The Elizabeth Gilbert meeting

I was leaving with a one-way ticket to Vietnam when my friend Suzy thrust a copy of Eat, Pray, Love into my hands. It was already a bestseller, but not quite the "super book" it was going to become.
"Read it," she said. "I think it will help."

Devastated by the collapse of a relationship with the boy I thought I was going to marry, I didn't know how to start re-imagining my future. So I was taking off to South-East Asia for as long as my money would hold out, hoping that the backpack on my shoulders would provide the answers I was looking for.

I read the book in one sitting, on the plane ride over. In the darkened cabin, while gliding over continents, I sobbed into its pages. "Someone else understands," I thought, feeling relieved that this grief and failure were not limited to me. And like so many others, I fell in love with the author. I felt like we could be best friends and I knew that if we ever met, we would be.

So when I hear that Elizabeth Gilbert is going to speak in Sydney, I buy tickets the second they go on sale. I would have camped out at the Opera House overnight, but the kindly man at the Information Booth assures me that these things all happen online now, and that I can take my sleeping bag home.

In the hour long Q&A to a virtually sold out Concert Hall, Gilbert proves that she's a performer as much as a writer. She's self-deprecatingly funny, diplomatically opinionated and incredibly candid about herself. Her story about being interviewed by Oprah has us in stitches. And when she says, "I am not tough at all, and I always felt like that was a liability," I think, "Me too! We are so going to be besties."

But this is Gilbert's magical power--the one that catapulted her book to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for a record 187 weeks. Everyone in the Opera House that afternoon thinks of her a friend, just like everyone who read Eat, Pray, Love thinks they know her.

Gilbert claims to be gullible, but I suspect it's self-imposed. She's the childhood friend who knows the cake you're serving is imaginary, but agrees that it's the most delicious thing she's ever eaten. She even helps you convince the skeptics ("It's got pink icing. Here, lick some off." And they find themselves licking the air and nodding, "Mmmm, yummy.")

I had already rehearsed my open gambit to my best-friend-to-be, Liz (I had presumptuously started to call her that in my head.)
"I read your book and I feel like I know you," I could have said. But no, everyone thought that.
"Thank you for writing this. You made me feel not-so-alone at the loneliest point in my life," I wanted to say. But those sort of confessions could wait until we were having tea together in my kitchen. After all, I didn't want her to think I was emotionally unstable.
So I settle on, "You make me laugh," because that's the greatest compliment anyone could ever give me.

Afterwards, my friend and I wait with about a hundred other people--all women--to meet her. I am struck by how different we all are. A mother and daughter on my left are from rural NSW and have driven two hours to see my friend Liz. On my right, an Italian girl who barely speaks English clutches her Italian copy of the book, which is highlighted in several places.

Liz herself is actually funny, and unbelievably gracious. Earlier, on stage, she'd told a joke about her shoes, and I hear thirty different people make the same joke back to her. She plays along every time and doesn't even roll her eyes and say, "Dude, I made that joke with Oprah."

"You are so funny. You are so funny," I practice to myself while waiting. I want to make sure I deliver it correctly. Each time someone tells her how much they love her book, or gives her a compliment, she seems slightly surprised and sincerely grateful. This surprise is disarming--after all, the book did sell 10 million copies. But again, this is part of her charm, a humility coupled with this child-like excitement about the world. Liz could describe paint drying and make it sound like something thrilling. No wonder so many women thought slumming it in an ashram would be fun. It translates into an overwhelming positivity, and I suddenly understand when people talk about being 'bowled over.' Her enthusiasm is a physical thing, and it seems to be unflagging.

She has a crooked smiley-face tattoo on her back. "My sister gave that to me when we were 15 with a needle and ink," she reveals, making us all wish our sisters had maimed us. When asked the somewhat impertinent question about the state of her marriage, she tells us her husband is 'wonderful', pointing excitedly at her ring. She is so emotionally generous, and treats everyone as if they are old friends.

"I love your shoes," says one girl, after she makes the shoe joke and Liz has laughed. "Where are they from?"
"They're Miu Miu!" Liz looks down at her gold pointed flats in delight, as though it's the first time she's ever seen them, and clicks her feet together like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.

When we get to the front, I open my mouth to say, "Hi, you are so funny," and promptly, inexplicably, burst into tears.
"I don't know why I'm crying," I sob, while gasping for air. Liz is nonplussed, but recovers seamlessly. "That's OK, it's nice to meet you," she replies, giving me a hug.
"I thought I'd be so articulate when I saw you," I continue, still crying because she's being so nice and actually hugging me. "You are beautiful!" I understand those sentences are totally unconnected and I am rambling, but I can't seem to control my tears or my mouth.

"Oh, you are so lovely!" Liz exclaims, and doesn't even call her bodyguard to haul me away. Now this is a total lie, because I see myself in the mirror afterwards and my face is red and puffy and I have snot coming out of my nose and my mascara has run all the way down my cheeks. I was never a pretty crier. But my friend Liz is so sincere, I truly believe I am lovely.

She, on the other hand, is beautiful. I hadn't expected that. Her book, as many have pointed out, reveals an insecure, uncertain woman who over-analyses everything, and somewhat ridiculously, we don't expect beautiful people to think too much, or have insecurities. Besides, it hadn't occurred to me that someone so self-deprecating, and such a fine writer, could be so gorgeous. Her skin has this dewy glow, and while she's tall, there's something fragile and fairy-like about her. I promise this isn't even my crazy girl-crush talking; all of us, even the Italian girl who couldn't speak any English, agree she is luminescent.

