Needless to say, this is not an easy interview for intermediate students of English to understand, even strong ones. However, students at this level may expect to have to deal with situations in which they have to listen to authentic listening material. In such situations, picking up the main ideas of what is being said and being able to follow the thread of the conversation sound like very realistic tasks.
Self-study activity:
Watch the video and put the topics of the interview in the order in which they are mentioned.
A proud gardener
An heirloom that belonged to her great-grandfather
Elizabeth Gilbert taking up gardening - 1
Fans
Gilbert comparing herself with one of her characters - 5
Her attitude to the success or failure of her latest book
Personal life
The title explained
Thank you. Nice to be here.
So the new book is set in the world of botany.
Yes.
Why botany?
It started with gardening. I, I, you know, I’m a traveler and I had finally settled down and found a house and had a yard. And like all gardeners, I got obsessive about it and realized that that whatever I was gonna write next, it was gonna have to be about plants. And so I started researching a lot of the plants that I was working with and trying to find out their provenance, which is a really fascinating history of discovery and science and trade and betrayal. There’s all sorts of amazing plotlines…
Who knew?
… that run through the plant world and then I came upon this 1784 edition of Captain Cook’s voyages that belonged to my great-grandfather and that I had inherited, and started paging through it and realized that the story of Joseph Banks and the idea of botanical exploration and the age of enlightenment was where it was at. And that little moment in history between the end of the age of enlightenment and the beginning of the industrial revolution was really fascinating planned stuff, and so I decided to set the book there and put a woman into it.
What have you had the most success with in your own garden?
I have an amazing wild flower meadow that I put in my garden to get rid of a lawn. I’m extremely anti-lawn. I feel like lawn is basically green asphalt.
Lawn is over, folks.
It is a dead, you know, golf course lawns and every yard makes me sad. And so I ripped up what had been sort of a golf course lawn and replaced it with a wild flower meadow that has now become quite the butterfly disco. So it’s pretty gorgeous. I’m very proud of it.
And why did you call it The Signature of All Things.
The Signature of All Things is actually a theory that was posited by a rather mad German 16th-century mystic named Jacob Bone, who posited that God had hidden in the design of every plant on Earth a clue as to its usage. So, for instance, sage leaves are good for liver ailments and they’re shaped like liver. Walnuts are good for headaches and if you crack open a walnut it looks like a human brain and he went really kind of ape with this fascination and by the time my characters came around, his theory had been much discredited in lieu of… or had been replaced by a better taxonomy. But I have a character in my book who still believes in that and still searches for the mystical divination of plants, and I just love the idea of that, that notion and the language in it.
Do you have any, any sympathy for a signature of all things in terms of, you know, some kind of divine or spiritual thumbprint?
Oh, my God! Me? Have you, have you read Eat, Pray, Love?
Maybe.
I have a great deal of sympathy for any cocackmamie theory that, that tries to find meaning in randomness. I am all about that. My… I don’t actually resemble my character in that regard. My character is very much an empiricist, she’s every inch a scientist, and it was really kind of an interesting exercise for me to write from the point of view of somebody who can only believe what is proven, because I am susceptible to everything and she is susceptible to nothing except the facts.
The lead character is Alma, in your book is, she’s a woman of means.
Yeah.
And because of that, she can do whatever work she wants. Now, you are now, thanks to your mega jumbotron, I think you can call it, mega jumbo death star, a woman of means, and so, is this why you’ve returned to fiction? Would you care, really if this book didn’t do well?
I think, I think every creative person would care if a book wasn’t or something they had worked on for as many years as I worked on this novel was not well received. But I feel like the skates for me personally on this are very low and that’s mostly because of the fact that I already did the hardest homework assignment of my life. I already wrote the book that came after Eat, Pray, Love. And once that’s done, and that, that spell has been broken and that enchantment has been snapped and everybody can go about their normal business and all expectations are sort of off the table, I am free.
Not very positive about marriage in this book. These marriages don’t all go very well.
Yeah.
Now, you’re a wife now, are you still not a fan of the institution?
I like my marriage, I don’t … I can’t say that I’m, you know, I, I like my… but I do. I like my marriage, but my marriage is very unusual. I’m married to a man who said to me from the very beginning you are young and ambitious and I’m already sort of lived out my ambitions and I want my role in this marriage to be the supportive partner, partner to be your champion while you go out in the world and make your way. And I don’t think that, I think we can all agree that most women don’t necessarily have that experience with matrimony. And, and history has shown again and again and again that marriage is a fantastic deal for men and not always a particularly good deal for women. And I take issue with a lot of the assumptions that we have around it. That said, I, I’m happy in my own. I wish that more marriages were like mine. I, I hope that more marriages over time will become like mine. But I still think that by a large measure, I think women end up sacrificing more.
When you, you encounter fans these days, do you get asked more about eating, praying or loving?
Loving.
Loving. It’s, it’s always loving.
When it’s fans, it’s even more intimate because they come to me with this sort of shorthand where they say, I just broke up with David, you know, you know. Or I just found my Felipe. Or you know like there’s, there’s things in my life that, that, that they can identify with in their own and so, yeah, love I mean I think, you know, the eating is nice, the praying is usually the last thing anybody wants to talk about. But the love is always first, first and foremost in people’s minds.
Liz, thanks so much.
Thank you so much. My pleasure.
Key:
A proud gardener - 3
An heirloom that belonged to her great-grandfather - 2
Elizabeth Gilbert taking up gardening - 1
Fans - 8
Gilbert comparing herself with one of her characters - 5
Her attitude to the success of her latest book - 6
Personal life - 7
The title explained - 4
