Retiring the whip of Self-Help

( & my break up with Elizabeth Gilbert)

The now legendary self-help book “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear” was crack for my creative insecurity. It wasn’t Elizabeth Gilbert’s fault and it wasn’t exactly mine. We were all doing our best — hers to teach, and mine to receive her wisdom — but I’d like to take responsibility for my part in what happened.

“Big Magic” explodes the age-old image of the tortured artist in favor of “a different way…to cooperate fully, humbly, and joyfully with inspiration.” For a book about writing, “Big Magic” is shockingly full of positivity. So I perceived it as a gift from the gods at a time when I really wanted to break through my creative blocks. “Show up for your work day after day after day after day and you might get lucky enough some random morning to burst right into bloom,” Gilbert writes, and then goes on to wonder, “Since when did creativity become a suffering contest?”

Well, since you asked, Liz, since the very beginning. Since before I was born.

I’ve been listening to the maxims of creatives since I was a fetus. While I was in utero, somewhere in northern rural England, my painter mother sat in the kitchen, before an easel, her hand on her stomach. “Don’t paint!” she told me. “It’s too painful!” Then my writer father stumbled in for a whiskey refill, pausing to shout at me through the wall of my mother’s stomach, “Painting is easy! Just never ever write, O.K.? It’s a bloody nightmare!”

Unlike my parents who led me to reject the arts and find something easy to do, the only messages Gilbert received was to stick steadfast to her dream. Raised by honest to goodness hard working Americans, writes, “I never recall my parents expressing any worry whatsoever at my dream of becoming a writer.” Reading that, I had to look at my own jealousy- never a fun emotion to examine.

Despite my heavy programming (or maybe because of it), I’ve always been obsessed with creativity. I wanted to be an artist but I was steered towards the more stable terrain of Oxford university. After an literature education that had me pick postmodern holes in every brilliant but tormented writer in the canon, I further cemented my understanding that the fate of the writer was worse than death. So I turned to…