true that I felt better when I looked better, and so it felt like it was an act of self care. So I don't want to demean anybody who's doing those things or for whom those things feel true. But something shifted in the last couple of years where that just doesn't seem true anymore. All of those things
just don't feel true. And part of it was that I spent a week traveling actually across Costa Rica with a woman in her eighties who is a great hero of mine. And actually I took a road trip with three eighty year olds and it was amazing. I was like, I'll be your tour guide in Costa Rica. I'll be your driver. I've got the jeep, you know, like, let's go. And they're all amazing people. And none of them have done any work on themselves physically, I mean what we
define is like cosmetic work. And they were all so gorgeous and I was walking The wild thing is I was walking down the street in Nosara, Costa Rica with these two women, one Argentinian, this eighty four year old and this eighty three year old, both incredibly spiritual beings, incredibly creative beings with passionate, beautiful, amazing women. And we were walking side by side, and the man walked by
us and said, are you sisters? And I was fifty fifty four and they were eighty four, and I said yes, and I was never did I feel so honored that somebody thought that they were my sisters. And they have white, like full on white hair covered with wrinkles, and being in their presence was an awakening where I just thought, like, it's a funny thing to be afraid of getting older or looking old. That's a funny thing to be afraid of. It suddenly became like no, like literally, why is that scary?
Why is it scary to look at your face and see line? Like why did I experience is that for so many years as frightful? Like that seems like a weird thing to be frightened up? And I just lost my fear, Like I lost my fear, and you know, like I look when I shaved my head and stopped doing bowtops, I instantly looked I looked ten years older than I looked three years ago. But I find that I don't care, and I actually find that not to
get like Tou wou. But my higher power, what I choose to call God, has said to me, it's extremely important that you don't do those things. Like I've heard this in meditation now, it's extremely important that you don't do those things. And it's extremely important that you go out in public on TV with no makeup and lines in your face and no hair. We really need you
to do that. And it's extremely important for you that you look in the mirror and look at what you look like, and that you that this is what fifty five looks like. And I accept and believe. But that's extremely important. So that's my that's my vibe.
Well, we've even seen, like even just recently, the level of media attention that Pamela Anderson has received just because she decided to stop wearing makeup so brave. It's insanity the fact that we as a society are so shocked to see a woman turn up as her natural self with no makeup and no botox.
It takes so much work to unpick those values. It's a lifetime of values that we have been conditioned to believe that. And I know it's a sliding scale, like some people place more value on it than others. But I think all of us as women have this feeling of like, well, we will be more liked, we will be more loved, we will be more pleasant, we will be more accepted successful the better we look, you know.
And it's and that condition.
You are not wrong.
Unpicking it is yeah, I mean you know it shouldn't be something that you're like, Wow, you should be so proud of yourself, but really you should. People don't get to that place of being able to unpick those society values.
Yeah, you're not wrong. All of those things that you said are true. Like the prettier you are and the lighter your hair color is and the smoother your skin is, the more you will be approved of. It is true. And I don't get a shit. You are the best, Okay, I don't care. I deeply approve of myself these days.
Liz, you have incredible perspective in life and I have loved so deeply speaking to you. For everybody who's listening to this, who is based in here in Australia, most about listeners are you're coming out here soon?
What does that look like for you?
How can people hear more, read more.
And get as much Liz as they could possibly have?
Oh that's so sweet. If you go to my website, you can see my tourist schedule for coming to Australia and New Zealand in February and so making a bunch of stops and a bunch of cities I actually have. I used to go to Australia all the time, like every year for a really long time because my ex husband's kids lived there, still live there, and I've spent a ton of time in Australia. But the last time I was in Australia was right before the pandemic. And I mean right before the pandemic. I mean I was.
I was on Bondi Beach in an Airbnb and I jumped in a cab and went to the airport without even a plane ticket and was like, I got to get home because the President said they're closing the borders right before the pandemic. So I'm excited to come back in a slightly less frantic way. But the really cool thing is I'm going to be teaching. There's a creativity workshop that I teach that I've taught for years all over the world. And don't be frightened of the word creativity.
It's not. You don't have to be a quote unquote creative person to come. It's really about teaching everything that I've learned about what I call creative living, which is not so much about what you produce, but about how you live and a style of living that is based more on curiosity than fear. Anyway, I'm going to be teaching my creativity workshop in Sydney. It's the I've never taught it in Australia or New Zealand before, so that's exciting.
So come to that. But then I'll also be giving talks where we tell stories and I take Q and A from the audience, and it's going to be lovely. It's always it's always lovely, and it's always better if you're there.
So come, say, go and spend all your money and make sure that you go and see it.
Well, I think we'll spend our money and come and see you as well. Thanks so much, Lias, Thank you for thank you. Yes, well we leave in Bondai, so if you want to ride back, we'll have a coffee in Budai.
We will have it. It'll be really nice to catch up.
You are both really lovely and brilliant and delightful to talk to, and this time has passed so swiftly and easily being with you. So thank you for just being as great as you are. Kaberam kamaboo.