and life you love.

My guest today, she's a legend, and she continues to inspire me, and millions of other to live

joyfully and boldly, and with our hearts wide open.

Elizabeth Gilbert is the number one New York Times Best-selling author of Big Magic, and

Eat Pray Love, as well as several other internationally bestselling books.

She's been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award

and the PEN Hemingway Award.

Her new novel, City of Girls is a rollicking, sexy tale of the New York City theater world

during the 1940s.

Liz freaking Gilbert, ooh.

Ooh.

All we do is make sounds.

We don't make words...

Exactly.

I'm so freaking happy that you're back.

I mean, the last time we did this in this format, you were launching Big Magic.

Yeah.

And a lot has transpired in the world in your life.

Yes.

It's a whole different world in every way.

It was a whole different world.

In every way, okay.

Our lives were different, the world was different.

Very much so.

But anyway, I love you.

I've missed you.

I love all of our adventures.

I'm wearing your earrings.

Yeah, so can we talk about that for a minute?

Yeah.

I think we should just begin with that.

Tell us.

I'm wearing Jersey Marie's earrings because I needed a little extra badass power today.

So, I was like, "Can I borrow some of..."

And reached into your box and got the biggest possible ones that I can actually see in my

peripheral vision.

And you know that the earrings are not the right size unless you can see them from your

peripheral vision.

Yeah, no.

Those are Jersey Marie's earrings and they have special power.

It is so funny.

I'm showing Liz some jewelries to pick from, I'm like, "Oh, do you want to see these smaller?"

She's like, "Those."

I was like, "You went straight for Jersey Marie."

I like those ear bangles.

Yeah.

Give me those.

It's the best ever.

And I have to congratulate you.

So, Liz and I were hanging out talking in my dressing room, and I have to say, so City

of Girls, you guys, this book.

You need to get your hands on it.

Get your hands on this book for you and your friends.

It's phenomenal.

Thank you.

By the way, Josh is thanking you because he's always on my butt because he's like, "Can

you just stop reading self-help and personal development books?

Can't you just read a novel?"

And so when I was reading this, he's like, "Are you reading a novel?"

I'm like, "It's Liz Gilbert's new novel and it's fantastic."

Oh, thank you so much.

What was the inspiration?

Talk to us.

Okay.

This is a novel that is set in the New York City theater world of the 1940s.

It's about showgirls, playboys, actresses, dancers and more than anything else, it's

about promiscuous young women who are behaving with incredible sexual recklessness and reaping

consequences.

Wreaking havoc, creating all sorts of problems.

And it's a story I've wanted to tell for a really long time because I've always wanted

to write a book about promiscuous girls whose lives are not destroyed by their sexual desire.

And that is a very hard book to find in the classics of western literature.

Because usually, you get really punished.

You step out of line, you get really... you're under the wheels of the train.

You get poisoned, you're dead in a gutter, you're kicked out of good society, you're

ruined, ruined.

It's always stories of girls and women being ruined because they dared to want to experience

sexuality.

And that has not been my experience and it's not been the experience of a lot of women

that I know.

And I also didn't want to write a fake romantic sexual story where there are no consequences.

So, I had to kind of figure out how to walk this line.

How do I create this story where I have a character who's behaving with abandon?

Stuff happens to her, but she's able to survive her own choices, which I think all women do

and can.

The whole idea of a ruined woman is a kind of fantasy because, god, if that were true,

we'd all be ruined.

Who among us would still be here if we couldn't survive our own choices and our consequences

and sometimes even terrible punishment?

We can survive it.

So, that is what the book is about.

But where did the idea come from?

How long ago did you start feeling in your heart or in your mind or somewhere, just that

this needed to be born?

I was at my great-aunt's house, god, I want to say seven or eight years ago.

And she handed me some out of print books that she was getting rid of.

She's at that age where she's like, "I'm 90, I'm dying.

Take everything."

And so every time you leave her house, you've got piles of stuff.

And amongst these books were a collection of essays written in the 1930s and '40s by

a guy named Alexander Woollcott, who was a theater critic at the time.

And there were interviews and profiles of famous actresses who I had never heard of

because they were theater actresses.

They were British and American divas, these stage divas, opera singers.

And the world that he was talking about just seemed so impossibly glamorous to me.

He was going to the Ritz Carlton to have lunch with a visiting British actress who is starring

in Lady Macbeth and he's writing this whole profile of her and what she's wearing and

what they're drinking.

And I was like, "I want to play in that world.

I want to go back to New York City Midtown, sparkling champagne cocktail, showgirl theater

world and put my promiscuous girls right at the center of it and see what they get up

to."

And so was this a time period...

