Wow! I never expected to open Oldster and find Elizabeth Gilbert here, too. (She's everywhere this month as her newest book launches--NY Times, New Yorker, Brevity Blog.) But why not here on Oldster, when she and her story are the perfect fit? Brutally honest. As if it took a lifetime for both interviewer and interviewee to get to this meant-to-be moment and we are the eavesdroppers who get to bear witness. Way to go, Sari! Gobsmacked over here.
So grateful to read that questionnaire from December 2023, when I wasn't on Oldster yet. And Elizabeth's TED talk. Truly, you and she are kindred spirits. Thank you for those links.
I sometimes have a problem reading Liz Gilbert (it's me, not her) but this is one of the best things by her I've ever read. Definitely one of the most inspiring. Thank you.
It is all a heart-breaking story. Being in recovery ends eventually and life can be worthwhile and joyful without addiction. With respect for others' battles, I have a thought as a former group worker in an addiction treatment centre in Amsterdam during the seventies/early eighties. I wonder why the twelve step program is allowed to take all the air in the rooms of treatment modalities, as it contains two principles that defeat its stated aim of beating an addiction: 1. a life-long identification with addiction as the organizing factor of a life, and 2. submitting to something else outside of the person—a power or a spiritual entity—for help with beating an addiction. The reason for that is probably because this self-help movement doesn't cost an arm and a leg—basically is free. The developmental view of addiction has a different focus and teaches to those myred in an addiction, to address the issues and catch-up on their unfinished development in life, and so, become a competent person who sheds their past ineffective patterns of behaviour (and moves away from their identity of an addict). The cognitive-behavioural view sees the unaddressed traumas in childhood as a factor if not the cause, which also indicates the remedy. The experiences in childhood may have led to emotional incompetence and self-defeating behaviors, and a lack of life skills through a poor match with their parent's capacities (or a parental absence), which factors kept the person as an adult repeating their ineffective patterns. The compulsion for seeking immediate gratification of their desires and impulses—regardless of what those are—is the basic premise of addiction. Postponing that gratification "one day at the time" is a good principle to start with, but only catching up with one's lack in the needed capacities will sustain that sobriety in the long run. In effect, one has to be their own parent and re-parent oneself, ideally with the help of a competent professional staff in a treatment centre based on group support, which can bring the required safety and support during an extended time frame of at least eight to ten months to learn the basics. It's a tough road but it can be done. The stats of the Parkway treatment centre in Amsterdam (a therapeutic community of the Jellinek Centre) showed a 65% successrate of people ditching their addiction to heroin (and to alcohol and other drugs) and still clean after two years of sustained sobriety on their own. As heroin addiction among the Dutch youth disappeared and government-funded treatment facilities of all kinds closed in the eighties, and no pharma industry was allowd to dump their opiates in the Netherlands, there still is no grand-scale addiction to opiates there. It seems to me that an AA or similar self-help group is vastly underqualified to provide that needed level of support. I am sorry Gilbert had such a journey to find a way out of her various addictions. She probably can afford a privately paid treatment centre, so I hope she finds her way to an effective, professional recovery centre and stays a decent time to allow herself to get the hang of it.
Oh gosh thank you so much for writing this. After 25 years in AA, I finally received proper therapeutic treatment for my cptsd and attachment needs. I spent 25 years not knowing that I could be truly free of addiction and have a full sense of myself and allow others to meet my needs and care for me. I believe that AA was helpful in separating me from alcohol, giving me structure and a support community, but it did nothing for the underlying condition.
What a truly inspirational and powerful interview. Thank you for your raw honesty Elizabeth. Also loved the 12 step program for America. That is just what we need at this moment in our nation's history. Thank you.
I can’t “heart” this enough! We all thought she had it all figured out after Eat, Pray, Love and Committed. But she was still a kid then. And like many of us, it takes decades to work that shit out. I feel some people are disappointed and fed up with Liz, but why? She’s human. Flawed. And vulnerable. The only difference between Liz Gilbert and the rest of us is that she is a spectacular writer. She’s one of those people, like Dani Shapiro and Joyce Maynard, whose novels are as compelling her their memoirs. (Sari those are two ideas for great Oldsters!) Thank you.
