Art is about personal endeavour and creativity, and in many ways can't be 'taught.' But there was a section in this book where Gilbert is very against creative related higher education. I get that she has interesting friends with interesting stories, but it really just felt like a pile of name drops.Ĥ) An uncomfortable anti-higher education stand point: Studying the arts is a very oxymoronic idea, I can absolutely admit to that. Maybe some of those moments were what some people needed to hear, but for me it was just extremely boring and anti-climatic.ģ) It was extremely name dropping: every few chapters Gilbert would say 'So, I have this famous friend,' and it started to get really grating. It all seems extremely unimportant and clouded to me, muddy and distracting.Ģ) Everything was super cheesy: It's tough to write non-fiction, especially motivational non-fiction, that doesn't end up being preachy or cheesy, I understand that, but this book had me rolling my eyes all over the place. She talks about our need to think of creativity as a spiritual entity, to believe that ideas can leave us and jump into other people, etc. but there were too many fundamental things that I disagreed with/thought were done poorly for me.ġ) Creativity as a type of religion: I don't know if 'religion' is the right word here, but Gilbert's spiritualization of creativity is saturated in this book. I appreciate and respect Elizabeth Gilbert's attempt to inspire creativity, and can fully see why people could love this and take a lot away from it.

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert