Elizabeth Gilbert discusses a wide variety of treatments for life’s problems.

Question: Is Eat, Pray, Love a self-help book?Elizabeth Gilbert:   I’m not really insulted when people call it a self-help book because I don’t know what else you would call a book about somebody helping themselves.  Although, I guess, a self-help book, by definition, is a book that sort of teaches; its intention is to set out, to create a path and say, these are the steps that you have to take.  And certainly, I wouldn’t do that because I don’t know what the steps are. 

But I definitely used the book as a way to salvage and rescue and recreate my own life, by hand.  It was kind of like a girl scout project.  Like, there were materials. With these materials in your own house, you too can build; kind of the feeling that I wanted it to have of a certain kind of self-resourcefulness.   I say that also with a grain of salt because I think it’s important.

We kind of demean the therapeutic abundance that’s going on in America right now.  And I think we have to do that very carefully because some of the stuff is really important.  And so, that stuff really works. 

And if you go to cultures where people don’t have access to those sorts of outlets, you can see how they might be served by them.  And as much as we kind of criticize the Oprah-ness of modern life, there’s something to be argued for it as well 

There’s a lot more communication today in a really open way between men and women; within groups of men and women about what they’re feeling, and what they’re sad about.  And that hasn’t always been the case. 

And it’s not the case in every culture on earth.  And when you go see cultures where people are still really buttoned down, you can see where there’s a lot of pain that’s intrinsic in that. 

And I, myself, as much as I like to call it a sort of self-help book, I didn’t set out on that journey until after I had been through two years of therapy on the Upper West Side.  And six months to a year, I can’t remember now, but a period of time of antidepressants that I was really ambivalent about but still consider a necessary bridge to get me through the last awful months of my divorce.  I probably could’ve done it without it, but it made it a lot less anguishing for me. 

But that too was, I guess, even so, seeking out help from a professional.  Look, I took whatever was available; religion, psychotherapy, friendship, companionship, exercise, drinking eight glasses of water a day. Whatever was on hand, I was using it because I was in a lot of trouble. 

And the last step of it was going off on this journey.  I certainly wouldn’t have been physically or mentally able to do that, even a year before, because I was in such a bad place.  So I would caution people against sort of leaping off a cliff in some sort of grandiose gesture of self-reclamation if they’re not actually, somewhat, mentally or psychology stable enough to handle it.

Recorded on: April 29, 2009.