Hello, it's Chris Anderson here, the guy who gets to run TED. Now, you're tuning into a special

archive presentation of TED Talks Daily. This talk from back in 2009 features the iconic author

Elizabeth Gilbert. We've dug this one up because it's one of our favorites, but also because

we've invited Liz to tell us more in a new podcast

called The TED Interview. It's a show in which I get to talk with some of our most compelling

TED speakers diving much deeper into their ideas. In this first episode, Liz talks not just about

creativity, the subject of the talk you're about to hear,

but also about loss and about love.

It's actually the first time she has spoken at length in public

since the loss of her partner earlier this year.

And what she says, honestly, I found it to be astonishing.

Please join me for the TED interview, wherever you listen.

So I am a writer. Writing books is my profession, but it's more than that, of course.

It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. And I don't expect that that's ever going to change.

But that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life, and in my career,

which has caused me to have to sort of recalibrate my whole relationship with this work.

And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called Eat, Pray, Love,

which decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world

for some reason and became this big mega-sensation international bestseller thing,

the result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed.

Seriously, doomed, doomed.

Like, they come up to me now, like, all worried, and they say,

...