I'm so curious about the research in this because not only do I instantly just get pulled

into the story, it's so much fun, you are such a...

I'm not blowing smoke up your ass, you are fricking Liz Gilbert.

Your writing is impeccable and I just felt instantly pulled into this time machine, and

it was so glorious.

And so I was thinking to myself, "Goodness, does Liz know all this stuff about this time

period?

Or was this, 'Oh, wow, I have this idea, I want to envelop this world, but I also need

to do a shit ton of research?'"

Shit ton of research.

Okay.

Yeah.

Like four years of research.

Wow.

And which- What does that look like?

Well, it's like everything finding a historian to walk me around Times Square and show me

some existing theaters, but more importantly, to kind of have... paint a word picture so

he could show me what it used to look like.

So, we could stand there and we're right in front of a Nike store, but he's telling me

about the theater that used to be in that place.

And it was also reading a ton of novels that were written in the 1930s and '40s to get

the tone of the way that people spoke.

Interviews with former showgirls and actresses and dancers in their nineties about their

professional lives and their sex lives, which they were more than happy to talk to me about,

which was great.

And just an immersion, an absolute immersion.

It's almost like learning a second language, learning another time and another place is

like learning a new language.

So that by the time you write it, you can write it convincingly.

Really?

Okay.

So, it sounds like, and tell me if I'm tracking right because I just, I get fascinated by

process because I just think pieces of art like this are so brilliant and fascinating.

And we get to enjoy the end product, but I also get really excited about understanding

how things get weaved together and how they're birthed.

So, it sounds like there was idea, you got excited about this time period, and then you

dove into the pool of research hardcore.

Yeah.

Did you then start writing the story or did the characters start coming to you afterwards?

Or was it a blend, where you kind of danced in between?

For me, it starts with the location.

The first thing is New York City, 1940s, I have to learn the theater world, I have to

learn everything about it.

As I start researching, the characters come to me.

So, I'll get inspired by something that I read.

I'll be like, "Oh, it'd be so cool to have a character whose sort of like that."

Somebody who's referenced in a letter that I would read who is a playwright visiting

from LA and complaining that New York City is terrible in white shoes.

That kind of guy.

Like a dandy, bon vivant.

I'm like, "Oh, we could put something like that."

So, it starts to people itself.

And then for me, weirdly, the last piece of it that I have is the actual story.

First, I have the setting, then I have the people and then I have to figure out, what

are those people doing in that setting and what is the story I want to tell here?

And in this case, what I've written is kind of a mystery because it starts, the whole

book is an answer to a mysterious question where this woman whose now in her nineties

gets a letter from we don't know who, from a woman saying, "Now that my mother is dead,

I'm wondering if you'd be comfortable telling me what you were to my father."

And the whole book is her answer of what she was to this mysterious man and we don't quite

know who he is and it takes a long time to get there.

But I kind of wanted to tell a mystery story as well.

And did you, so again, this is...

By the way, y'all, I have to tell you, okay, so this is coming out...

Sometimes I forget when I'm recording interviews, I have to think about when we're actually

publishing them.

This is coming out very soon.

So, you all don't know, but Liz was kind enough to read some of the first pages of my upcoming

book- Which is so good.

I read more than a few pages.

I know you did.

I know, but- I read a lot of it and I would read more because

it's great.

I love you, thank you.

My point in bringing this up is that she gave me some advice and it was just like, "Marie,

for the love of all things holy, please trust Auntie Liz on this one."

And I was like, "Girl, I am trusting you," and reshaped the beginning of my book.

The reason I'm bringing this up is I'm curious if you knew the mystery piece, if you started

there, or if that, it was like, "Whoa, now I know how to start the book in terms of this

mystery."

I had that pretty soon.

The thing that's interesting, and I don't want to give away too much of the book-

Of course.

But I will say that the entire book is an answer to the question, "Vivian, what were

you to my father?"

That somebody's written a letter.

And I myself did not know that answer until we got to where the two of them meet.

And I was like, "Well, I need to find out what they are to each other.

I actually don't know."

And I was willing for it to be anything, but I decided to let magic take over at that point

and to let the two characters themselves show me what they were to each other.

And I was surprised myself by the answer to that question.

And it's so sexy.

Well, thank you.

Like, woo.

I'm in bed reading this and I was like, "When does Josh get home?"

Because again, I am such based on what I do and everything, it's like, I'm reading books

about the brain, and I'm...

You know what I mean?

Spirituality, and all that kind of stuff.

And to get lost in a story and then to have it be so hot.

And to have it- Yay.

That's what I wanted it to be.

Yes.

And to give all of the feels and then to be laughing.

It's phenomenal.

Thank you.