So last night I trotted off to the Cadogan (pronounced - I was corrected by an American (!) –  as Cuh-dug-en) Hall to listen to Elizabeth Gilbert talk about her life as a writer.  Well in the life of little Jules, it doesn’t get any better than this: London and Liz.   

I am still glowing with the joy.  Elizabeth Gilbert is articulate, funny, inspiring, self-deprecating; all the qualities you want in a best friend and I was among the many hundreds, mostly women, in the audience who aspired to be just that.  Liz  grew up on a farm with no television alongside some very forthright eccentric family members who loved to drink and tell stories (in that order).  So from a very young age she was hearing very inappropriate (that’s a euphemism) stories and writing them down.  To illustrate just how whacky her gene pool is she tells the story of getting up early one morning to read and her grandfather coming down to start the fire.  Pretty normal so far only he’s stark naked.  There he is poking at the fire completely oblivious to his granddaughter’s embarrassed presence.  She clears her throat and on seeing her he said.

 ”Oh Liz if I knew you were up I would have put my teeth in.”

I can’t now remember all that she said as I sat there spellbound trying to memorise it all hoping that if I sat still and really concentrated some of her talent would seep into me or at least I would pick up some writing tips, but if you go onto her website www.elizabethgilbert.com you can watch the Ted.com speach she gave about the creative process and where she is now.

She sold the screenplay rights to Eat,Pray,Love to Columbia Pictures a while back knowing that she was giving it up.  She very intelligently had no hand in writing the screen play (and did not want to be involved) although did talk on a few occasions to the director, Ryan Murphy, who needed more background detail.  She very generously wrote a letter to Julia Roberts and gave her the prayer beads she wore throughout her travels  but alas from what I can surmise they never met.

 When asked how she felt Julia Roberts played Elizabeth Gilbert, in the film,  she replied ”well”  which I caught along with the upturn of the head, as another euphemism.  Her husband José (the one she meets in the book in Bali) did meet Javier Bardem who plays him in the film of which she said,

“They met several times and talked about love, life, women and the difference between the Brazilian and Spanish culture.  (José is Brazilian and Javier is Spanish).  I think you can tell.” 

Tell and well…She’s a clever girl.   

On creative inspiration she quoted her long and famous interview with Tom Waits in GQ magazine “Sometimes songs are like shy birds in the woods and you have to creep up on them and sometimes they are like pieces of gum that you feel under a table, niggling at you.”  I think I got goosebumps at about this time. 

“Once,” she said, “I awoke from a dream and wrote a short story in 15 minutes but most of the time I am a mule, working away from the early hours to get it done.”

Her advice to writers? Most writers whinge too much and don’t get on with doing the work – that resonated awkwardly and I may have hunched down a little in my seat.

I woke up this morning with two thoughts in my head: A) Euphemisms are so chic  and b) She should definitely ask for those prayer beads back.

It’s Tuesday which means Nathalie from the Auberge does the ballet run and munchkin will not be back until 6pm.  In addition, the weather from southern europe has, for once, won the battle with that of the north resulting in a day of sunshine and warmth usually only reserved for mediterranean resorts.  In any case the fresh air and sunshine will do me good, so I go for a hike.

I decide to take the path that my friend Inger pointed out to me. Inger is a solid, straight talking Brit and when she said it was a good walk, she omitted to say to this flighty, capricious Brit that crampons and an oxygen mask were advisable.  I made it to the top having blown more than a few cobwebs away - my arteries were sandblasted by the effort – and sat down on a log to partake of a sacred moment with my water bottle and my latest read: Lucy Edge’s Yoga School Drop Out. 

Sometimes books are just so good you have to take them everywhere with you and this is one of them.  Edge has written a memoir somewhat in Elizabeth Gilbert’s style (Eat,Pray,Love) about her search for a more meaningful life around the ashrams of India.  I like her writing voice and we share the same attitude to yoga.  We love it, appreciate all it has to offer but want everyone to lighten up a little along the road to enlightenment.  Sometimes yoga instructors or even your fellow classmates (yogis/yoginis) feel the need to impose their beliefs and systems on you and this can become a little…oh here we go… tiresome and then what happens is that the class turns into one long excruciating round of agonising poses as you battle against the enforced brainwashing.  If ever I open a yoga school I shall call it The Laughing Buddha and hold classes in giggling with a series of sniggerasanas.

I make myself comfortable on the log.  I’m at a good bit where Lucy, who is looking for a man on her way to finding bliss, has fallen for an Italian named Bruno but is struggling with raga (attachment to pleasure) on the beach, as the sight of Bruno frolicking in the surf fills her with insatiable desire.

