Women, Desire, and Survival: Inside a Literary Revolution

In a dressing room at MarieTV Studios, Elizabeth Gilbert reaches into a jewelry box and pulls out the largest earrings she can find—the kind that shimmer in peripheral vision. She needs the badass power today. The conversation that's about to unfold will touch on sexual recklessness, literary tradition, devastating loss, and the architecture of how a novel gets built. It will also start, unexpectedly, with earrings. This is how real creative conversations work: they begin not with thesis but with gesture, with reaching toward what we need to feel brave.

For her latest novel, City of Girls, Gilbert has done something that turns out to be remarkably rare in Western literature: she's written a book about promiscuous young women whose lives are not destroyed by their sexual desire. The novel, set in 1940s New York City's theater world, centers on showgirls, actresses, and dancers behaving with abandon. They make choices. They face consequences. They survive.

Why do literary traditions punish women for wanting?

This premise sounds simple until you understand what Gilbert is actually fighting against. For centuries, Western literature has operated on a script about female sexuality: step out of line, and you get punished. Catastrophically. The woman who dares to want—to experience desire—ends up poisoned, dead in a gutter, kicked out of society, ruined. It's a story so old that it feels inevitable, almost biological.

Gilbert pushes back against this with deliberate force. She tells Forleo:

"It's always stories of girls and women being ruined because they dared to want to experience sexuality. And that has not been my experience and it's not been the experience of a lot of women that I know."

The creative challenge was to write a book that honored both realities: yes, consequences exist; no, those consequences don't obliterate you. Women survive their own choices. As Gilbert explains:

"The whole idea of a ruined woman is a kind of fantasy, because, god, if that were true, we'd all be ruined. Who among us would still be here if we couldn't survive our own choices and our consequences and sometimes even terrible punishment? We can survive it."

This matters not because it's biographical realism (though it is, for many women) but because the stories we tell shape the stories we believe are possible for ourselves. A novel that shows a woman surviving her sexual agency, without sanitizing the costs, offers readers something the literary canon rarely does: permission to be complicated, to want, to survive your own wanting.

How does immersion create fictional worlds that feel lived-in?

Before Gilbert wrote a single page of dialogue, she spent four years in the architecture of the 1940s. The origin was romantic: her great-aunt, then 90, handed her a stack of out-of-print books while downsizing. Among them were essays and profiles by theater critic Alexander Woollcott, written in the 1930s and '40s. He wrote about famous actresses, opera singers, British and American divas—a world of sparkling cocktails at the Ritz Carlton, glamour that felt impossible and utterly magnetic. Gilbert knew immediately: "I want to go back to New York City Midtown, sparkling champagne cocktail, showgirl theater world and put my promiscuous girls right at the center of it."

But wanting to play in a world and actually knowing how to inhabit it on the page are different things. This is where the research became an immersion—almost a language acquisition. Gilbert hired a historian to walk her through Times Square. They'd stand in front of a Nike store, and he'd paint a picture: here, a theater used to stand. And here. And here. The point wasn't to collect facts but to train her eye, to let the past become visible underneath the present. She read novels written in the 1930s and '40s to absorb how people actually spoke. She interviewed former showgirls, actresses, and dancers in their nineties about their professional lives—and their sex lives, which they were genuinely happy to discuss.

"It's almost like learning a second language. Learning another time and another place is like learning a new language. So that by the time you write it, you can write it convincingly."

This reveals something essential about her creative process that isn't intuitive: she doesn't start with plot or character. She starts with place. As Gilbert describes it:

"For me, it starts with the location. The first thing is New York City, 1940s, I have to learn the theater world, I have to learn everything about it. As I start researching, the characters come to me."

The world peoples itself. Once you're fluent in the atmosphere, the customs, the texture of a place—who lives there emerges naturally, almost inevitably. Location isn't backdrop; it's the seed.

What does sexual desire have to do with being fully alive?

Buried in this conversation is a claim that extends far beyond the novel itself. Gilbert argues that sexual desire—not sex necessarily, but the energy of desire—is fundamental to being fully human and fully creative. Without access to desire, she suggests, we're not fully ourselves.

This connects to why the novel matters. It's not just about validating women's sexuality (though it does). It's about recognizing that the repression of desire cuts off a vital creative current. To be alive creatively, you need access to your own aliveness—which includes sexual aliveness.

This is why the book had to walk a specific line: "I didn't want to write a fake romantic sexual story where there are no consequences," Gilbert explains. But she also refused to write yet another story where consequences equal ruin. She was modeling something essential: it's possible to be sexual, to want things, to make mistakes, and to still be okay. To be alive.

Can grief become something that makes you more creative?

The conversation takes a turn toward loss. During the writing of City of Girls, Gilbert experienced profound grief. She doesn't detail it extensively in this exchange, but she describes moving through it—and crucially, learning to use it.

Her daily habit was unorthodox: she would dance. Specifically, she would dance to Leonard Cohen songs while weeping. Not to cheer herself up, but to stay in the grief, to let it move through her body. This is a different model of grief than our culture typically offers. We're often told to process grief, to get over it, to move on.

Gilbert's approach is stranger and more alive. She describes how:

"Grief, when you allow it to live in its fire in you is a very active, living force."

This isn't acceptance in the sense of resignation. It's activation. Grief, allowed to be what it is, becomes fuel. It becomes the thing that makes you move, that makes you remember, that connects you to what matters. The Leonard Cohen dances while weeping weren't therapy; they were creativity. They were a way of turning devastation into movement, into presence, into the kind of aliveness that only grief can create—because only grief knows what we've lost, and therefore what we loved.

Where to go from here

The conversation between Gilbert and Forleo ends with a reading—a passage about friendship, about being "precious to the heart" of those who know you. It's a reminder that these ideas aren't abstract. They're about how we actually live: how we write our lives, how we survive our choices, how we move through loss, how we stay creative in a world that often asks us to shrink.

If you're drawn to Gilbert's approach—whether through her novels or her philosophy—the path forward involves a kind of dual commitment. First, to depth: to research what you need to know, to become fluent in your subject matter, to let yourself be changed by what you study. Second, to honesty: to write (and live) without punishing yourself or others for desire, for mistakes, for the messiness of being human. And finally, to activation: to treat every setback—grief included—not as proof that you should have stayed small, but as material for creation. The world of 1940s New York that Gilbert brings back to life in City of Girls reminds us that there's always another world to discover, another story to tell, and always another way to survive.