Elizabeth Gilbert Admits: "I Need a Dose of Courage Every Day"

Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, a chronicle of her post-divorce adventures in Italy, India, and Bali, became an iconic travel memoir not for its incredible scenes, transcendent experiences, and fascinating characters—although it has all of those things—but because the story began in a place where many of her readers have found themselves: kneeling on the bathroom floor in crisis.

Gilbert's account of making peace with the past and discovering her more authentic self gave women an example of another kind of hero's journey, one in which the treasure at the end of the quest is a more truthful life. Eat, Pray, Love fans have told Gilbert that the book inspired them to begin or end romances, to embrace motherhood or eschew it, to change their job or their address or their beliefs. These radical shifts, she says—like any profound transformation—don't necessarily have anything to do with planes, trains, or automobiles.

"I have a painting of Emily Dickinson, who spent much of her life in her bedroom but still created some of the most monumental poetry ever written," she says. "That painting reminds me that the answers to my life are not likely to be found out there. The world is an enchanting place, but there are worlds inside us, too, that are always ready to be unlocked."

In her subsequent books—such as Big Magic, a how-to for cultivating creative expression, and The Signature of All Things, the story of the fictional 19th-century botanist Alma Whittaker—Gilbert has remained an intrepid explorer of intellectual and emotional terrain. She's also spent the past few years navigating challenging personal territory, caring for and then grieving her partner, Rayya Elias, who died of cancer in January 2018. "I can't live without her, so I don't," Gilbert says. "Sometimes I make a recording into my phone and just talk to her. The fact that the message is being recorded makes me feel like she's receiving it."

Despite Gilbert's trademark blend of lightness and earnestness, common sense and magical realism, she says her equanimity doesn't come easily. "I need a dose of courage every day, because I'm frightened every day. There will always be a nervous little person inside me. But if there's a creative project I'm afraid to attempt, a truth I need to tell, or a painful new reality I must face, I ask myself: 'What's the alternative?'"

Below, Gilbert answers 20 questions from O.

Read the full story on Oprah Daily: Elizabeth Gilbert Admits: "I Need a Dose of Courage Every Day"