Now, in my opinion romance and yoga always spell trouble.  At the Sivananda yoga school in Geneva I once became besotted with  a teacher who arrived not in the usual orange robes of the Sadhu but stallion like on a Harley Davidson (think Paul Newman in The Great Escape).    I couldn’t concentrate and had problems with my underpinnings throughout the whole lesson.

At one point Lucy meets a Swiss called Emile and I get all excited for her envisioning a life of security full of  fresh air and cheese but alas he is leaving for Switzerland that night.

I am startled as a Darth Vader figure on a bike hurtles towards me.

“Brarbrar” shouts the mountain biking adolescent which I translate as helmet-speak for bonjour!  At least that is what I presume he says as Swiss youth are polite.  Although he possibly could have been shouting Attention! (Get out the Way!) but I’m having a sacred blissful moment sitting on my log and all is good with the world.

After a while I resume my hike and make my way westwards towards the avenue of statues to see if the man in the woods, whom noone has ever seen and I doubt even if he exists, has resumed his woodland art.  I walk further and further into the woods when suddenly I round the bend and see a fire outside the old abandoned hut.  I stop not sure whether to proceed then go a few steps further and see a man with long grey hair in a red checked shirt sitting on the ground in front of the fire.  It is a beautiful tableau, the sun, the birds singing, the sound of rushing water from below and a man enjoying a moment alone with nature at one with the world.  Maybe it is all the thoughts of yoga, maybe I’m a scared chicken but something makes me abandon my plans and turn around not wanting to invade this moment of sacred privacy.

 I”m reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed – A sceptic makes peace with marriage.  She is the author of the bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love where, following a devastating divorce, she takes a year off  and travels to Italy, crying over plate after plate of pasta, to India, seeking spiritual solace in an Ashram and Indonesia where she unwittingly falls in love with a Brazilian gem stone dealer.

 In Committed she explores marriage: examining her own terror of getting hitched again to Felipe the Brazlian; how it has evolved over the centuries and why so many fail spectacularly.  This is Gilbert grown up.  No more crying over bowls of pasta and navel gazing; it is a solid piece of research delving into her own psyche and the collective.

Donning her anthrolophogist hat, the book begins as a social essay charting her days spent with the Hmong in Viet Nam but although interesting you find yourself yearning for her to take off the serious Panama and put on her Aussie Outbacker with the corks dangling around the edges.  I fast forward, skip paragraphs and sometimes whole pages which reminds me of being back at school speed reading Molière.  As a researcher/essayist she gets the salient points across but it is the personal writing that Gilbert is so good at and thankfully she is soon out of the Hmong mud hut and back on dry land with Felipe writing from the  personal aspect which is far more entertaining and enlightening.  (If you have yet to discover Elizabeth Gilbert and you like this blog, go get yourself a copy…that’s me comparing myself to Elizabeth Gilbert ha ha).

So after travelling the world talking to many, many women about marriage Gilbert comes to the conclusion that the problem why so many marriages fail is one of expectation.  We, and by this I presume she means herself and those who have tried and failed to stay committed, (do I sound smug?  maybe a tad) believe that our other halves will not only help pay the bills, look after us when we are ill and put the bins out on Mondays but are also responsible for our happiness at every minute of the day.  I think she is onto something here, at least if I look around at the many around me who are divorced – not counting those who really are better off and should never have got involved with each other in the first place – I think many have blamed each other for their own failings, dissatisfactions and the downright difficulties of staying on an even keel and in happy bunny  mode through a life which is not always forgiving. 

As preparation for marriage to Felipe she lists a whole page of her own character failings and reads them out to him on the banks of the Mekong river.   (Note to reader your kitchen in Reading will do if you don’t happen to have the Mekong handy.)  At the end of a pretty honest, warts and all list which makes us want to be her best friend, she asks Felipe  in typical Gilbert style – which makes you take that wish back because she really can be too much at times -

 Do you still love me?

 To which he replies,

“I know all of this and I’ve been watching you for a very long time and I believe I can accept the whole parcel.” 

This is where you want to throw the book at her because if she doesn’t marry him I know a few thousand women who will.  That’s the thing about Gilbert and her writing, she can get a bit carried away with the me-ness and you find yourself batting for the other side on occasion.  Anyway, having wrung all the romance out of the holy matrimony of “marriage” through analysis, interviews and contemplation she starts to explore the bit that really cannot be explained away no matter what hat you are wearing at the time:  Love.  She writes of  her grandfather burying her grandmother’s ashes on the family farm and manages to convey, without once telling us, the years of love they shared and the ache in his heart since she has gone whilst  the tears gather in the rims of my reading glasses.

