But the woman challenged her, saying that from her perspective it looked like Gilbert put time into everything except the writing that she said was most important to her. Gilbert felt offended and immediately defended herself. It was: “What are you willing to give up to have the life you keep pretending you want?” I can honestly tell you my life hinged on that question,” Gilbert recalled. “At the end, she asked me the single most important question anybody has ever asked me in my entire life. In short, she didn’t have time, and she didn’t have privacy. Gilbert said she had too much work, and was busy with a boyfriend, and her roommates were very distracting. Then, one night, Gilbert saw her at a party, where the woman politely asked how her writing was going. “My plan for this mentorship relationship was to be in her presence and what would happen is all that would migrate to me.” And, what that meant in my world was that I would semi-talk to her,” Gilbert told 10,000 women at the 2019 Pennsylvania Conference for Women. “Almost a football field.When she was 25 and had moved to New York City to pursue a career as a writer, Elizabeth Gilbert saw a woman in her neighborhood who seemed to be living her dream life: one of creativity that was not taken up by other day jobs. But Gilbert recently called me to tell me that after more than five years of intensive rehabilitation she was able to take her first steps with the aid of a walker. Doctors thought she would never walk again. Shortly before Willingham’s execution in February, 2004, Gilbert was in a car accident and was paralyzed from the neck down. She began to investigate his case, revealing disturbing flaws in the evidence used to convict him and raising the prospect that he was innocent.
A poet and school teacher, Gilbert had gotten to know Willingham when he was on Death Row for allegedly setting a fire that killed his three children. One of the most compelling and indomitable characters I encountered was Elizabeth Gilbert, who was a subject of my New Yorker story “ Trial by Fire,” about the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham-a story that is included in my book.
In researching the stories for my new book, “ The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession,” I’ve spent time with con men, cold killers, squid hunters, sandhogs, a death squad real-estate agent, arson sleuths, Sherlock Holmes fanatics, a baseball icon, an imposter, F.B.I.
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