-That's a pretty nice reception.

- Nice place you have here.

[Laughter]

- Good afternoon everybody.

My name is Caroline Baum and I'm delighted to be here with

you today for what I think is going to be a very

inspirational experience.

Um, Elizabeth, you- if you'd been here yesterday,

I suppose we would have had to call this talk

"Heat, Pray Love."

Youů poor Elizabeth was driving back from the, um,

south coast yesterday and spent most of yesterday in a

car, um, so, she deserves a medal, I think, for being

here today.

Um, most of you will have been asked when you booked

your tickets whether you would like to ask a question

today, and so I'll be incorporating some of those

questions into our conversation.

And, I hope, that those of you that don't get your

question asked will still get some of the answers that

you're seeking from the conversation that we're about

to have.

And, at the end of this session, Elizabeth will be,

um, in the foyer and looks forward to saying hello to you.

And, there will be some pre-signed books, um, her new

book, which is her great-grandmother's cookbook,

um, which will be available for sale.

So, you will get a chance to say hello then.

Um, you know you've made it when your bestselling book is

satirised by Barry Humphries,

[laughter]

not to mention The Simpsons and also our own local

comedienne Judith Lucy who wrote a book called Drink,

Smoke Pass Out in your honour.

[Laughter]

- I saw it in a book store.

I have to say I think that's one of the best ones I've

seen yet.

- Yeah, it's not bad. - Very nice.

- Umů - I approve.

- I thought that, given that the talk today is supposed to

be about life after Eat, Pray, Love that, maybe it

would be useful for us to go back to before Eat, Pray, Love

in order that we can kind of understand the

trajectory that you've been on a little better.

Um, and I guess I wanted to start by asking you what your

definition of success was before this tsunami kind of

hit you.

So, when you were growing up on your father's Christmas

tree farm with two goats and honey bees and a television

that didn't work very well, what was your dream and what

was your idea of how to go about that?

- Um, I always say that I'm very lucky because I've only

ever wanted to do one thing with my life and I've only

ever been good at one thing.

And it's, I think it's rare that you get both of those

pieces, right?

Um, I, I don'tů I'm not interested in anything but

writing and I'm not good at anything but writing so it

makes your path extremely clear.

You know?

I have friends who are multi-talented and they're

cursed by it.

And I'm notů I do think of it as a curse.

Um, they're pulled in, in many different directions.

That's never been a problem for me, um, and so it's been

pretty simple trajectory.

There's been so much other stuff in my life that I've

made messy and complicated but, for some reason, the

writing path has been straight and narrow, um, from

about the age of nine on, um, maybe even earlier.

And, the idea was to just, um, write as much as I could.

Start, I started sending short stories out for

publication when I was about 18.

Um, I collected rejection notes for six years.

Um, that was okay.

My goal was to get published before I was dead.

And people

[laughter],

people in my family live a

really long time.

So, I thought:

"I got a long arc here."

And, it's not like, you know, it's not like being a dancer

where, if you haven't done it by the time you're 22,

you know?

Um, I had, I knew that, that you only mellow more into

your work as a writer.

So, I wouldů took the long view.

And, um, and, and, really honestly, from the beginning,

my only goal was that I, someday, wanted to have

something published somewhere.

- I'm interested in this, because I know that in your

20s you left Connecticut, and you went off to Wyoming, and

you became a cowgirl.

And you, I think, cooked on a ranch, and you did various

kind of very physical, very masculineů

-Yeah. -ůvery rusticated things.

And, um, I wondered whether, in fact, you were on a kind

of personal quest there?

That you could talk a little bit about exploring that

masculine world at, because you were a tomboy weren't you?

- No. That's theů

- I thought you were? -No, look!!

Um, no I wasn't and I'm not.

And, um, and, in fact, I was on a quest to make a man out

of myself.

I think that's really what I was trying to do.

Um, I come from very tough people and I'm not a tough person.

And I've always felt that it was a liability.

Um, I, my mother's tough, my dad's tough, my sister'sů macho.

I mean, there are, like, people, my, my whole Gilbert

side of the family.

My uncle refers to them all as oxen, you know?

Um, the Olsen side of the family are all Swedish

immigrants, so they're like lazy and, no I'm just

kidding, they're not at all.

They're just, and I always felt like weak, you know?

I always felt like I was the weakest link in, in every

family gathering.

I was a cry baby, and a sensitive, and emotional and,

um, and I wasn't a pretty kid but I wanted to be, and, um,

and, and somehow I just wanted to overcome that sense

of, um, helplessness.

