Eat, Pray, Live.
Uh — did Hank mean she was a really good … writer?
He about busted a gut when he realized her confusion. It didn’t take Liz long to give up the tough cowgirl idea and head back East and resume what she did best: writing. But that was the thing — it did work, immersing herself, becoming enough of a cowgirl to write about pulling on a bottle around a fire and riding double and falling off and jamming a shoulder into the ground and kissing in Big Sky country. The first short story she sold to Esquire, “Pilgrims,” was a fable about a tough cowgirl toying with her cowboy — a beautiful story, in fact — and her career took off. Which was exactly the problem. Because that became her method. Live it, be it. Charming her way into her subjects’ lives was great fodder for her writing, but kept her wildly ungrounded.
She lived fast. Articles, men, travel, books. She wrote for Spin, then GQ. She’d head out somewhere, have an adventure, write something, then come live in Philly for a while with her big sister Catherine, who went to Bryn Mawr and then Penn. Liz would make quick money waitressing at the American Diner on Chestnut, then head out to do it all over again.
Always, when she was writing, she could make sense of things. It was pure and authentic, like an 11-year-old boy. She published a collection of short stories; a portrayal of a survivalist, The Last American Man (nominated for a National Book Award); a novel. Writing, that was clear. What was blurry was … the rest of it. Especially men. She bounced from one to another, always high drama, always a trail of broken hearts. Wild Liz seems like an exotic stranger to her now. “I was a flat hot mess,” she says, laughing, and for a moment she looks out the window toward the swollen Delaware, as if that Liz is long gone.
“I was like the guy who drove through Yosemite a few years ago with his muffler dragging, setting all these fires. That was me, with men. Like I was driving along, singing at the top of my lungs as the radio was going. There had to be a lot of smoldering acreage before I finally stopped the fucking car. And just got out, and was like” — and here she conjures yet another Liz, an innocent girl from long ago — “Oh, did I do that? Does this have anything to do with me?”
It’s quiet in the Bridge Café, and for a moment I simply look at her. She’s just given me two alternate versions of herself, the wild-ass sex fiend and the femme innocent, but the one before me is … laughing. At herself. As in, What can I say, dude? Here I am. As disarmingly straightforward in person as she comes across on the page.
