Book Review big magic

Welcome to our book club! Every month we will be rating and reviewing an inspirational book that has been sitting on our shelves. First up is Big Magic by the wonderful Elizabeth Gilbert. 

Now, you may know her as the author of Eat, Pray, Love but this is a completely different kind of book. It centres around living your creative life and enjoying a sense of big magic that surrounds finding how to do it. 

That might seem totally absurd but even from one page in, we were completely and utterly hooked. Split into six chapters that discuss how to live creatively without fear, peppered with life lessons from friends met along the way and anecdotes of what seems now to be a previous life. 

Our key takeaways from the book, and oh there were so many, are these… 

Feel your fear

Not to be confused with feeding your fear, feeling your fear means to sit and acknowledge what is scaring you or making you anxious, in order to work on it for the future. Saying YES to opportunities, even the scary ones and facing that fear head on. One of our favourite pieces around this was Gilbert’s mum telling her to get over her fear of the ocean by getting straight in. No nonsense!

Do it for yourself 

This is essentially all about doing it for yourself and blocking even the thought of doing ‘it’ for someone else. That’s not to say to be completely selfish, but being selfless won’t get you very far with your creative endeavours either. 

Courage to be vulnerable

Vulnerability is not a weakness, it makes you human. This is a topic that pops up throughout the book and we can see why. Vulnerability is a tough topic so we enjoyed seeing this being written about so openly. 

Does it love you?

Your creative outlet. You love it, but does it love you back?

Maybe we should have put a spoiler alert on this one but we sat, mouths agape as we read this section of the book. An odd question but one that is super interesting to answer. 

Have you read Big Magic? What did you think of it? Let us know in the comments below and we will be back next month with another book for you to feast your eyes on.