Today, My Guest Is Elizabeth Gilbert. Elizabeth Is an author, essayist, short-story writer, and novelist.In 2006, She Wrote Her Landmark memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, Which Spent 199 Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List and Sold Over 10 Million Copie

So I’m not really concerned so much about the subject matter of what people choose to create in their art. I’m concerned about the way they engage with the actual creative process.

So, I went through a lot of pain during my divorce [and] during my depression. Through that pain, I got the inspiration to go on this journey and write this book. When it came time to write the book, I wasn’t fighting with the book. Does that make sense? I was writing about things that had happened to me that were painful, but I wasn’t in war against my creative self.

The best example I can give of this is I recently finished writing my new novel, and I really, really, really enjoyed working on it—even though there’s some really dark stuff in that book. I enjoyed the process of writing the book. I said to a friend of mine—who’s also a novelist—”I’ve never had more pleasure in my life than I had crafting this book for four years of my life.” And he said, “I would never publish a book that I enjoyed writing.” And I said, “Why?” And he said, “I wouldn’t trust that it was any good.”

That’s what I’m fighting against, right? This idea that there’s this distrust of pleasure, distrust of love. I just found that so heartbreaking. I thought, “So, the only thing you trust is your suffering process?” This is somebody who really bangs his head against his writing. And I just thought, “My God, you’re so addicted to this,”—this idea of being the furious, struggling artist that it wouldn’t even occur to you to write something that you loved writing—which means that you’re denying us the product of love when you write your books. And what you’re giving us is just the product of pain.

EG: That clarification is helpful. It leads me to this question I wanted to ask you about your own threshold for fabulosity, if you will—or goodness. I was thinking, here Eat, Pray, Love is such a successful book. You’re in what appears to be in a deep and meaningful marriage relationship. Your threshold for success. You’re going on an eight-city tour with Oprah this fall. I’m wondering if you’ve hit—at any point in time—some type of nourishment barrier, if you will. Like, “Can I really experience this much fabulosity?” How do you do it? Does it challenge you in some way?

EG: I like the idea. No—I completely understand what you mean and I think there’s two things that come to mind to answer that. One is that there was a period around 2008 [to] 2009. Eat, Pray, Love came out in 2006 and it went “sterile” in 2007, 2008. By 2009, I had reached a point where I physically and emotionally could no longer go out in public and be that person for everybody, because I couldn’t replenish my spirit as much as I was giving out.

So I took a break. I stayed home for almost a year and I didn’t even write. I just gardened. I think I needed to get back into the soil in a very—I had to get my hands dirty. I had to be growing things that had nothing to do with books and words. It was really restorative, and at the end of that I was able to write a new book and sort of go back into the world again in a different way.

I’m more careful now in just managing how much of myself I put out there and making sure that I’m refilling that well in the ways that do restore me. So, I haven’t had an experience like that again. That was a pretty—I don’t think I ever will, because that was like Ground Zero of the whole thing.

But I’ll tell you how I ended up processing the whole Eat, Pray, Love fabulosity thing. I realized pretty early on that I wasn’t going to be able to. It was too big. It was just too off-the-charts. Nobody would ever have expected that. I would have never expected it. A movie with Julia Roberts, and all this stuff is—it just got so huge. So, I just got, “You know what, I’m not even going to try to process it. I think I’ll just watch it like it’s a kind of amazing parade that’s going on just outside my house—all day long and all night long. But I’m not going to try to join that parade, because I think I’ll just get swallowed up by it.”

The sense that I had during the whole thing was I was in my house, doing laundry, washing dishes, and looking out the window every once and awhile at this parade that was still going by. And I was like, “Oh my God, that parade is still going by. That is amazing.” Then I would go back to my tasks.

That’s still how I feel about it. I spend most of my life in my own tasks and in my own pace, and every once and a while I look up and I’m like, “Whoa! That carnival is still there.” And then I go back to myself. If that makes sense.

TS: It does. It does seem, though, that you must have a large capacity for pleasure, for success, for financial success—for all of that. That something in your being can be that expansive to allow that.

EG: That’s a good point. I heard that the writer Junot Díaz—who wrote Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, [and] is a tremendous writer—he had an almost ten-year dry spell after his first book that was so beautifully received and so beloved. He said later in an interview, “There was nothing in my life that had prepared me for being loved as much as I was loved after I wrote this book. And it just made me shut down.”

It broke my heart to hear that. I thought it was really honest and searching and sad commentary. He had to do some probably pretty serious spiritual and psychological work to be restored from the love overload—which seems like something that wouldn’t harm somebody. But, of course, we see instances of that happening in people’s lives all the time.

I think I’m blessed enough to sort of feel the opposite—that everything in my life prepared me for that. I’ve had a very nice life. I mean, not everything has worked out—but I’ve known love my whole life. I felt—whatever problems or issues that I’ve had with my family members—I’ve generally just felt like I had been welcomed to this world by my parents. They were not perfect, but they certainly really liked me. They liked having me around. I was not an intruder into their life. That sort of fundamental sense in childhood that I was allowed to be here and I was supposed to be here, and they were happy that I was here. [This is] where you find your footing—I think—in the world.