Thanks, Susan! Dani has already taken the questionnaire, and Joyce has it in her hands to turn in. (Great minds.)
I’m with you! Liz is a serial memoirist, and serial memoirists discover new things about themselves to excavate and examine and share as they move through life—sometimes contradicting what they experienced and shared earlier. That’s being human. The vitriol I’ve witnessed is ugly and uncalled for. If a recovery memoir isn’t for them, they can just not read it. I see too many people saying, essentially, “I refuse to read this but I’m against it.” Too many people calling her narcissistic and solipsistic, but I think nothing could be further from the truth, especially in this book. She ruthlessly self-examines, and I am better for having read it. (You know what’s really narcissistic? Joining a mean-girl pile-on for clout, without even having read the book, which I’ve seen too many people doing!)
Agree with you about Joyce Maynard...love her work. As for Liz Gilbert, she is a treasure, a brilliant and creative and ultra-talented writer and human being. Why she attracts the snarky people is a mystery to me. I suppose because so many people are wounded and lash out at anyone who opens up to personal and spiritual growth. I, for one, will always and forever admire her and read her glorious books.
You nailed it Deborah. Oftentimes those who pride themselves as intellectuals have a strong distaste for anything touching on the spiritual. They should read Carl Jung and his brilliant disciples to witness the intellect in perfect harmony with the spiritual.
A thousand times yes! To me, that is what lifts Gilbert's work above others...her openness to spiritual and metaphysical experiences. That is true wisdom. I agree about Carl Jung.
Great interview. Just when you think a person has it all figured out you discover that they too - have issues that plague most humans. God bless Liz for getting help. She’s still very prolific and tremendously accomplished.
I've just started reading Liz's new book, and very much appreciate this conversation being out there in the world . I'm sober 8 years now, and found CODA meetings were really helpful, as it is often not the alcohol that is the issue, rather what is underneath this habit - the codependency and love addiction issues. Creativity (Music) has also been my medicine since the beginning, and still is. So I was thrilled to read one of Liz's weekly therapies is Karaoke ! :)
Incredible interview! Liz’s honesty and insight are mind-blowing. I’ve had mixed feelings about her in the past as a self-help guru (never quite bought it, I guess) but have always thought she is a wildly gifted writer and now, in her 12-step recovery, I’m moved and inspired by her spiritual depth and courage. Godspeed, Liz Gilbert! And thank you, Sari, for featuring her in Oldster. 💕
That line is perfection. When I first got sober, I straddled two words—the world I knew I had to leave behind, and the world I needed in order to survive. For a while, I felt like I was in a spiritual limbo. I was sober, but still craving the pills I gobbled, the things that would alter me. But then it happened, the spiritual shift that Gilbert articulates. I wanted to be clear and here more than I ever want to be altered again. Recovery shattered me, broke me wide open, and it was painful for many years. But it's still easier than the hell of being lost inside yourself. Thank you for this interview!
Thank you for this insightful interview, Sari! Reading the questions and answers given, I had a few AHA moments that were thought provoking, self-reflective, and curious as I reflected back on my family.
I think I need to be in Writers Anonymous : ) Jus kidding this is a great post on important issues. "Someone at the table insulted me quite out of nowhere". And "how this wasn’t really HER speaking, but the booze." Oh it was her. The booze just brought it out
Disagree. Haven’t you ever heard something just ludicrous fly out of your own mouth, sober or sloshed?
The Imp of the Perverse, by Edgar Allen Poe, explores this anomaly.
I suspect it’s related to the events in dreaming: the brain takes in a vast amount of info and makes shit up as it sorts it all while we sleep, like AI harvesting large language models. There will be intriguing insights and utter garbage to dispose of.
