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"FacebookPinterest\n\nAlma Whittaker, the big, brilliant, sexually thwarted botanist at the heart of Elizabeth Gilbert\u2019s new novel, The Signature of All Things, is born in nineteenth-century Philadelphia seemingly with two strikes against her. &amp;quot;The baby was neither a boy,&amp;quot; Gilbert writes of Alma, &amp;quot;nor was it pretty.&amp;quot; Gilbert follows her through a version of the nineteenth century brimming with problems that still vex us in the twenty-first: the malefactions of Big Pharma, the rift between spirit and science, the unwillingness of pompous dinner guests to shut the hell up. Alma even goes on a post-traumatic, globetrotting journey of self-discovery that may be a precursor to the one Gilbert made famous in her 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love. In our interview, Gilbert talked about the challenges of writing historical fiction and the joys of inventing Victorian-era pornography.\n\n\n\nGQ: Can you tell me about reading a book that changed you or shaped you?\n\n Elizabeth Gilbert: The book that most influenced this one and that has knocked me out in recent years is Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Of course, I\u2019m not the only one knocked out by it. For her to win the Man Booker for Wolf Hall and for its sequel is kind of like &amp;quot;The Godfather&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The Godfather Part II&amp;quot; both getting the Oscar. It\u2019s an unprecedented, amazing achievement and incredibly deserved. I read Wolf Hall twice completely and then three times in bits trying to figure out how she did it and what she was doing., because I had already started research on this novel and I was really intimidated trying to figure out how to write a nineteenth-century novel. And then, one day I realized that what she had done was: she wasn\u2019t trying to pretend that she wrote a novel in the sixteenth century. So there are none of those candlestick-y affectations: the whale oil lamp, where there\u2019s just too much detail. It was such a simple code to break. She\u2019s writing as a contemporary novelist about the sixteenth century, about events in the past, without at the same time using any anachronism. And that was the key that opened the door for me.\n\nGQ: You went looking for that key in her book?\n\n Elizabeth Gilbert: Yes. I had already done probably a year of research on my book and what was frightening me about it was: What\u2019s the voice going to be here? Like, if I tried to write a book and sound like George Eliot, I think that you would be annoyed by it. And then I thought: The voice is my own! It\u2019s me writing this book. It\u2019s not a mask. I\u2019m the on-the-ship narrator, and I\u2019m really on the ship because I\u2019ve got two centuries of distance on these people. So I really see the whole story. There\u2019s a broader perspective. \n\nGQ: Can you think of a sentence or a passage in Wolf Hall that has stayed with you?\n\n Elizabeth Gilbert: There\u2019s a great moment, the first scene between Henry VII and our hero, who is almost like one of our great television antiheroes, Thomas Cromwell\u2014someone who history sees as a villain, but who I now love. He has his first encounter with Henry VIII, they\u2019re sort of testing each other and it\u2019s like cage wrestling of the wits, between a king and somebody who came from the gutter and has now risen to stand before the king. Cromwell isn\u2019t going to be pushed around or back down, but he knows the right tone to take. The first thing that Henry does is challenge Cromwell by bringing up something that Cromwell had said in Parliament six years ago.\n\n&amp;quot;You said I was not to lead my troops. You said if I was taken, the country couldn\u2019t put up the ransom. So what do you want? You want a king who doesn\u2019t fight? You want me to huddle indoors like a sick girl?&amp;quot;&amp;quot;That would be ideal, for fiscal purposes.&amp;quot;&amp;gt;\n\n\u2014from Wolf Hall&amp;gt;  by Hilary Mantel\n\nIt\u2019s this insouciance, but also this worldliness and this kind of macho, face-to-face sizing each other up. I find it to be one of the most exciting moments of two important people meeting. And I used it as an inspiration for the first scene between Henry Whittaker and Joseph Banks [in The Signature of All Things]. There would be not that scene without this scene. It\u2019s an ambitious, poor person confronting an affluent, intelligent person who has all the power. And we\u2019ll see who has all the power by the end.\n\nGQ: That scene in your book that you\u2019re talking about has one of my favorite lines, when the streetwise kid Henry calls himself &amp;quot;a useful little fingerstink.&amp;quot; I love that. Is that an example of the advantage you have, as a 21st century novelist writing about the 19th? \n\n Elizabeth Gilbert: Right. Dickens wouldn\u2019t use that word because it\u2019s obscene, but it\u2019s a word that was used at the time, so it\u2019s historically accurate and that\u2019s where I get away with it, writing from my perch in 2013.