Another craft essay and this one also ties in with the previous post Krakauer vs Gilbert.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Presence in The Last American Man
The author’s presence is prominent throughout this book. Before we see her and Eustace Conway together on the page, we learn a little bit about the author’s background which includes working on a ranch in Wyoming for two years with Conway’s younger brother. “Like me, Judson was twenty-two years old and a complete and thoroughgoing faker.” (9) The purpose of including this is to show the readers that Gilbert and everyone she worked with on that ranch, pretended to be what Eustace Conway is. “We were all putting on the same show.” (9) When the readers meet Conway through Gilbert meeting him, we already know where she comes from, and seeing him through her eyes gives us a better idea of how enamored she (and everybody else that meets him) is.
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Gilberts choice to immerse herself as a character in the story, works because reading this book is like having a friend sit across from you and tell you about someone they know, someone that’s their friend that you haven’t yet met. Although you would think that this would put a biased slant on the interpretation of Eustace Conway, Gilbert avoids that by including other people’s idea of what happened in a scene that Conway describes. For example, when telling the story of how Eustace met and dumped his first girlfriend, Donna Henry, she includes Donna’s take on the situation, “’Now, remember,’ says Donna today, thinking back on it.” (78) She also goes back to Eustace and asks him his opinion after she’s talked to his ex.
The fact that Gilbert is writing about a friend, or someone who became a friend, and she’s still close friends with (“I get drunk with Eustace Conway sometimes. It’s one of my favorite things to do with him.” (227)) lends authority to her narrative, but is also why she can be a character on most of the pages of the book. I also don’t think that someone like Eustace Conway would have shared as much of himself as he did with Gilbert, if he didn’t consider her a friend, and she probably would not have had access to his journal. (I also don’t think he would have been as open with a male—but that’s a different story.) Also, by being friends with Eustace’s family, they too are more open with her and spill more details. This is especially true when Judson and Walton Conway talks about their brother on pages 236 and 237.
It would have been very easy for Gilbert to exploit that nearness and the people that spoke to her, but her presence on the page and her friendly and sometimes chatty tone of voice avoids that. You’re left with the feeling like she really cared and still cares about the people she wrote about—especially Eustace Conway.