Elizabeth Gilbert on Sabbaticals, Covens and Rest After a Memoir

Katherine May is walking through an autumn that refuses to be autumnal. It is warm enough to feel like spring, the sycamore seeds are spinning down onto the pavement, and she has just left a pet shop where a chew filled with foul-smelling goop sent her back out into the air. She is recording her podcast on the move, apologising to listeners for ruining winter with a heavy duvet, and announcing a two-week mid-season break. Then she hands over to her guest, Elizabeth Gilbert, who arrives fresh from a six-month sabbatical taken after she lived through, and then wrote about, one of the hardest stretches of her life. That memoir, All the Way to the River, has drawn plenty of debate and critique, and the cost to Gilbert is audible in the conversation. What follows is a candid hour about what it means to stop, why a person might ban herself from working, making and doing, and why the most appealing version of the good life, for both women in the conversation, looks suspiciously like a shared house or a convent.

What does a "clearing" actually mean for Elizabeth Gilbert?

The idea of the Clearing is the spine of the episode, and it is worth sitting with before anything else. Gilbert describes taking herself to what she calls a very real Clearing, a place where she banned herself from working, doing or making anything at all. Alongside that real retreat she sets an imaginary one, a stretch of volcanic beach in Costa Rica with the sea on the right and jungle on the left. The contrast is the point. The imagined place is an image you can hold when you are tired; the real one is the harder discipline of actually being somewhere with no output required.

Most people who burn out know the first version well. They keep a mental picture of rest but cannot get their hands off the work long enough to arrive anywhere. Gilbert's sabbatical was a deliberate attempt to close that gap. The episode description says she felt she had been "dragged through" the writing of her memoir and its publication, and the sabbatical was her answer: not a holiday with a to-do list, but a clean withdrawal from the public role that the book had made heavier.

Why did Gilbert have to leave after writing All the Way to the River?

May frames the memoir as a turn toward vulnerability. In her introduction she says Gilbert is "showing her much more vulnerable side and kind of opening up some of her life to us so that, you know, we can see a bit of the chaos behind it." She adds that the book has been endlessly discussed and debated, and that seeing the fallibility of a figure many readers have leaned on for years has been, in her words, "really beautiful." She also credits Gilbert with doing real good for people affected by addiction, including sex and love addiction, a subject she says comes up a great deal in the conversation.

That is the context for the sabbatical. Writing about the worst of your life in public does not end when the manuscript is finished. The reviews, the readers' responses and the expectation that you will keep performing the same openness all keep the experience running. The sabbatical, in this telling, is less a retreat from the book than from the machinery that surrounds a book once it leaves your hands.

How do you rest when your body won't sleep?

One of the most candid passages has nothing to do with publishing. Gilbert describes menopause and sleep with a kind of wry precision. "I feel like it's really a coin toss every night as to whether sleep will occur," she tells May, adding that sleep used to be a talent she had and now seems to have lost. The effect on her days is immediate: when she does not sleep she becomes "fussy and resentful," and when she does, the world is easy and great. May shares the experience of waking in short, hourly bursts, and of a body that drops into five minutes of sleep and then insists on four hours awake.

This matters for anyone thinking about rest as a practice, because it names a truth that productivity culture usually edits out. A sabbatical is not automatically restorative. Rest has to survive a body that is changing, and sleep, the most basic form of rest, can become the thing you are most anxious about. The conversation treats this with humour and without a lecture, which is part of why it lands.

What is a sabbath, and why did Gilbert's sabbatical need one?

The episode links to The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel, and May brings the book into the conversation when she asks Gilbert what she actually did during her six months away. The question is a good one, because the answer reframes the sabbatical as a set of rhythms rather than an absence. A sabbath, as the word has always implied, is a stopping point built into time: a day or season set apart from production. Gilbert's version was a longer and more personal stretch of the same idea, a period in which the usual demands on her attention were deliberately switched off.

Katherine May's own framing, from earlier in the episode, makes the stakes clear. Explaining the break she is taking from her podcast, she says, "I don't like working in a way that ever feels relentless." She goes on to describe the industry advice she is rejecting: "All of the podcast wisdom is that you make more money and gain more followers if you keep going and never ever stop. And I don't want to do that. So, I am not doing it." That refusal is the same impulse that drove Gilbert's Clearing. Rest is not a reward for finishing the work. It is a condition that has to be defended against the logic of relentless output.

Why are women over fifty quitting everything?

The conversation widens from Gilbert's personal experience to a broader question that she and May explore: why so many women past fifty are stepping back from the commitments that defined their earlier years. The episode description lists it as a central theme, and it connects directly to the menopause conversation. A body that no longer runs on the old schedule, a mind that wants less noise, and a long career of saying yes can add up to a deliberate reduction. The pattern is not described as failure. It is treated as a clear-eyed recalibration, with rest and self-respect at its centre.

For readers, the practical takeaway is less about quitting and more about permission. If the cost of staying in every role is your own health, a sabbatical or a smaller life may be the sane choice. Gilbert and May both come at the subject as people who have seen the alternative from the inside.

Can a coven or a shared house be the answer?

The most striking part of the episode may be its turn toward community. May and Gilbert talk about the power of covens, the small groups of women who hold each other through hard seasons, and about the appeal of collective housing. In Gilbert's case, collective living is the ultimate female fantasy lifestyle; in May's, a nunnery plays the same role. The joke lands, but the idea is serious. Both women are describing a way of living where care is built into the structure rather than improvised by overwhelmed individuals.

Yet the conversation does not romanticise togetherness. Both speakers describe themselves as introverts in extroverts' bodies, which complicates the fantasy. A coven is only restful if it also leaves room for solitude. May's own remark about the idea that "we each get our own space" points to the balance: community that protects individuality rather than dissolving it. That is the kind of insight the episode returns to again and again.

Why is it so hard to go back to work after a break?

The episode ends on a reflective note about re-entry. Both speakers admit to a shared reluctance to return to work, and the podcast itself becomes the test case. Recording after a long pause feels like walking back into a room you have just left. Gilbert and May do it anyway. That decision, to show up imperfectly and speak from a rested but unfinished place, is the quiet resolution of the whole hour.

May also promotes her own forthcoming book, Tending: How Care Binds the World, which arrives in March, and notes that the show will return at the beginning of November with guests already recorded. The break she is taking is part of the same philosophy: a schedule that does not run relentlessly, and a refusal to treat constant output as the price of relevance.

Where to go from here

If this conversation stirred something, start with the sources the episode points to. Gilbert's books, including Eat Pray Love and Big Magic, are a good entry point into her voice, and All the Way to the River is the memoir at the centre of the debate. Heschel's The Sabbath, linked in the episode, offers a classic meditation on rest as something set apart from work. For the wider conversation about care and community, May's Tending, due in March, takes up how care binds the world. The full transcript and information on the show's bonus episodes are available at theclearingpod.com. The most useful takeaway, though, is the simplest: the Clearing you can picture is a start, but the real one needs a boundary you are willing to defend.