The booze may decay the inhibition to voice these various thoughts, but they roll around in most minds. I’ve heard and read several professional therapies that emphasize “I am not my thoughts”. Isn’t that the basis of meditation? To just watch them come and go?
Every body is different and will sometimes radically change when one least expects it.
You're running completely against conventional thinking. Everyone wants to blame someone or something else for their behavior, but it's not the drug, or society, or the Imp, it's you, and until you accept this getting healthy is a long shot.
Why thank you. Conventional thinking has rarely appealed to me. So little of it is actually thinking…
Where did you get the idea that I am “blaming” anybody for anything? People just say very odd things sometimes.
And I’ll thank you to keep your unqualified psychoanalysis to yourself: “it's you, and until you accept this getting healthy is a long shot.” How rude. How rigid.
Let me guess; longterm attendance in some form of AA yet still bossy and arrogant? So common there…
I’m very healthy. Every person I encountered today (85° and smoky ugh) on several errands was extraordinarily kind and loving. It was just wonderful! You cannot bring me down.
I am a huge Liz Gilbert fan. Have read most of her books and believe she is an extraordinary talent. Just finished her new book, "All The Way to the River" yesterday. Read it in 24 hours and it is a masterpiece. So raw and honest and real and deep and wise. I love how she is so connected and open to mystical experiences but also very grounded and realistic. So impressed with her commitment to her sobriety. Thank you.
This might be the most honest gospel of recovery I’ve ever read.
Elizabeth naming the “imperial ego” and calling the steps a spiritual technology hits harder than any sermon I’ve heard this year. The part about realizing her judgments of others were actually instructions for herself—that’s pure gold-level humility training.
Blessed be the ones who stop auditioning for love and start recovering the soul that never needed to perform.
Wow! I never expected to open Oldster and find Elizabeth Gilbert here, too. (She's everywhere this month as her newest book launches--NY Times, New Yorker, Brevity Blog.) But why not here on Oldster, when she and her story are the perfect fit? Brutally honest. As if it took a lifetime for both interviewer and interviewee to get to this meant-to-be moment and we are the eavesdroppers who get to bear witness. Way to go, Sari! Gobsmacked over here.
Thanks , Peggy! BTW, a few years ago she also took The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire: https://oldster.substack.com/p/this-is-54-author-elizabeth-gilbert
So grateful to read that questionnaire from December 2023, when I wasn't on Oldster yet. And Elizabeth's TED talk. Truly, you and she are kindred spirits. Thank you for those links.
<3
I sometimes have a problem reading Liz Gilbert (it's me, not her) but this is one of the best things by her I've ever read. Definitely one of the most inspiring. Thank you.
Glad to hear.
Read Big Magic.
It is all a heart-breaking story. Being in recovery ends eventually and life can be worthwhile and joyful without addiction. With respect for others' battles, I have a thought as a former group worker in an addiction treatment centre in Amsterdam during the seventies/early eighties. I wonder why the twelve step program is allowed to take all the air in the rooms of treatment modalities, as it contains two principles that defeat its stated aim of beating an addiction: 1. a life-long identification with addiction as the organizing factor of a life, and 2. submitting to something else outside of the person—a power or a spiritual entity—for help with beating an addiction. The reason for that is probably because this self-help movement doesn't cost an arm and a leg—basically is free. The developmental view of addiction has a different focus and teaches to those myred in an addiction, to address the issues and catch-up on their unfinished development in life, and so, become a competent person who sheds their past ineffective patterns of behaviour (and moves away from their identity of an addict). The cognitive-behavioural view sees the unaddressed traumas in childhood as a factor if not the cause, which also indicates the remedy. The experiences in childhood may have led to emotional incompetence and self-defeating behaviors, and a lack of life skills through a poor match with their parent's capacities (or a parental absence), which factors kept the person as an adult repeating their ineffective patterns. The compulsion for seeking immediate gratification of their desires and impulses—regardless of what those are—is the basic premise of addiction. Postponing that gratification "one day at the time" is a good principle to start with, but only catching up with one's lack in the needed capacities will sustain that sobriety in the long run. In effect, one has to be their own parent and re-parent oneself, ideally with the help of a competent professional staff in a treatment centre based on group support, which can bring the required safety and support during an extended time frame of at least eight to ten months to learn the basics. It's a tough road but it can be done. The stats of the Parkway treatment centre in Amsterdam (a therapeutic community of the Jellinek Centre) showed a 65% successrate of people ditching their addiction to heroin (and to alcohol and other drugs) and still clean after two years of sustained sobriety on their own. As heroin addiction among the Dutch youth disappeared and government-funded treatment facilities of all kinds closed in the eighties, and no pharma industry was allowd to dump their opiates in the Netherlands, there still is no grand-scale addiction to opiates there. It seems to me that an AA or similar self-help group is vastly underqualified to provide that needed level of support. I am sorry Gilbert had such a journey to find a way out of her various addictions. She probably can afford a privately paid treatment centre, so I hope she finds her way to an effective, professional recovery centre and stays a decent time to allow herself to get the hang of it.