\n\nGQ: Did you find it somewhere?\n\n Elizabeth Gilbert: I did. I read so many slang dictionaries. It was probably in one of those. But I do remember immediately being like, I\u2019m so taking that. There\u2019s no way that word is not showing up in here.\n\nGQ: How important was the digging, the research?\n\n Elizabeth Gilbert: It\u2019s everything. I couldn\u2019t do it without it. I\u2019m not particularly inventive. If you left me in this room and told me to write a novel, I wouldn\u2019t be able to do it. But if you gave me two years in your public library around the corner, I could. It all comes from sort of mixing the true and the invented. I\u2019m not a fabulist. I\u2019m more of a reporter. Even when I was a short-story writer, I left home and went traveling around to collect stories to hear what people were saying. I think my weakness as a writer is a limited imagination, and I think my strength is a talent for reflecting the world, or sort of curating things out of the world and putting them into books. My sister is a young adult novelist and when we grew up, she was like Scheherazade--lock her in a closet and she\u2019ll write you a six-volume epic with time travel and dragons and all this kind of stuff. And I sort of wish I had that, but I don\u2019t; I have a different mind. It doesn\u2019t work that way.\n\nGQ: Alma Whittaker makes all kinds of important discoveries in your book, including intellectual and scientific ones. But one of the most important to the novel is the sexual discovery she makes in the bookbinding closet in her father\u2019s library. It\u2019s a fabulous scene. Was it a fun scene to write?\n\n Elizabeth Gilbert: I\u2019ll tell you what was fun to write was fake nineteenth-century pornography. Inventing the book that she found was a blast.\n\nGQ: Right, &amp;quot;the light coating of nut oil upon the hood of passion.&amp;quot; \n\n Elizabeth Gilbert: But then, it\u2019s the only place in the book where I got stuck: just as she\u2019s going into the binding closet. I couldn\u2019t do it to her. She had become so dear to me, I felt like I was going to humiliate her. I didn\u2019t want to shame her. So I started to talk myself out of that whole idea. I\u2019d known from the beginning that I wanted her to be really carnal. It drives the whole story in a way. But, then I started to balk and feel like if I pull that piece out, the whole rest of the plot crumbles. So I ended up going out for lunch with this woman named Mary Bly, who\u2019s also known as Eloisa James. She\u2019s a brilliant scholar, and she has this alter ego who writes Regency romance novels. It\u2019s in her contracts that she is required to write two-and-a-half sex scenes per book. And they have to appear on like page 40, 80 and 120 and &amp;quot;half&amp;quot; means either masturbation or oral sex. It\u2019s all in the contracts. So she knows how to do this. And so I expressed my anxiety about what I was doing, and she says, &amp;quot;It\u2019s actually really simple; you just have to ask yourself what would she actually do? Or if it\u2019s two people together, what would they actually do? And then just have them do it.&amp;quot; And I felt sort of embarrassed that after twenty years of writing, no one had ever given me that advice for everything your character does. It just felt like, my God, that\u2019s like the sorcerer\u2019s stone right there. That\u2019s what you have to ask yourself in every moment: What would your character actually do? And let them do it. And that opened it up and then it was fun.\n\nGQ: Why was it important for Alma not to be beautiful?\n\n Elizabeth Gilbert: Because as a woman I get frustrated that there are only two endings for women\u2019s characters in novels. You\u2019re either rescued or destroyed by men, right? So you\u2019re either married to landed gentry or you are under the wheels of the train because you\u2019ve been violated and disgraced. So that\u2019s it. And I wanted to write a book where a woman didn\u2019t have either of those two endings; she was neither rescued nor was she ruined. She was disappointed, but she endured, which I think is what most women\u2019s lives are about.\n\nGQ: And some men\u2019s lives.\n\n Elizabeth Gilbert: We aren\u2019t really good at being disappointed and getting over it eventually and with dignity. So that was part of it, but also, in most books when a woman is sexual or sensual, it is telegraphed in her appearance in really Jessica Rabbit-y ways. Like she has heavy breasts and flashing eyes and auburn hair and dangerous beauty, and that\u2019s how you know that she\u2019s a sexual person. And biology and reality don\u2019t line up with that; that\u2019s not really how it works. There\u2019s an internal clockwork that is invisible and has nothing to do with outer appearances and is much more interesting than that simplistic analysis. Alma\u2019s a tree among flowers. For the women of her time, she\u2019s towering in every way: physically, emotionally, intellectually, sexually. And that is going to bring itsown challenges and rewards."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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