She kindly asks if we want a photo.
"Yyyeeesssss," I sob, trying not to cry and crying even harder. (Isn't it a good thing I didn't want her to think I was emotionally unstable.)
"This is so humiliating," I whisper to her, and she quips back, "Yeah, because I am such a stranger to humiliation," which makes me laugh and promptly gives me hiccups. Someone had clearly decided that I didn't deserve dignity that day.

So we take a photo, and I apologise again, and she says I'm lovely again, and kisses me on the cheek.

I guess I don't need to tell you that my friend Liz probably isn't going to call me, and we probably aren't going to have tea in my kitchen. That's OK, because I got to meet her, and it's nice to know that someone you fell in love with is exactly the way you imagine them, except funnier and more beautiful. And my friend Liz thinks I'm lovely.

Besides, I'll always have the photo of us together. In it, Liz has her arms around my friend and I. They are both smiling and look wonderful. And then there's me, face crumpled, mouth down turned, sobbing red-faced at the camera, clutching my (now signed) copy of the book and thinking, "You are so funny."

The Word Collection

My father, being something of a hoarder, collected lots of things—stamps, coins, books, old photographs—you name it, my father had it. He was a collector of collections. Perhaps it was this childhood spent in accumulated junk that has made me love minimalist spaces, bare of anything but a fresh coat of white paint. But Dad insisted we collect something, suggesting it was both a hobby and an investment. You never knew when your collection could be worth something, he told us.

“I will collect words,” I told him when I was eight.

There were two reasons for this. Firstly, words don’t take up any space. I could collect for a lifetime, and never run out of words and never run out of room to keep them. But more importantly, I adore words. Learning to read is, to this day, the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. (Well, that, and my ill-advised affair with a gorgeous French boy, but that’s a different sort of pleasure altogether.)

So I carry around a battered little notebook and whenever I hear something that seems worthwhile, interesting, new or profound, I add it to my collection. And each year, I find one sentence that trumps it all.

Last year, I didn’t think I would find that elusive sentence.  “We are the sum total of our parents,” I read in a book. “Hearts are made to be broken,” my girlfriend Bea told me. “You make everyone you love feel safe,” a friend’s husband said to her. (How lovely a sentiment. Would that I could make someone feel like that one day.) But none of these felt like The One.

Then, at the end of the year, I took up Italian lessons and learnt the most wonderful sentence of all.

“C'è un bar all’angolo.”

It rolls off the tongue, full of unfamiliar sounds. It is a sentence requiring gesticulation.When I say it—c'è un bar all’angolo—I feel foreign and exotic and possibly fluent in Italian, and what a feat that is, to be exotic to one’s own self.

It means, “There is a bar at the corner.”

There is a bar at the corner. How wonderful! How comforting to know that whatever situation we find ourselves in, there is a bar at the corner. As a child, my mother’s sentence was “Let’s make a cup of tea.” It was how she greeted news both joyful and disastrous. From cancer to her first grandchild, my mother’s cups of tea marked every significant occasion of my childhood. To this day, I believe in the improbably curative properties of a hot beverage.

But now I had my own sentence of comfort. “Not to worry,” I told my friend when she called me to say she’d lost her job. “C'è un bar all’angolo.” And then again, when she found a new job, I reminded her that “C'è un bar all’angolo.” It is a sentence heavy with promise, an unlikely collection of vowels that suggest honey coloured sunshine and doe-eyed Italians.

I spoke it sternly to my reflection in the bathroom mirror, right before a big meeting. It calmed my nerves to hear it—as the words rolled off my tongue with the fluency of regular use, I felt like the aloof, disdainful, exquisite Italian women I had come across in Florence and Milan, women for whom uncertainty was surely an alien quality. “C'è un bar all’angolo,” I told myself again, and it sounded almost like a threat.

This year has been a lot more forthcoming. Three days after New Year, I found the sentence.

“It hurts as much as it is worth,” wrote Zadie Smith in an essay for the New York Book Review. The words rolled around in my head for a long time afterwards, and I whispered them to myself as I walked home. The universe felt like a different place after I collected that sentence. Suddenly, the two years I had spent mourning an ex-boyfriend was no longer a waste. Instead, it was a triumph! I had loved someone so much, it hurt for two years.

Later, when I went running (an activity I absolutely loathe but force upon myself to justify the copious amounts of cheese I inadvertently consume), I felt I simply couldn’t go another step—the air was burning into my lungs and my muscles screamed for redemption. “It hurts as much as it is worth,” I reminded myself, and continued up the hill.

So you see, it is not so ridiculous a collection to own, my notebook of words. Over the years, they have provided me with advice, giggles and comfort. They have made me wiser and one day, just as my father plans to leave his collection of stamps and books and coins and photographs to his children, I hope to leave this collection of words to mine. Until then, I share them as needed. Last night, a friend came over in tears, her heart broken by a casual love affair. “It hurts as much as it is worth,” I reminded her gently. But wonderful though that is, she needed more immediate consolation. So I told her, “C'è un bar all’angolo,” and indeed, that was comforting a thought for both of us.