One of the pleasures of the portrait-in-greatness podcast—“WTF with Marc Maron” and many dozens of others, multiplying all the time—is the dual presentation of culture and character, the insight into both art and its creation. In an interview with Penelope Spheeris, you hear about filmmaking and about growing up in a travelling circus. Listen to enough episodes and you begin to consider the wild biographies of writers and artists in relation to your own attempts to pursue your dreams. Michael Ian Black’s appealing podcast, “How to Be Amazing,” which he started in May, suggests that it will provide advice, but the instructional part is largely theoretical: after listening to him interview Elizabeth Gilbert, Bob Odenkirk, Tavi Gevinson, Amy Schumer, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, I had gained plenty of insight but remained at the modest level of amazingness I had going in.
If you want a podcast that offers a more direct route to personal fulfillment, self-help and advice podcasts, sometimes corresponding to the host’s recently published book, are proliferating, too. Michael Ian Black’s guest Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of “Eat Pray Love,” has a new book called “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear.” It won’t be out until late September, but its podcast, “Magic Lessons,” has been humming along since July.
“Magic Lessons,” in which Gilbert provides “road maps for the path to creativity,” begins with a few strains of a feisty Old World tune. Its music could be playing in the Italian scenes of “Eat, Pray, Love,” making your mouth water for feel-good advice like “Eat spaghetti,” which is basically what you get. In each episode, Gilbert calls one of her fans on the phone, who’s submitted a question in advance. The person is overjoyed to hear from her; Gilbert is overjoyed to be reaching out. The questioner summarizes whatever is keeping her from being creative: the demands of motherhood, for example, or the strain of having “the world’s most boring job.” Then, in a tremendously fond, encouraging, gentle way, Gilbert encourages the person to write, to do “the work that is gnawing at you—the work that wants to be made through you, the creative project that’s begging you to release it, the treasures that are hidden inside of you.” Gilbert has a beautiful voice and a loving tone—her advice sounds almost like singing—and she calls fans things like “my love.” When she announced “Big Magic” on Facebook, she wrote, “Dear Ones—I wrote a book for you! I mean—I very literally wrote a book quite specifically for YOU, my dearest Dear Ones.” A little of this goes a long way.
Listening to “Magic Lessons” is like listening to an author engaging with her readers one by one, telling each that she’s special. Sometimes this evokes a reality life-improvement show, the spectacle of a life transformed during a broadcast. But what Gilbert’s offering her fans isn’t a house renovation or a college scholarship—she’s giving them permission to be creative, and it makes them nearly weep with joy. In that episode, Gilbert told the caller that she should make time to write a book, and added that because she’s not a mother herself she was going to consult another expert: “a little extra present for you.” An “Oprah”-style “Look under your seats” tension hovered in the air. What was under the seat was yet another guru—Gilbert’s friend Cheryl Strayed!—and the woman was beside herself with excitement and gratitude. Strayed has her own self-help podcast: “Dear Sugar Radio,” expanded from her popular advice column, which combines hard truths with buckets of love; she calls questioners things like Sweet Pea. “So now you have, like, two fairy godmothers,” Gilbert said.
Unlike good old Flannery O’Connor, who had a wonderfully crabby attitude about aspiring writers (“The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one,” and so on), Gilbert is interested in the importance of creativity for the individual’s soul. She uses the vocabulary of magic to describe it; she uses the term “magical thinking” to mean something positive. When she said it with a laugh on Black’s podcast, I thought she was being self-deprecating. But for her, creativity is a force to be reckoned with, danced with. Not only do you want to use it but it wants to be used by you. This kind of thing, like the notion of serenity, and anything involving gurus and meditation, makes me scowl, yet I can’t quite scowl at “Magic Lessons.” When you hear the people who want to create, and the gratitude they feel toward Gilbert, you can’t help feeling that she’s healed them—that she has, in fact, become the kind of guru she once sought. After “Eat Pray Love,” hordes of her acolytes went to Bali to meet the medicine man who inspired the book; on this podcast, they meet her.
I don’t seek gurus, but I do have someone who encourages me to find happiness, via doing things like cleaning out my closets and issuing cheerful hellos and goodbyes. Her name is Gretchen Rubin, and she has a podcast called “Happier with Gretchen Rubin,” started this year, which she hosts with her sister, Elizabeth Craft, who once referred to herself as the Oscar to her sister’s Felix. Rubin speaks in a tone that’s both nasal and chipper—she’s accessible, and not a dramatic actor, as most audiobook readers are. Like my dentist, whose love of teeth is so joyful that you can’t help sharing her enthusiasm while chuckling about it, Rubin is wonderfully gung-ho. Her zeal for happiness is part of a general celebration and appreciation of life: she doesn’t want to screw up via bungled life management, by driving with the emergency brake on.
