Let it goとGoing home

ようやくLet it go（歌詞の訳）という曲を聞きました。「ありのままで」という日本語の歌詞も自分はいいと思いました。

やや『アナと雪の女王』に便乗して無理矢理絡めた感がありますが（汗）、Eat Pray Loveを出した後の葛藤を語ったエリザベース・ギルバートのTEDスピーチも「周りを気にせず自分らしく」という同じようなメッセージで素晴らしかったです。



But in both cases, it turns out that there is also the same remedy for self-restoration, and that is that you have got to find your way back home again as swiftly and smoothly as you can, and if you're wondering what your home is, here's a hint: Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself. So that might be creativity, it might be family, it might be invention, adventure, faith, service, it might be raising corgis, I don't know, your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential.

For me, that home has always been writing. So after the weird, disorienting success that I went through with "Eat, Pray, Love," I realized that all I had to do was exactly the same thing that I used to have to do all the time when I was an equally disoriented failure. I had to get my ass back to work, and that's what I did, and that's how, in 2010, I was able to publish the dreaded follow-up to "Eat, Pray, Love." And you know what happened with that book? It bombed, and I was fine. Actually, I kind of felt bulletproof, because I knew that I had broken the spell and I had found my way back home to writing for the sheer devotion of it. And I stayed in my home of writing after that, and I wrote another book that just came out last year and that one was really beautifully received, which is very nice, but not my point. My point is that I'm writing another one now, and I'll write another book after that and another and another and another and many of them will fail, and some of them might succeed, but I will always be safe from the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live.

プレッシャーは相当のものだったでしょうね。その中から自分を取り戻すのは大変だったに違いありません。現在は、必読の女性作家21人に選ばれたり、昨年の本がTIMEの2013年のベスト10の小説に選ばれたり、高評価を得ています。

These Are the 21 Female Authors You Should Be Reading
TIME Staff April 16, 2014

Elizabeth Gilbert
Gilbert has a reputation as the patron saint of any woman undergoing a well-funded mid-life crisis thanks to her bestselling memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. But she’s also an accomplished novelist who published 2013′s well-reviewed The Signature of All Things, a charming bildungsroman about a spirited botanist who uses science to organize her heart and world. Gilbert will also appear on Oprah’s upcoming The Life You Want Weekend tour.


Top 10 Fiction Books
By Lev Grossman and Radhika Jones @leverusDec. 04, 2013

5. The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert

top10-fiction
Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love made her a household name; now she reminds us that she began her career as a writer of fiction with this masterly tale of overflowing sensual and scientific enthusiasms in the 19th century. Gilbert’s heroine is Alma Whittaker, a cerebral, insatiably curious spinster who wanders the globe in search of exotic flora but who stumbles on that more elusive and baffling natural phenomenon, love. —Lev Grossman