2 Questions Every Girl is Asking Herself

Chapter 81

As if to prove me right, Elizabeth Gilbert is coming to town. She's making a couple of stops in London to promote her new novel, The Signature of All Things. I signed up. Seeing now that I even get to meet and converse with my long-time idol is only further evidence of the rightness of my choice to be in London. It's not like she ever comes to Vancouver.

At an intimate setting in Bloomsbury, Liz was doing a cocktail reception followed by an interview. I had been thinking for days of what to ask her. But when I saw her at last, on the patio with a golden ring of Christmas lights behind her, I got all choked up I couldn't speak at all. How can I describe what I felt in that instant? I had so much to say yet so little time. Her book had inspired my journey, and my life is so completely different from what it was two years ago. My path may seem clumsy and messy, but it is resembling me now, thoroughly.

Without saying a word, Liz hugged me.

Later on, we all gathered in the living room for the interview. Liz talked about her writing process, her four shoeboxes of index cards used for research, and her brushes with creativity. I sat in the back row in the crowded room (all the front row seats were taken), straining my neck to get a better view, scribbling down notes, hanging on to her every word. I was so insanely psyched to be there, I felt heat rising off my pores in the middle of winter.

She said inspiration is like a stroke of luck. If she had relied on inspiration alone, she would have produced one book in her entire writing career. Her only brush with inspiration came when she was riding a commuter train in New York. The story came to her perfect and whole. But that was the only time it happened, and she rides a lot of commuter trains. For the rest of the time, she just works like a mule.

She talked about how she was a diner waitress and then a bartender before she got her break in writing. I was so relieved to hear this. The job at Browns feels like a big step back, but perhaps this is just part of being an artist.

After the event, I stepped out into the evening air, and saw Liz drive off in a black Adison Lee. I watched her leave with a sickness in my heart, but it was a pleasing kind of sickness. Because when you experience an evening so exciting, you are sad to see it end, but still grateful that it happened. Prior to this, writers and artists seemed to me like "a different kind of people". People who possess extraordinary abilities and exist only on TED talks or the glossy pages of magazines far away from the narrow confines of my Vancouver environs. I couldn't believe how close I had come with the great Elizabeth Gilbert. It didn't matter that I spend a few hours a day doing something that wasn't very prestigious. As long as I get to be here, it is all worth it.

***

Having come to terms with my new employment, I start to like my time at Browns. I began to develop an interest in the clothes I pulled. Which are sometimes beautiful, sometimes bizarre, but always expensive. I found their creative details clever and amusing, like Charlotte Olympia's Pandora Box clutches, or Alexander Wang's mesh cut-out dresses. Thoughtful additions like having a polaroid photo of the shoe attached to the shoebox, so you know what's inside when they are in storage; or cute care instructions inside the shoe box, as if the shoes themselves were saying, "treat me kindly," really piqued my curiosity. I wonder if these unique touches are the things that separate designer shoes from ordinary shoes.

Still, I'm starting to enjoy this fairy land of pretty things. And digging for clothes in the warehouse has become good vocabulary practice for big brands I knew very little about.

One the seventh day of my trial, my boss, Rachel, pulled me to the side. We have a good rapport and she likes to read. The HR lady has already asked me to fill out the paperwork: address, social security number, the works.