I think that made it easier for me to accept good fortune. I know it seems so strange to say that you have to learn how to prepare to accept good fortune, there is a sort of absolute value on the scale of human emotion. We live our lives sort of in the middle: huge failures cast our selves into the disappointing darkness of shame, but huge success can blind us too by throwing us too far in the other direction.

I was lucky enough to have enough love in my life that it didn’t poison me. I also think that I was lucky enough that it happened at the right time. Eat, Pray, Love became a giant hit when I was almost 40, not when I was 22. So I didn’t have Miley Cyrus Syndrome. I had already been through enough of life to know by that point who I was and—more importantly—who I wasn’t. It happened when I was in my good, solid, supportive marriage [and] not when I was in my youthful, irresponsible marriage. It happened when I’d already been through years of therapy [and] when I’d already been on my spiritual journey.

So when people say to me, “It must be so crazy. Everything that happened after Eat, Pray, Love,” I always think, “No! All the crazy was before Eat, Pray, Love!” [Laughs.] The good part was after.

TS: OK, Liz, I just have two final questions for you. The first one is: To live in this Big Magic way, with the collaboration with the Mystery, it seems like you have to have a lot of trust—or someone could even say faith. I’m curious to know what you have trust in.

EG: I have trust in the fact that I do not believe we would have been formed or evolved with this capacity for creativity if it’s not something we’re supposed to be doing and [are] allowed to be doing.

I’ve travelled a lot and I’ve been to other cultures where artists are not isolated in the way that they are in the West. Where creativity did not become this strange, twisted, bent, broken house that you live in far away from the rest of society. Instead, it’s something that is really integrated into everybody’s lives. Everybody sings. Everybody dances. Everybody paints. Some people do it better, but it’s not like you’re so singled out at an early age and shunted away.

Which is what I think what happens—a lot of time—in the West. If you have a talent, you’re plucked out or your remove yourself, and you become a kind of capital-S “Special Person.”

There’s a level at which—as much as I love and revere creativity—I can be playful with it, because I sometimes think that we’ve come to think that it’s much more important than it is. I’m sorry to say that. I don’t want to mean it in a diminishing way. The best line I ever heard about this was when I was a journalist and I did an interview with the singer Tom Waits. He said, “You know, artists—we take it so seriously. And we get so freaked out about it, and we think that what we’re doing is so deadly important. But really, as a songwriter, the only thing I do is make jewelry for the inside of people’s minds. That’s it.”

When you reduce it to that, and think that as an artist and a creator all you’re really doing is making pretty jewelry for the inside of people’s brains—somehow it just takes the grandiosity out of it. You just think, “This is what humans do. We make beautiful things.”

We’ve made them forever, and I’m lucky that I get to be part of that long, beautiful tradition. And I don’t want to soil that long, beautiful tradition by going into some sort of narcissistic tailspin where I think that I or my work or my suffering is the most important thing in the world—when really, we’re just jewelry-makers. And we’re allowed to do this. You have every right in the world to make a beautiful thing. Or to try.

Nothing has ever brought me more satisfaction than that. So, I sort of trust that we’re allowed to—that we’re entitled to, and we don’t need to get permission from anybody to do it. It’s engrained in our humanity to be makers, so go make.

TS: And my final question: This interview program is called Insights at the Edge. I’m always curious to know what people’s current “edge” is in terms of their own inner evolution—sort of your own sense, when you look at your life and your path. The edge that you’re on right now.

EG: Oh, wow. For me, it’s interpersonal. It’s always interpersonal. I think I’m sort of moving—hopefully—moving into this new period of my life where I’ll be better at not setting up scenarios in relationships that are inevitably going to turn into resentment, disappointment, and a severing of the friendship.

I’m a really intense person, and I’ve generally created really intense relationships my whole life. Sometimes, those are really satisfying. Sometimes, they can become a little bit crushing over time.

So, I think that—in a weird way—my edge right now is sort of backing off from that edge and learning how to be a little less codependent, a little less enabling, a little less over-involved in the lives of the people that I love—and trusting.

Going back to the question of trust, trusting to sort of sometimes just let the story play itself out without me feeling like I have to be in charge of the story at all times. I think that that will be a great source of peace in times to come for both me and people in my life. I hope. [Laughs.]

TS: I’ve been speaking with Elizabeth Gilbert. Liz, thank you so much for the conversation and for coming to Sounds True’s 2014 Wake Up Festival.

EG: Thank you. I’m really happy. It was fun talking to you and I’m really looking forward to the event.

TS: Liz will be speaking about “Big Magic: Thoughts on Creative Living.” The Wake Up Festival takes place from August 20th–24th in Estes Park, Colorado. Wakeupfestival.com for more information.