Oh gosh thank you so much for writing this. After 25 years in AA, I finally received proper therapeutic treatment for my cptsd and attachment needs. I spent 25 years not knowing that I could be truly free of addiction and have a full sense of myself and allow others to meet my needs and care for me. I believe that AA was helpful in separating me from alcohol, giving me structure and a support community, but it did nothing for the underlying condition.
What a truly inspirational and powerful interview. Thank you for your raw honesty Elizabeth. Also loved the 12 step program for America. That is just what we need at this moment in our nation's history. Thank you.
I can’t “heart” this enough! We all thought she had it all figured out after Eat, Pray, Love and Committed. But she was still a kid then. And like many of us, it takes decades to work that shit out. I feel some people are disappointed and fed up with Liz, but why? She’s human. Flawed. And vulnerable. The only difference between Liz Gilbert and the rest of us is that she is a spectacular writer. She’s one of those people, like Dani Shapiro and Joyce Maynard, whose novels are as compelling her their memoirs. (Sari those are two ideas for great Oldsters!) Thank you.
Thanks, Susan! Dani has already taken the questionnaire, and Joyce has it in her hands to turn in. (Great minds.)
I’m with you! Liz is a serial memoirist, and serial memoirists discover new things about themselves to excavate and examine and share as they move through life—sometimes contradicting what they experienced and shared earlier. That’s being human. The vitriol I’ve witnessed is ugly and uncalled for. If a recovery memoir isn’t for them, they can just not read it. I see too many people saying, essentially, “I refuse to read this but I’m against it.” Too many people calling her narcissistic and solipsistic, but I think nothing could be further from the truth, especially in this book. She ruthlessly self-examines, and I am better for having read it. (You know what’s really narcissistic? Joining a mean-girl pile-on for clout, without even having read the book, which I’ve seen too many people doing!)
Agree with you about Joyce Maynard...love her work. As for Liz Gilbert, she is a treasure, a brilliant and creative and ultra-talented writer and human being. Why she attracts the snarky people is a mystery to me. I suppose because so many people are wounded and lash out at anyone who opens up to personal and spiritual growth. I, for one, will always and forever admire her and read her glorious books.
Same!
You nailed it Deborah. Oftentimes those who pride themselves as intellectuals have a strong distaste for anything touching on the spiritual. They should read Carl Jung and his brilliant disciples to witness the intellect in perfect harmony with the spiritual.
A thousand times yes! To me, that is what lifts Gilbert's work above others...her openness to spiritual and metaphysical experiences. That is true wisdom. I agree about Carl Jung.
Great interview. Just when you think a person has it all figured out you discover that they too - have issues that plague most humans. God bless Liz for getting help. She’s still very prolific and tremendously accomplished.
Well said!
