Elizabeth Gilbert Dissects the "Chick Lit" Label | Big Think

Elizabeth Gilbert Dissects the "Chick Lit" Label

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Elizabeth Gilbert spent most of her early career writing about and for men; now, she’s labeled a “chick lit” writer.

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Elizabeth Gilbert:

Her most recent book is the #1 New York Times Bestselling memoir "Eat, Pray, Love," about the year she spent traveling the world alone after a difficult divorce. Anne Lamott called Eat, Pray, Love "wise, jaunty, human, ethereal, heartbreaking." The book has been a worldwide success, now published in over thirty languages with over 7 million copies in print. It was named by The New York Times as one of the 100 most notable books of 2006, and chosen by Entertainment Weekly as one of the best ten nonfiction books of the year. In 2008, Elizabeth was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, by Time Magazine.

In addition to writing books, Elizabeth has worked steadily as a journalist. Throughout much of the 1990’s she was on staff at SPIN Magazine, where – with humor and pathos – she chronicled diverse individuals and subcultures, covering everything from rodeo's Buckle Bunnies (reprinted in The KGB Bar Reader) to China’s headlong construction of the Three Gorges Dam. In 1999, Elizabeth began working for GQ magazine, where her profiles of extraordinary men – from singers Hank Williams III and Tom Waits (reprinted in The Tom Waits Reader) to quadriplegic athlete Jim Maclaren – earned her three National Magazine Award Nominations, as well as repeated appearances in the “Best American” magazine writing anthologies. She has also written for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, Real Simple, Allure, Travel and Leisure and O, the Oprah Magazine (where her memoir "Eat, Pray, Love" was excerpted in March, 2006.) She has been a contributor to the Public Radio show "This American Life", and -- perhaps most proudly -- has several times shown up at John Hodgman's Little Gray Book Lecture Series, most notably during Lecture Four on the subject "Hints for Public Singing."

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Why did you shift to writing from the female perspective?

Gilbert: It’s funny ‘cause I wrote for and about men for like a solid decade. That’s pretty much all I did. I think I had to work through some issues. And also, fearful, always, of my own vulnerabilities. I think I was intrinsically attracted to, like, flinty, macho people. Wanting to be like that because it’s not, at all, how I am. You know, I kind of magnetize toward people like that. And I was interested in them and… You know, I wrote for SPIN for years and I wrote for GQ for years. They’re both really male focused magazines. And, you know, I wrote a book called the “Last American Man”, that was this big study of a woodsman. And then, my novel “Stern Men” was about a girl but it was a girl in a very manly world, on who behaved in a very manly manner, and who was, herself, sort of tough and macho and flinty. And then, after, really, a solid decade of doing nothing but kind of exhaustively examining masculinity from every possible angle to the point that I even did a story for GQ once where I became a man for a week, like inhabiting it in this really intense and direct way, you know, my life fell apart. And I wrote my way through it with “Eat, Pray, Love”. And then, the book came… this became this big phenomenon. And suddenly, I started hearing myself refer to as a chic lit author which was… was really strange after a decade of, like, really putting in the hour to write about men and think about men and… Back in my 20s, people use to say that I wrote like a man, which I took as a compliment. And now, I’m often referred to as a chic lit writer which I… I’m not even completely certain I know what that means except that I’m pretty certain it is never intended as a compliment, you know. And I… I think it’s strange. I think it’s curious, this whole idea of, like, gender based writing. And I also… I have to say, the whole chic lit thing bugs me because, you know, in our culture at this moment in time, it is women who read. And pretty much exclusively, it is women who read. And there is this kind of denigration of women’s reading which is a pity because they’re the ones holding that whole custom up right now. So it’s odd. And my next book, which is a memoir and a kind of meditation on the subject of marriage is definitely sort of…

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