Welcome to the book show A Celebration of Reading and Writers. I'm Joe Donnelly.
Elizabeth Gilbert author of The Number One New York Times Best Seller, Eat, Pray, Love
returns to fiction with her first novel in 13 years.
The signature of all things as an epic story of desire, ambition,
and the thirst for knowledge spanning the 18th and 19th centuries.
The novel takes the reader from the age of enlightenment to the industrial revolution
through the scientific, social, and commercial progress of those times,
all while telling the birth to that story of one woman, Alma Whitaker.
It is a great pleasure to welcome Elizabeth Gilbert to the book show.
Thank you very much for being with us. I'd like to have you here.
Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.
What has this journey been like after the tremendous success of nonfiction
to return ultimately to the roots of fiction?
Well, it kind of feels like a homecoming for me.
That's where I got my start as a writer, although I know that's not what people associate me with.
And also in this case, felt like a real celebration because the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life as a writer
was to write the book that came after Eat, Pray, Love, which was the memoir called Committed.
For obvious reasons, it was sort of challenging to try to figure out how to do anything after that.
And once that was done, I felt like Committed really broke the spell of Eat, Pray, Love.
It sort of snapped the enchantment and everybody's expectations were dashed.
And everybody got to get everything out of their system that they felt about Eat, Pray, Love,
and then we could all move on.
And I would never felt so free in my life after that.
And I really wanted to celebrate that freedom by writing the biggest and most ambitious novel that I could.
I was going to say the fact that you decide to take on such a large project
was I always the intent to take on something massive in this sense?
Yep, it was.
And it was because I wanted to kind of stretch my legs in a big way, but it was also to honor this rare position
that I find myself in at this moment.
And if I can be very frank, one of the things that Eat, Pray, Love afforded me is that I don't have to,
I'm going to really rare circumstances a writer.
I can do what I want now.
I can afford to fund my own projects.
I don't have to ask permission of a publisher.
I don't need to get advances on my books.
And I know that there are very few writers who have ever had that kind of freedom.
And I also know that there are exceedingly glancingly few women writers who have ever had that.
And so in order to honor the unbelievable amount of power that that felt like it gave me,
I thought, don't waste it by writing something small.
Write one of the books like the great men who always write.
You know, like really go out there and go for it.
So is this, is it safe to say that this is the novel or the type of novel that you always wanted to write?
Or that you don't, you couldn't have imagined yourself writing it if you didn't have the success and that freedom
that you, and quite frankly, the maturity of 12 or 13 years to be able to write something like this.
Yeah, I mean, I always wanted to write a book like this.
I don't think I ever had the chops before to write a book like this.
And I also think, you know, in my 20s, there are dozens of reasons
why I wouldn't have been able to take on a project like this.
Not least of all that I was working through other jobs to support myself
and, you know, two dedicated three years to the study of 19th century botany
would have been hard thing to have done at that point in time.
So, um, so I feel like it's a book I could only have written now.
So at what point does it come to you?
Where is this a dream or how does this come up in polite conversation where you say,
okay, I want to write a book about 19th century botany.
Well, it started because I knew I wanted to write a book about plants.
I've become a really passionate gardener and, and I was at a point in my life where I was really just beginning my gardening.
And I thought nothing else will hold my attention if I don't write a book about plants
I'm not going to be interested in what I'm writing about.
And then this really sort of miraculous magical thing happened that I came into possession
of a 1784 edition of Captain Cook's Voyages that had belonged to my great grandfather
and had been in my house when I was growing up as a child.
And I've been very familiar with it.
I had this kind of talismanic power.
It looked like a book that was in a sorcerer's library.
And I actually had scrawled my name in that book when I was four years old
there by both destroying its value and laying claim to it.
So when my mother moved, she gave me the book and said, you know, you ruined it.
I guess it's yours.
And when I saw it again, I had that real stirring of, you know, the remembering of how magical that book
had always seemed with its maps and its ethnography and its botanical illustrations.
And once I started studying it, I discovered that the really fascinating character
in that story of Captain Cook's Voyages was not necessarily cook himself,
but Sir Joseph Banks, the botanist who came with him and brought back thousands of specimens of plants to England.
And once I looked into banks, I discovered that there was this golden moment
between the end of the Age of Enlightenment and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
that was sort of the action-adventure moment of plant science.
And I thought, well, there is where my novel is going to be.
And that's how it was born.
And I want to get into the character of Alma in just a moment.
But I also want to point out when you talk about that book and the physical nature of that book,
this novel is beautiful.
It is gorgeous of how it is packaged and has come out.
Oh, you mean it's an object? It's beautiful.
You know, thank you. I really am delighted with the way they've done it.
I really wanted it to have that feeling because, you know, I feel like especially now
in the world of electronic books, which I'm not necessarily an enemy of,
but I feel like the job of a physical book these days is to be more than just a container for words.
