Two

TWO HEADS ON A PIKE

ELIZABETH GILBERT

In late 2005, I was working on the final edits for Eat, Pray, Love. The manuscript had already been through several rounds of in-house copyediting, but was still stubbornly riddled with typos and errata. Some of these were decidedly my own fault—I write fast and sloppily—but others were just random bloopers (including, oddly, numbers that kept appearing within words, almost demonically, for reasons nobody at my publishing house could explain). Even my Brazilian sweetheart was finding mistakes, and English is his fourth language. I begged my editors to run the book through yet another round of corrections, only to be informed that the galley was just fine as it was. But it wasn’t.

Desperate to catch all these lingering errors before the book went to press, I tried to think of somebody with a fresh and precise eye who might be able to clean up my book once and for all. My thoughts turned to a friend I’d made a few years before at an artists’ colony—a woman named Anne Connell, who was neither an editor nor a writer. Anne was, in fact, a beautiful painter, whose painstakingly detailed work suggested a mind of exceptional patience and precision. She was also—if our evenings of after-dinner word games were any indication—a genius with language. I remembered her as someone who selected her every word carefully before she spoke, as though using the sharp, silvery tips of some finely tuned verbal cocktail fork. And she had been on Jeopardy! She was really smart.

So I sent a copy of the galley to Anne, with a plea that she take a look at it. She was humble and self-deprecating (“I’m an artist, not an editor!”) but agreed out of concern to examine the pages. The next week, she sent me an email whose tone, message, and grammatical scrupulousness completely exemplified what I would eventually come to think of as The Anne Connell Editorial Experience: “Dear Liz,” she wrote. “Whoever copyedited this manuscript should fall on his/her/their sword(s) in utter disgrace.” She found more than a hundred errors. I was relieved and dazzled and vindicated. And I would never again publish a book without her.

Now we have done three books together, Anne and I. This is how it goes: I send my manuscript to Anne when I think it’s basically ready for the world to see, but I don’t send it to my publisher until Anne thinks it’s completely ready for the world to see. What happens in the interim is an amazing months-long process in which Anne lets loose her mad genius in the margins of my manuscript. Without changing my voice at all, she changes everything. She marks my misspellings and mispunctuations, of course—but also catches plot inconsistencies, factual inaccuracies, geographic (and even architectural) implausibilities, dates that don’t quite line up between chapters, my overly enthusiastic tics and exaggerations (must I use the word very so very much?), and surprising anachronistic usage. (Among the modern words Anne jettisoned from my recent historical novel included “jettison” itself as well as—appropriately enough—“nit-picking.”)

While never veering into the realm of disrespect, Anne does not treat either me or my text like a precious object. She teases me and challenges me. She calls me out when I use words incorrectly (what she refers to as “Inigo Montoya Alerts,” as in: “I do not think that means what you think it means.”). I find myself laughing aloud as I read her edits. I laugh at my own exposed foolishness (how did I manage to write about “the tenants of Judaism” instead of “the tenets of Judaism,” for heaven’s sake?), but I also laugh at the twisted beauty of Anne’s extreme didacticism. In my latest novel, for instance, I have a character who sails the world with Captain Cook, and who, in Hawaii, witnesses Cook’s men “kill two natives and put their heads on a pike.” In the margin next to this sentence, in her immaculate handwriting, Anne noted: “2 heads = 2 pikes.” Later, over the phone, she further clarified her correction: “It’s not a shish kebob, Liz.”

And then there was the moment when I wrote that my protagonist reached for her lover’s penis, “which had been—like the penises of every Tahitian boy—circumcised during youth with the tooth of a shark.”

“Not unless Tahitian boys have multiple penises,” Anne informed me, delicately changing the phrase to read: “like the penis of every Tahitian boy.”

Who would ever see such things? Who would care? Multiple penises, too many heads on not enough pikes—Anne sees it all. Anne cares. Which means I get to fix it up: one spike for each head; one penis for each boy. Thus the universe is set right. And then nobody has to see those mistakes, ever again.

I once heard the novelist Robert Stone complain that he possessed the two worst possible characteristics for a writer—laziness and perfectionism. The great good fortune of my own writerly nature is that I am neither lazy nor a perfectionist; I am, in fact, a hardworking half-ass. I get my work done fast and without a lot of drama because I was raised by an incredibly efficient mother who taught me from a young age that “Done is better than good.” (As she always said, “I get the dishes washed faster than anyone in this house—just don’t look at them too closely when I’m done.”) Like my mother, I take shortcuts. I let things slide. I push ahead toward completion. The only problem with this approach is that my work—while finished, and always ahead of deadline—is often flawed in the details. With speed comes missteps. I am the enthusiastic researcher, the breakneck storyteller, the extremely confident narrator, the fastest writer in the joint—but I will never be the person with the magnifying glass, inspecting every sentence for dust mites of fallacy or infelicity.

I don’t need to be that person, though, because—thanks be to heaven—I have found that person.

I can fly blind because Anne is my eyes.