Elizabeth Gilbert spent 3 years writing a new novel. It took 5 days for it to be pulled from publication.

Liz Gilbert has cancelled herself.

Or rather, she's cancelled her latest book – a big, ambitious novel she's been working on for the past three years, called The Snow Forest. 

Elizabeth Gilbert announced her new book on Instagram and Twitter and even Good Morning America last week. 

The author – who became a guru to millions 17 years ago, when she published the memoir Eat, Pray, Love and caused untellable numbers of Generation X women to abandon their mediocre lives and go eat pasta in Rome, meditate in Ganeshpuri and have sex with a Brazilian in Ubud – was excited about it. 

"I hope you will buy it and order it from wherever you get your books," she said, holding up the cover of the hefty, hard-back novel. "I love you! Here we go!"

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Five days later, Gilbert was back. This time, she was rescinding the invitation to buy The Snow Forest because it was being pulled from its publication date. Rested, perhaps forever. Full refunds would be issued to anyone who had already laid down dollars. 

The problem? 

The Snow Forest is set in Russia. Siberia, actually. In her first video, Gilbert explained that the plot was inspired by the true story of a Russian family who successfully hid in isolation in the Siberian wilderness for half a century. 

"It will take you into the deepest realm of the Siberian tiger," she said, "and into the heart and mind of an extraordinary girl born into that world." 

The pushback was immediate, fierce and undeniably united. Now, it said, is not the time to write a romantic book about Russians in Russia. Because right now, Russia is waging an unjustifiable war with Ukraine, murdering and raping its citizens, displacing millions and destabilising the world. 

The voices of Ukrainian readers were prominent. A typical comment read: "Very much disappointed that you decided to write about Russians when they are killing, torturing, terrorizing and raping my homeland at this very moment. And to issue a book in February on the anniversary of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine is beyond atrocious."

Then Gilbert's Good Reads account was flooded with more than 500 One-Star reviews in protest. 

If this was the public fall-out, anyone familiar with the dynamics of an Internet pile-on will know that Gilbert's DMs, emails and personal feeds would have been wall-to-wall abuse for making such a "tone deaf" creative choice in 2023. 

Gilbert listened, deliberated, and acted. "I'm making a course correction," she said, in her retraction video. "I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and continue to experience grievous and extreme harm. So that is the choice I have made."

It's an understandable choice, and quite possibly the right one, given that Gilbert is a thoughtful writer, with a significant social media presence, and that she could never have outrun this criticism once it took hold. 

The question the publishing world is asking is, is this a choice she had to make?

Publishing a Liz Gilbert novel is no niche undertaking. As The Atlantic wrote, it's "the literary equivalent of a Marvel movie", a huge, guaranteed blockbuster with a million-dollar investment, a robust marketing plan and number-one best-seller expectations. 

Gilbert did not sit at home and design the cover of The Snow Forest on Canva over a cuppa. This was a book her publishers would have been focused on and planning for months, if not years, and last week's announcements were the first salvos in a campaign that would last until and beyond February 2024, when the book was due to be released. 

Clearly, during all this preparation and planning, the notion that setting a creative work in Russia might be a cancel-level event did not feature.

And so Gilbert takes the fire and makes the call. It's a call she's able to make, financially, but one that would still have come at a significant cost. A novel – particularly a big, historical novel at Gilbert-scale – is years of your life in the writing, editing, releasing and promoting. 

Of course, now there's another group of people who are mad at Liz Gilbert: The ones who thought she should have weathered the storm. 

"By withdrawing the book, she has set a terrible precedent," wrote Franklin Foer, in The Atlantic. "In meekly complying with the angriest voices, she accepted their argument that setting a book in Russia is an act of collusion, even though that’s an entirely nonsensical argument.

"Gilbert had a chance to gently explain herself and defend her work, to argue for the importance of literature in a time of war, but she chose to abnegate her responsibilities as a writer and go another way: Eat, pray, pander."

It's hard to imagine a male author of Gilbert's standing making the same decision. A Jonathan Franzen, perhaps, would likely have held up two middle fingers to the critics and pushed on. But Franzen's audience does not have direct access to the master on Instagram. 

A complicated by-product of authors building a community of people who will maybe buy what they're selling is that those people also get to critique it, judge it, and interpret the choice of creating it – even before it's released. 

It's impossible to imagine that Russia's wartime atrocities are in any way endorsed or affected by the choices of one wealthy American writer.

But what's happened to Gilbert is a lesson and a reminder that if you're going to serve up your art for commentary, you're not always going to like what people say about it. Or what they see in it. And what many Ukrainians saw in the very idea of The Snow Forest was a betrayal.

And that's a sentiment that a writer of Liz Gilbert's sensitivity was never going to be able to ignore. 

One person's 'pandering' is another's act of integrity. 

Feature Image: Getty, Instagram + Mamamia. 

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