It has to be an object of beauty in its own right or it will never compete.
So let's talk a little bit about the time, of course, of bringing this character specifically into the 19th century
and writing about starting, opening in 1800 and spanning much of the 19th century,
of what it was about the 19th century and specifically about, I guess, the science and the botany of the 19th century that fascinated you.
Well, there's a bunch of stuff. One piece is that the 19th century was sort of the last moment in Western history,
I think, when a relatively well-read amateur could understand what was going on in the world of science.
And people were following what was going on in the world of science.
People say that the origin of species is the last major scientific work that a layman can read.
After that, we all got left out.
You know, science got so specialized that there's no way I could write a book about 20th or 21st century science.
It's far, far, far beyond my reach.
And not only that, a modern chemist doesn't know what a modern botanist is doing,
and a modern botanist doesn't understand physics.
It's all just become impossible. But back then, there was this sort of general knowledge that if you were an educated person, you were following.
I also love the idea that it was the age of amateurs.
You know, when my character Alma Whitaker begins her career in botany, there's no such thing as a professional botanist.
It's not a profession, it's a pursuit.
And she eagerly joins that pursuit as did many women.
Botany was the only science that women were really welcomed into because plants.
Flowers, that's what ladies like.
And somehow women were able to sneak into that science through the garden gate.
And so I was able to find examples of really extraordinary female botanists that I could use as models for Alma's life.
That's a fascinating idea, though, that it's really, a few of us could follow the technology and science of today.
But that was a time where it was coming, it was coming in by amateurs, and we could sort of figure it all out.
Yeah, you could not only read about it in the journals that would be delivered to your house.
You could participate in it. You could do your own experiments.
You could be an amateur taxonomist. You could collect beetles and send them to the Royal Society.
You could say that you found a new genus of a plant.
I mean, this is the kind of stuff that, you know, there might be some exceptions, but I would say very few people do that on amateur level anymore.
But back then, that's all it was. And it was also largely done in botany.
It was a field that was largely conducted by ladies and also by religious men, because especially in England, the great naturalists were often ministers, Darwin himself almost became a minister, because they had the education and the leisure time to be able to go exploring.
And I find that really interesting because, of course, what happened later in the century was that that all blew up.
And science and religion got a divorce and had been fighting over the kids ever since.
It seems as though in the novel that there is also you have a great love and appreciation for the language of the time as well.
Well, yeah, and as a reader, it was natural for me to be to feel myself being pulled toward that because my favorite books have always been the great 19th century novels.
And with all respect and apologies to William Shakespeare, I happen to believe that the 19th century was the pinnacle of the English language.
And also it was the most democratic period of the English language. It was this rare moment where literacy, widespread literacy intersected with cheap printing methods.
So people had access to a lot of information. And then there was no other distracting media around. So it was an incredibly literate society.
And if you could read or write, you could probably read or write pretty well. You know, like when you read the letters that civil war soldiers, for instance, mailed home from Antietam, they're exquisite.
You know, they're just to our ears, just beautifully crafted. So it was really fun for me to spend three years just vanishing into that language.
With that language also comes the places that you write about. And this novel certainly takes us around the globe.
Wondon, in Philadelphia, and Peru, and Tahiti, and Amsterdam, and many other locales. Was that part of the war as well?
Yeah, you know, to be honest, my initial plan for this book was to write about a female character who never leaves her father's property.
And to try to examine the idea, it could somebody who was limited in geographical scope, but limitless in intellect and imagination unlock the same secrets to the universe as the men who were able to travel.
And that was originally going to be sort of the founding question of the book. Two things happened. One is that I discovered a lot of very well-traveled 19th century female botanist.
And two, my own nature is such that, you know, not only can I never stay home, I couldn't leave my character at home. So by the time she was 50, I just had to fling her out there into the world.
And that meant, of course, that I had to go to all those places and do all that research, which is a terrible, terrible, terrible burden.
And also it comes in, I assume, from the traveling of Henry in the novel of, in the Kwai Nine trade, of going from place to place.
And that also affords Alma this, this, not luxury, but this opportunity to go to these places in her search as well.
And even the idea, you know, I mean, I think that what I was amazed at looking at these people sort of from the age of enlightenment into the Victorian age, it was an era where people either never left a five mile radius of their home or they went everywhere.
You know, like the people who traveled traveled, you know, in really outrageous and daring and challenging ways.
And, and almost father Henry is certainly that by the time he's 14, he's already on Captain Cook's last voyage as an assistant to one of the botanists and he circumnavigates the globe, you know, almost twice before he's before he's 18.
And that just means that the world is his home in a way. And that, that means that his daughter is raised with people who just see the world in a very different way than the provincial ideas of the other Philadelphiaans.
Certainly, Alma comes by all of this, honestly, with both her father and her mother when it comes to the interest in botany.