Of Felipe – whose faults she lists and lays out to dry in the sun for all the world to read: drinking too much wine and being hopeless with money – she writes: 

“I love this man.  I love him for countless ridiculous reasons.  I love his square, sturdy, Hobbit-like feet.  I love the way he always sings “La Vie en Rose” when he’s cooking dinner. (Needless to say I love that he cooks dinner).  I love how he speaks almost perfect English but still manages to invent marvellous words and has never quite mastered the exact wording or pacing of certain English-language idioms either.  “DONT COUNT YOUR EGGS WHILE THEY ARE STILL UP INSIDE THE CHICKEN’S ASS” is a terrific example.”

And she means that with every flaw in her being.

Well let’s start the new year blog posting with a bang.  I had a little look at some of the other bloggers in my sphere for inspiration and god are they boring.  One wrote a posting about changing her name to Zelda (after Zelda Fitzgerald  no less)  a requirement of being put back into a will or something – as if it were a daily occurence to the likes of you and me darling – and another let her daughter write and by that I mean actually get hold of the keyboard and type - spelling mistakes and all.  Now you, dear reader, get the odd posting from my daughter Alexia-Rose but YOU ALL KNOW THAT IT IS REALLY ME taking the piss out of myself and my family.  Postings from authentic nine year olds are NOT interesting, the syntax is crap and the spelling not even cute. Please take note all bloggers who feel the urge to exploit the under tens.  Much better to write à la Sue Townsend in the mind of Adrien Mole.  Now that’s funny.  Thine own therapist, bring it on.

I may be high on oxygen just having returned from the mountains or Lexi’s headlice shampoo – yes again – but I pledge not to write any pretentious bull this year and if I do you can complain.  In fact I should put a bullshite-o-meter icon on the front page for you to buzz me with.  If anything I hope you see me as an honest warts-and-all writer providing a glimpse into a normal female’s life (one without pretentious claims to the name Zelda) trying to be more than a mother and sometimes dutiful, although to be quite honest not always, wifelet to Mr. J.

Life is hard, life is beautiful and I won’t try to tell it any other way.

PS Thoughts in my head these days:  Why are there so many unhappy women in their fifties?  It’s healthy in fact its essential, to have a really big argument with your partner once a year, preferably between Xmas and New Year;  Is physical pain coming from our conscious mind i.e., my lower back problems and Mr. J’s neck injury? see www.martinbrofman.ch.  Why did I eat so much and sabotage the two kilos lost from flu just before Xmas? Should I invent the headlice pillow a potentially lethal murder weapon but huge money spinner?

2009.  Writing wise it was a bummer.  I started the year well with a publication in The Telegraph thinking that this was the start of a great year of writing only for it to be an ill-fated omen and in fact signalled a terrible drought.  The Geneva Times were unable to continue due to financial reasons and since my writing friend Graham passed away early in the year, writing this blog just hasn’t been the same.  He was my number one reader.  It was akin to working for a jovial editor who would ring you up and tell you how well you were doing or most of the time, because Graham was a prize cynic, what a load of rot you were writing.  But still I owe it to him to continue – and to myself for where would I be without this blog to rant and rave and share in all of life’s glory with all you kind readers who take the time to comment and connect?  If I go inwards, quiet the chatter and listen, I can hear Graham’s voice with that particular asthmatic wheeze on the inhalations saying something along the lines of…Well Jules I liked that phrase you used it rather reminds me of … and off he would go reciting some wonderful anecdote from his past.

In 2010 I will try to remember that I have two ears and only one mouth.  If you are a good listener and most of us living in this frenetic world thinking only of ourselves are not, then you have tapped into something far greater than us non-listeners can ever imagine.  Especially if you are so advanced that you listen properly because then you also hear what is NOT being said.  Les non-dits as they say in French.  Ahhh now that is where the nuggets of gold are to be mined.  A classy friend of mine is famous for never criticising or judging.  How she gets her disapproval  across about a certain person or situation is to say…nothing.  Not to mention it or that person at all and so she neither makes herself look bad nor does she pepper the air with negativity and her message is received loud and clear by those of us who know how to listen to her.

If I listen to myself at the closing of this year, I know there is that familiar feeling of nostalgia tinged with sadness around Christmas time.  I’m  not really sure where this comes from, another year passed?  Longing for Christmases past never to return?  Regrets? Who knows.  Sometimes our own personal depths are unfathomable but at least I can listen and acknowledge and say, okay you again, I get it, I know you are there but I’m going to be happy and joyful.  As we all know, happiness is the bedfellow of sorrow, listen to someone cry and it could also be someone laughing and we’ve all laughed cynically in desperation just as we have cried for joy. 

So in 2010 I pledge to pay heed to my own inner voice as well as others, paying particular attention to the pauses, the silences, the words that are unspoken in the gaps between the exhalation and the inhalation because that is where the truth lies.