This is a guest post from writer Kate Horowitz on the perils of her investment in two famous writers, Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame and Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts. Kate’s newsletter, small magic, can be found here
I am happy because the protagonist of Department of Speculation is bitter, like me. Often when an author writes about something I’ve been thinking, I feel scooped, cheated, like I’ve arrived too late and missed my chance. But in the case of this character—a depressed science writer researching Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s legendary cosmic love—I feel giddy with gossipy prescience, like a wise real-world older sibling. Even as the narrator begins relating the lovers’ story I know how it will end: not happily ever after, like most retellings, but with a revelation of the unromantic truth: the affair, the cover-up, the acrimonious divorce. I know the narrator will uncover it, just as I uncovered it, because I know this narrator. Her disillusionment. Her tendency to keep digging. I know, because she is me.
She is me. There I go, making the same mistake all over again. She is not me. No one is. Not, frequently, even me.
As I write this it occurs to me that what I feel toward her predecessors is not, in fact, anger, but embarrassment at my own gullibility.
I’m not a complete rube. If a person begins her story with I am good, I am so, so very good, I have at least acquired the sense to know that she is not, thanks partly to Ann Druyan and her lies of happy omission. But if a narrator’s first self-assessment is I am bad, I am ruined, I will ruin you, and then later on she says I was bad but I have learned and now I am so, so good—
Every time, I’ll believe her.
Every single foolish time.
I’ll believe her in part because that is my story, too. Or, rather, they all are. A long time ago I’d have introduced myself with Hello, I am so, so good. Because I didn’t know any better, couldn’t see the electric venom powering my entire body. Then, later, having met myself: I am bad, I am ruined, I will ruin you. Then, some time after that, well into recovery: I have learned.
I encountered Elizabeth Gilbert’s work somewhere between my first and second personas. For a long time I’d been deluded enough to believe I was a good person. But by Eat, Pray, Love I’d already begun to recognize the rampant rot inside me. And in the author’s confessions, I saw myself.
I’m a disaster, she swore up and down. A human mess. I read on, avidly. The mess went to the Mediterranean, to southeast Asia. The mess learned pasta-making and mindfulness. The mess met a wonderful man, a gentle man, so unlike the others. Gradually, as Liz told it, her wreck unwrecked itself. She was good, now. I tossed back the entire story in one gulp. It burned my throat like bourbon. It tasted like a promise.
And Maggie Nelson, queen of lyric wretchedness. Was I too blue for you. Was I too blue. My copy of Bluets arrived as I was grieving a weird breakup with a lousy man. Hours and hours disappeared each day in tears. I sat sniffling, engrossed in the book, on a battered metal stool outside a local film festival. I was ostensibly there to take tickets, but no one was coming in. At last a beautiful young man approached, fishing in his coat pocket. Long dark lashes. His eyes took in the lapis-bound book. He held out a slender hand. Not the one with the ticket. I’m Azul. Like the color.
Immediately upon finishing the book I wrote Maggie a letter. Like any oblivious punisher, I told her everything: who I was, where I’d been, what I was going through. My sloppy, embarrassing, selfish gratitude.
Her response was concise but generous. Maybe Azul will recur.
Azul did not recur, and Maggie, Liz, and I all got older. I went through more messy breakups; they published more books. After every heartbreak I went back and re-read Bluets. I underlined new passages and scrawled frantically between paragraphs in royal- and sky-blue ink. I wrote Maggie letter after letter. I never sent any of them, other than that first one. They were mostly for me.
Liz eventually married the wonderful man she met in Bali. Maggie married, too. If one does one’s solitude right, she wrote, this is the prize. In other words: I have learned. I am good now.
The lives of other celebrities don’t interest me nearly as much. It’s just writers (and sometimes their characters), and only those who arrive on the scene already bruised and bleary-eyed, keening with self-loathing.
November 9, 2016. Donald Trump has been declared the winner of the U.S. presidential election. I’m staggering through downtown Washington, DC on a Wednesday afternoon with the person I’m dating. We’ve both taken sick days and are drifting toward the art museum just to have something to do. The air’s too hot for late autumn; we carry our damp jackets under our arms. We are numb, dissociating, one upsetting headline away from total collapse, yet still trying, absurdly, to make conversation. The person I’m dating mentions that Liz Gilbert left her wonderful husband for someone else. She’d been having an affair.
I stop walking, crumple, and sink to the sidewalk. Soon I am inconsolable, and I can’t articulate why.
Years later I’ll look back on this moment and understand it completely. I was just way too invested. This woman that I’d never met had become an avatar for me and my trajectory. Her redemption was evidence that I was redeemable, too. That I could be good. And then she faltered, and I felt personally betrayed. Perhaps because I was then, myself, on the verge of faltering. And then I, too, fell.
And then I learned.
(No, really. I did.)
In time even Maggie Nelson has descended, at least a little bit. Her reflections on queerness, transness, and domesticity, which once felt so revelatory, have lost something of their power as we’ve all learned more about marginalization and who gets to speak. She’s said things in recent interviews that mildly rubbed me the wrong way. She is, it turns out, human. And to her credit, she never pretended to be anything else. It was my own desperation to be healed—to win the prize—that put her on that pedestal in the first place.
It is futile and unproductive to assign a binary moral value to an entire human being. We are so much more complicated than that. There are definitely some people who are just bad, straight down the ticket. But good is so much more complicated. Good is like clean. You could scour your entire house from top to bottom, but by the time you finish, a little dust will have settled somewhere. We are living things. We drink from cups and sweat in our clothes and shed strands of our hair. The only person who does not create mess is a dead one.
And yet I still expect myself, and anyone I perceive as an avatar of me, to be all good, all the time. To—having made such painful mistakes before—never step a foot out of line again. There are, of course, certain things I will truly never do again. But to require complete perfection of myself is a misuse of my already-limited energy.
It is possible to be, in general, a good person, and still miss the mark sometimes. To break a plate. To miss a deadline. To hurt someone’s feelings.
I finish Jenny Offill’s book. The science wife is, in the end, not like me at all. Her mistakes are plentiful but nothing like my own, and for that reason I absolve them all instantly.
Perhaps this, then, is the lesson, or the outline for a new prayer. Maybe it’s time to retire May I never fuck up again and try May I fuck up differently. May I become a different character. One I can forgive.
*image by Clare Satera
TBH I’d love to facilitate a discussion of Liz Gilbert feels in the comments, so if you’re feeling froggy, leap!
I accept the invite for Liz Gilbert chat!
I’ve actually never read (nor seen) Eat, Pray, Love, BUT I recently started reading the top-half of her Letters from Love series here on Substack because the rest is behind a paywall and I thought I might find them some but I just adore them? And even her videos from her fancy house in NYC or all the places she travels, which again, I would think I would sorta hate, I find actually grounded and speak directly to my heart? I’m happily baffled by it. Do you ever read her Substack posts?