Yeah, I had a, I had a great time inventing Alma's mother.
There were some very learned women around that time and a lot of them did seem to come out of Holland.
Holland has always been sort of advanced above the rest of Europe in terms of the education of women.
And it was also the center of the botanical trade, the center of the spice trade, you know, obviously it's where the Dutch East Indies company was based.
And, and they were the, you know, they were the bankers of Europe.
And so everything that Henry almost father would have been involved in was sort of centered around Amsterdam.
And so I had him choose as a wife, a woman named Beatrix Van Devinder, who I decided was the daughter of a fictitious family who had been running one of the botanical gardens there forever.
And so he is not an educated man himself, but he chooses an incredibly overeducated wife who, you know, forces, force feeds her young and very bright daughter with Greek and Latin and German and French at a very early age, gives her limitless access to the library that they collect together.
So she's got her father's ambition on one hand as a role model and then her mother's intellect, which I think could make for a pretty interesting person.
I want to talk about her in a second, but the father is a fascinating figure because he certainly dominates the first part of the book, the beginning of the book for 50 pages or so.
And ultimately has a great influence on his daughter's life.
I had so much fun writing Henry Whitaker. I don't think I've ever had more fun writing anything than I had writing the first, I have to say, 50 pages of that book, which tells the story of the ascension of Henry Whitaker from a two-room shack outside of Cue Gardens in 1760 to becoming eventually the wealthiest man in the New World.
And that's also the really fun thing about fiction is, you know, just I'd forgotten, I hadn't written fiction so long. I'd forgotten the great joy and liberty of being able to say things like, by 1800, Henry Whitaker was the richest man in Philadelphia and the third richest man in the New World.
If you say so, you know, and you can make a case for it, then so he was, you know, like there's something really something joyful about that.
But for Henry, I think it was so fun, was inventing a character who only has one motive and he has that motive his entire life and that is ambition.
He is a conqueror and every single interaction, every single scene, every single decision that he makes is about how far he can rise and how fast.
And there's just a kind of accelerated energy to that and it was really, really joyful to write that.
Elizabeth Gilbert is our guest. The name of the new novel is The Signature of All Things. It is published by Viking.
What's fascinating about her father, about the character of Henry is, yes, you could say that he is domineering, but he is, he has a love for Alma and there is also the way that he challenges her to do these incredible things.
Yeah, it's an interesting relationship. There's a line in the book where, you know, Alma is not a pretty girl and never is from the beginning and Henry never minds that.
It's his only biological daughter and there's a line that says Henry Whitaker had a habit of admiring everything he had made and he made Alma.
So he admired her, you know, there's a narcissistic love almost and his affection for her.
And then there's also the respect for the fact that she becomes really brilliant and really educated in a way that he isn't.
And he refuses to allow her to be weak. Both of her parents actually refuse to allow her to be weak.
And things happened are that are incredibly unfortunate and even heartbreaking.
And there's one of my favorite lines of Henry's is when he scolds her after a terrible crushing disappointment that might drive somebody else into a complete depression.
And he says, your life will not be felt by one obstacle. And I think that that's a really important message for a parent to a child, especially to a girl that, you know, you're a Whitaker. Get back up on your feet. Go.
Yes, a terrible thing has happened to you. What do you think the world is? Get, you know, get back out there and fight. And he forces her to become a fighter.
There is, of course, the, the history and the research that is necessary and looking into a character like this and saying, okay, this is what a woman at that time would have gone through under these under these circumstances.
And there are, if you will, the mechanics of it. But then there is the emotional characteristics of this woman.
It seems in reading that it comes to play very quickly. So did you feel that very soon of knowing this character very deep within you at an early stage?
I think so. And, you know, I know that novelists often like to say, you know, they like to give their imaginations full credit for the characters that they come up with and say, you know, I dreamt this person completely.
There is no resemblance to my life. And I will do the opposite and say that, you know, there is a lot of my own DNA in Alma Whitaker. And, and even, you know, there is also differences.
She is a scientist and I am more of a dreamer. I actually have one foot with the fairies compared to Alma who is very grounded and very empirical. And that is her defining characteristic.
But emotionally, I know her. I know her very well. I know her passion. I know her curiosity. And foremost, I know what it feels like to be a woman whose central love of her life is her work.
And I feel like that's a story we don't see a lot in women's literature. Somebody who is kept alive and kept buoyed and kept thrilled by life because of her passion and her pursuits.
And other things can go wrong. But as long as the work is still there, then the life has meaning.
In her life and what she is able to do as in science of what Alma is able to do in science, then comes the guy that she falls in love with.
And, and that's where we have this, this conflict because she is very rooted in because of her mother, because of her father in a scientific mind.
And all of a sudden you go into a spiritual and magical realm and yet it works.
To a certain extent.
In the beginning.