I started listening to Rubin telling me how to be happier a few years ago, before she started her podcast, for reasons that she’d probably have some theories about: I’d ambitiously subscribed to an audiobook site, and as the credits piled up I panicked about how to use them. There, I came across her book “The Happiness Project,” a best-seller in 2009. I don’t read self-help books. I suspect, like millions of others, I was intrigued by the cover, which features a reassuringly urban row of brownstones, and by the subtitle: “Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.” I dig happiness, and I’m into generally having more fun, so I gave it a go.
As therapy (which the intro makes clear that it’s not—consult a professional!), “The Happiness Project” is more C.B.T. than psychoanalysis, practical advice focussed on practical solutions. But these are based on Rubin’s research and insights about personality: she encourages you to know yourself and helps you figure out the rest from there. Like Atul Gawande’s “The Checklist Manifesto,” Rubin’s work urges you to prioritize: learning what not to attempt to chart and worry about is key. Like Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” her books and podcast try to explain us to ourselves so that we’re working with, not against, the occasionally maddening ways in which we operate. She’s not trying to make you perfect; she just wants you to get enough sleep and to enjoy, rather than dread, celebrating loved ones’ birthdays.
“The Happiness Project” audiobook got me to be better at covering up the light sources in my bedroom and getting rid of clothes I don’t wear, but it did not fix me entirely. A few months ago, I went back to the audiobook site to use a free credit I’d picked up somewhere, and when I logged in I realized in horror that I’d been subscribing to it all along and forgotten about it. I thus had many credits to use, and with one of these I got Rubin’s “Happiness Project” sequel, “Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives.” This book—like the brilliant Sam Gross cartoon in which a man lying in bed reads a book called “How to Get Up and Get Dressed”—struck a nerve. It basically is the book “How to Get Up and Get Dressed,” but it works. Rubin had learned that there was a close correlation between habits and happiness, so she figured out how we form them, use them, and change them. Once I came to understand habits as harnessing our own laziness—making a habit frees you from decision-making, which you can use to your advantage—my relationship to them changed permanently.
Now Rubin has this podcast, with her sister, Elizabeth Craft, whom you know already if you’ve read or listened to her books: she’s a TV writer in L.A., and they have different personalities and a close bond. Craft stays up late; Rubin goes to bed early. Craft loves reality TV and talk shows; Rubin is in three children’s-literature book clubs and has a shrine to a saint she finds interesting. When Rubin talks about Tiggers and Eeyores, it’s hard not to think of her and Craft, who speaks in a wry tone that implies some amount of irony; a British listener praised it as “lugubrious.” If you listen to Rubin with a combination of amazement and disbelief, Craft can function as your stand-in. She refers to Rubin as a “happiness bully,” and she makes Rubin laugh; their dynamic reminds us that different styles, as Rubin describes, have different ways of making things work. Craft, in her own way, is game for the whole project, taking note of her happiness “demerits and gold stars” and engaging in Rubin’s various Try This at Home challenges. Their voices remind you that life is a human project that we’re all experimenting with. Some of us are doing it by trying the One-Minute Rule—immediately doing tasks that can be completed in under a minute, such as hanging up your coat—or trying Indulge Your Inner Toddler, which means feed yourself, get enough sleep, and, if something on your clothes is poking into your back and driving you crazy, fix it. Some are bumbling along sleepily, trying to figure it out themselves.
Sometimes Rubin’s advice might remind you of Don DeLillo’s “White Noise,” and the classes that Babette teaches on sitting, standing, and walking. (I always suspected that I’d learn something in those classes.) The lessons can seem small and obvious, but the whole point is that little daily things are meaningful over the long haul. Rubin and Craft’s mother once observed that when people see each other all the time they have lots to talk about, and that when they see each other rarely they don’t: they say “Oh, nothing,” when asked “What’s new?” So the family began a practice called Updates: sending one another short e-mails about their lives every few days, in which they’re “not afraid to be boring.” Updates has proved to be a revolutionary idea, for them and for listeners, who have flooded them with requests demanding more information on how to do it.
In one episode, Rubin, who lives in New York, visits Craft, in Los Angeles, and they record the podcast from inside her closet, which Rubin is determined, once again, to clean out. “Outer order leads to inner self-command,” Rubin says happily. They clean—or Rubin cleans while Craft accepts it, bemused. When Rubin questions an item and Craft says, “That’s a five-pounds-away shirt,” Rubin replies, “Don’t buy in anticipation of your future body.”
Having advanced her understanding of habits when writing the habit book, she’s also honed her advice. “Convenience matters,” Rubin says from inside the closet. “The tiniest bit of convenience will enormously change people’s behavior. So if you just had a little trash can here…”
“Are we done?” Craft asks.
Writing this, I was reminded to cancel that underused audiobook subscription, and felt that I was making some kind of practical and existential progress. And, I realized, I could download a third Rubin audiobook, “Happier at Home,” before I left. When I went to its page I discovered that the audiobook is read by someone else: a professional, which was a terrible disappointment. Thanks to Rubin, I knew myself well enough to abstain.