And, I think that's what drew me to, to the west and to

ranching, which I wasn't very good at.

[Laughter]

But I made friends, you know?

- Well, and you, you discovered people who were

incredibly competent and who lived by a very different set

of values.

And, and you wrote about those people very memorably.

And, that's why I was sort of leading you, hoping that you

were going to talk about, um, Eustace Conwayů

-Mm. - because he is such a, an

extraordinary character and I was just wondering, for

people who haven't read your books from before Eat Pray Love,

whether you could talk a little bit about what you

learnt from encountering someone like Eustace Conway

in terms of values.

- Um, Eustace Conway, ah, for those of you who haven't read

it, is, is a guy who I profiled in a book called The

Last American Man.

Um, he was one of the most fascinating people I'd ever met.

I did a magazine article about him for GQ.

He was the brother of a cowboy who I met on the ranch

in Wyoming and, even among that set, where people were

pretty macho and pretty tough, they were all like:

"And then there's Eustace."

You know, he was like, sort of at the Navy Seal level of,

um, outdoorsmen.

And he had left his family's suburban home when he was 17,

moved into the woods of North Carolina, and has been living

there ever since.

He's a utopian, he's a visionary, he's, um, he's a tyrant.

Um, he's a very complicated, difficult person, who I spent

probably four years of my life with, um, writing this

book about him.

And, um, came away, ah, came away with a very different

idea of our heroes.

I mean, I think I started the book with a real sense of

hero worship and came awayů um, there's a line that

Ursula Le Guin says, that she says, um:

"The other side of heroism is very sad;

women and servants know this."

Um, and when I was closer to his life, and you saw the

sort of, the sadness of, of his, um, ferociousness, um,

and the casualties of the people who admired him, and

followed him into the woods and, and just the

complications of being so grandiose.

Um, it, it tempered me for hero worship in the future.

- Because it's interesting, in the book you

de-romanticized the idea of a man who lives in the woods.

Because you say that, when people in cities talk about

the woods, they get this sort of nostalgic look and they go:

"Oh, the woods, the woods."

And Eustace's view of life in the woods is harsh and brutal.

-Yeah. -But then, you tell this

story about seeing him talking about his life to a

group of school children and that crystallises something

for you about authenticity.

So, when you saw Eustace Conway talking with these

children, you saw authenticity that you wanted

didn't you?

- Well, he, he's incredibly compelling, um, and, and very real.

Um, and his values are earnest.

Um, I don't think you can be a fundamentalist of any

stripe if you don't have earnest values.

Ah, he, he believes, quite rightly, that we are driving

this car off a cliff environmentally, um, on the

planet earth and that America is leading that car chase

over the edge of the precipice.

He wants to transform the way we think about resources.

He wants to transform the way that we think about nature.

Um, and he has this kind of messianic ability, especially

with young people.

They're awestruck by him.

Um, and it's beautiful to watch.

And, whenever you see him in action like that, it's

incredibly moving, and it's incredibly stirring.

And it's incredibly unrealistic.

And it's incredibly un-pragmatic.

And, it comes with, um, a whole other sort of darkness

as well, um, that, that I needed to get away from after

a while.

- 'cause I was going to ask you whether you think you're

very susceptible to charismatic leader figures?

Are youů

- I'm susceptible to everything

[laughter]

- But are youů - But, yeah?

-ůare you a follower? - Oh, hell yeah.

What, what do you have? What are you selling?

I'm buying it.

What do you believe in?

I believe it.

You know? What's the fad?

I'm drinking acai juice right now, and pomegranate.

Like whatever!

I'm, I'm the permeable membrane, you know?

I'm a, I'm a Cancer.

Um, I, I just believe. I'm very gullible.

Um, it's why I think it's funny that I was a journalistů

-Mm. - Um, because I think it, it

doesn't really make for great journalism

[laughter].

Um, I believe anything people tell me about themselves and

then I report it, you know?

Um, [laughter]

like people, you know, people would be like:

"I'm the best six string guitar player the east coast

of the United States has ever produced"

and I'll be:

"This guy is the best sixů"

You know?

I fact checked it because I asked him and he told me

[laughter].

Um, you know, and there's a, you know, that's kind of just

how I am, and I'm always going to be that way.

Um, there's, there's nothing for it really, you know?

Like I keep waiting to, I mean, the world has beaten a

bit of it out of me, but I come back for more all the time.

Um, and on the other hand, there's great benefits of

being like that.

-Mm. -You know, there's a great

openness and, um, people trust me and should.