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely, you know, I will say without wanting to spoil too much of the book, I will say that Alma and Ambrose love each other completely.
You know, whether it is an appropriate match for marriage is another question altogether. But the love is certainly there.
And it's no accident in the novel that Alma is somebody who dedicates her life to studying moss, which is very much of the ground and very pragmatic and very hearty and very overlooked, very useful.
And Ambrose, the man she falls in love with is somebody who studies and paints orchids, which are, you know, they grow in the sky.
They don't even need soil. They're very airy and impractical and sometimes only bloom once every 10 years.
And they are only there for beauty.
And so that just sort of telegraphs immediately the differences that are going to be between these two.
What joins them is a passion for trying to break down, you know, for lack of a better word, the signature of all things, the meaning of all life as it's hidden in botany.
Of ultimately the search of knowing.
What's the code? I mean, I feel like what I really felt strongly about in the 19th century was that artists, the religious and the scientific, which were often the same person.
You know, there was no contrast in the early part of the 19th century between being a man of God, a man of the arts and a man of religion. And that's all been blown up now too.
But, you know, they were all sort of trying to break the code. It was the great code breaking era. They were trying to figure out how things work.
What is the secret behind everything? What is the mechanism? And whether they were trying to figure that out artistically, spiritually or intellectually, they were all on the same path.
And this seems like a very talk to your question, but I have to ask it, which is, would you have been able to do this if you had not been able to take the journey that so many of us read about in the pray love?
Oh, I would have absolutely not been able to do this. I mean, the signature of all things could not exist without a deep pray love for many reasons. One was sort of clearing out my own emotional life through that journey so that I could get out of my own way.
I, you know, I'm a big advocate for the idea that the sort of less miserable your life is the better novelist you can be because you're not so distracted by your own drama.
And that gives you an opportunity to really focus on inventing drama instead of living it. So one of the things that the e-Pray love journey did was sort of help me sort out my own dramas and come to a more stable and calm place where I could go back to writing fiction.
And the other thing that it did was to fund this journey into writing this book. It's the great, e-Pray love is the great enabler. It's the godmother who has bequeathed me the resources to be able to do work like this from now on.
And so I'm grateful to it forever for a thousand reasons, but this reason among them.
Would you have looked at nature the same way and have considered moss the same way?
Well, that's a good question. I, I don't know. I mean, probably would have looked at nothing the same way. Had I had I not gone on that journey. The question of moss with Alma.
It was sort of a novelistically pragmatic question that I was facing as I wrote the book. I needed to figure out what she was going to study. And I needed to figure out what she could study that was close by, but at the same time rich and complicated enough to keep her busy for decades.
And moss seemed like the right move and turned out to be exactly the right move. But the other reason I wanted her to be studying moss is because to me, moss felt like the botanical equivalent of the miniaturized arts that women have always done to keep themselves from going on.
So, you know, women couldn't do, they weren't in a position to be able to do say the cysteine chapel, but they can do needle point.
And they can, they can do textiles and they can paint landscapes on teacups. I feel like women's creative work traditionally has always been sort of tiny because they're doing it in their stolen hours and they're doing it on small, you know, with found materials and they're doing it in little ways.
And moss with its miniaturized universe felt like it was similar to that and in that way felt sort of feminine. And at the same time, like women's arts and other miniaturized ways, once you look at it under a microscope or a magnifying glass, you discover that it's, it's really magnificent creativity.
We started this discussion by talking about how you follow up something like ePray love and go back to your fiction route. So how do you follow up something like this?
I think I'm going to just keep doing what I've been doing all along because it seems to be working, which is to just not really worry about the chatter about, you know, what I'm doing or what kind of a writer I am or what category or genre I go into, my serious literary writer, my a chick, let's sell out.
It's just sort of ignore all of that and then just continue very stubbornly and with great love to do what I've always done, which is to follow the threat of my own curiosity wherever it might lead me in the world, which means at this moment that it happens that I'm feeling like the next thing I want to do is another novel.
And that may change over the next year or so, it'll be a while before I have time to write again because I'm promoting this book and I'm doing it very intimately because I really want to bring this book out to people personally.
But I think I want to write another novel. I'm really interested in women's lives and I feel like after writing this corseted buttoned up a book about this sort of repressive era, I might want to write about women going wild in a freer time.
So I'm not a contemporary novel, but definitely we may be shedding the corsets in the next book.
Oh, we look forward to that. I do too.
The new book is The Signature of Things that is published by Viking Elizabeth Gilbert, a great pleasure. Thank you so much for being with us.
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Congratulations on the novel.
Thank you.
I enjoy hearing from our listeners about the show. You can email us at book at wamc.org.
You can also listen again to this or find past book shows at wamc.org.
Sarah Laduke produces our program bookmarks for next week and thanks for listening for the book show. I'm Joe Donne.
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