I've just started reading Liz's new book, and very much appreciate this conversation being out there in the world . I'm sober 8 years now, and found CODA meetings were really helpful, as it is often not the alcohol that is the issue, rather what is underneath this habit - the codependency and love addiction issues. Creativity (Music) has also been my medicine since the beginning, and still is. So I was thrilled to read one of Liz's weekly therapies is Karaoke ! :)
Karaoke is the best medicine (in my opinion!) 🎤
Love it too !! :)
Incredible interview! Liz’s honesty and insight are mind-blowing. I’ve had mixed feelings about her in the past as a self-help guru (never quite bought it, I guess) but have always thought she is a wildly gifted writer and now, in her 12-step recovery, I’m moved and inspired by her spiritual depth and courage. Godspeed, Liz Gilbert! And thank you, Sari, for featuring her in Oldster. 💕
<3
That line is perfection. When I first got sober, I straddled two words—the world I knew I had to leave behind, and the world I needed in order to survive. For a while, I felt like I was in a spiritual limbo. I was sober, but still craving the pills I gobbled, the things that would alter me. But then it happened, the spiritual shift that Gilbert articulates. I wanted to be clear and here more than I ever want to be altered again. Recovery shattered me, broke me wide open, and it was painful for many years. But it's still easier than the hell of being lost inside yourself. Thank you for this interview!
Best of so many good ones Sari! I’ve been away a bit. My heart and eyes are opened again. Thank you
I applaud Liz. We’re forever evolving and finding language to share what might benefit another
That’s service
Thank you ☺️
Thank you for this insightful interview, Sari! Reading the questions and answers given, I had a few AHA moments that were thought provoking, self-reflective, and curious as I reflected back on my family.
I think I need to be in Writers Anonymous : ) Jus kidding this is a great post on important issues. "Someone at the table insulted me quite out of nowhere". And "how this wasn’t really HER speaking, but the booze." Oh it was her. The booze just brought it out
Disagree. Haven’t you ever heard something just ludicrous fly out of your own mouth, sober or sloshed?
The Imp of the Perverse, by Edgar Allen Poe, explores this anomaly.
I suspect it’s related to the events in dreaming: the brain takes in a vast amount of info and makes shit up as it sorts it all while we sleep, like AI harvesting large language models. There will be intriguing insights and utter garbage to dispose of.
The booze may decay the inhibition to voice these various thoughts, but they roll around in most minds. I’ve heard and read several professional therapies that emphasize “I am not my thoughts”. Isn’t that the basis of meditation? To just watch them come and go?
Every body is different and will sometimes radically change when one least expects it.
You're running completely against conventional thinking. Everyone wants to blame someone or something else for their behavior, but it's not the drug, or society, or the Imp, it's you, and until you accept this getting healthy is a long shot.
Why thank you. Conventional thinking has rarely appealed to me. So little of it is actually thinking…
Where did you get the idea that I am “blaming” anybody for anything? People just say very odd things sometimes.
And I’ll thank you to keep your unqualified psychoanalysis to yourself: “it's you, and until you accept this getting healthy is a long shot.” How rude. How rigid.
Let me guess; longterm attendance in some form of AA yet still bossy and arrogant? So common there…
I’m very healthy. Every person I encountered today (85° and smoky ugh) on several errands was extraordinarily kind and loving. It was just wonderful! You cannot bring me down.
Ali and Richard, can you take this argument elsewhere? Thank you.
I am a huge Liz Gilbert fan. Have read most of her books and believe she is an extraordinary talent. Just finished her new book, "All The Way to the River" yesterday. Read it in 24 hours and it is a masterpiece. So raw and honest and real and deep and wise. I love how she is so connected and open to mystical experiences but also very grounded and realistic. So impressed with her commitment to her sobriety. Thank you.
I read it in under 24 hours, too!! Yes, a masterpiece.
This is really great 👍
<3
Such an inspiring interview!
This might be the most honest gospel of recovery I’ve ever read.
Elizabeth naming the “imperial ego” and calling the steps a spiritual technology hits harder than any sermon I’ve heard this year. The part about realizing her judgments of others were actually instructions for herself—that’s pure gold-level humility training.
Blessed be the ones who stop auditioning for love and start recovering the soul that never needed to perform.