A Rave Review
Elizabeth Gilbert on friendship & Jonathan Miles on the world and its ways
Dear Friends,
It is my delight and honor this week to be helming the Isolation Journals, while our beloved Suleika takes a much-needed and long-overdue vacation. We love you, Susu! And we all strongly support the vision of you lounging on a beach chair in a warm clime, sipping a refreshing beverage out of a coconut, whilst Lentil (who is hopefully wearing a tiny straw hat) gazes at you with adoration!
It is also my delight and honor to have the opportunity to celebrate and introduce Jonathan Miles, who will be offering up our prompt this week. And that is the last time in this dispatch that I will be referring to him as “Jonathan” because that just feels weird and wrong. To his friends (and we are all friends here), he will always be Jonny—and we do love ourselves some Jonny Miles.
I am at the age now where some of my friendships are many decades old, and so I can say with joy that I have known Jonny Miles since the final days of the 1900s. Way back then, in those more innocent times (were they, though?), we were both baby journalists and aspiring fiction writers, making our way in the world. We met through this wonderful circumstance: I wrote a book called Stern Men (my first novel), which Jonny gave a rave review in Slate Online. The Internet was still pretty new back then, and—get this!—we freelance writers often used to sign our pieces with not only our names, but also our email addresses and phone numbers, with the hope of catching the eye of an editor and maybe getting another job. (It’s true! In fact, it wasn’t until well after Eat Pray Love was published that I took my email, phone number, and home address off my website! I was still that hopeful and hungry for work!)
Anyway… back to our tale.
The write-up that Jonny offered for my novel was the best review I had ever gotten, and to this day it is still the best review I’ve ever gotten. Not only because he was praiseful, but because he really, really got it. He could see everything I was trying to accomplish in that book, and he caught every single arcane literary reference I had tucked in there. He saw me. That’s why it felt so magical. He really saw me.
So I reached out to a stranger by email to offer my thanks for his kind review, and found out he was a very smart and funny guy named Jonny, who was living in a cabin in the woods of Mississippi with four big dogs and a lovely new girlfriend. We started a delightful email correspondence—and thus began a friendship that is now over a quarter of a century old.
Over time, Jonny and Cat moved up north, and I convinced them to move to my corner of rural New Jersey, where they still live to this day. They still have a ridiculously large pile of dogs, but also added a pile of children—and we all became family. Then the pandemic hit, and for reasons that are too complicated to explain here, Jonny’s wife Cat convinced Suleika and Jon (and Carmen!) to move nearby for the duration of the pandemic—and the family got even bigger.
This, children, is why it’s a great idea to put your email address and phone number on the Internet! (JK, don’t do that.)
I have many favorite things about being friends with Jonny. I love to sit at his table when he is in the mood to prepare a feast, and nobody can prepare a feast like Jonny. I love listening to him play music in his living room with his insanely talented kids, raising up a glorious ruckus as if they are some family of musical geniuses straight out of an Appalachian holler. But most of all, I love being his writer friend.
My wish for all of you is that you each someday have a friend like Jonny—somebody who really sees you as an artist, who understands what you are all about creatively, and who celebrates and supports your work for many years on end.
Jonny has always been one of my first readers for all my work, and I am one of his—and I proudly assert that I am his biggest fan. (Although that’s an audacious assertion, because many in the literary world admire my friend.) As a novelist, Jonny is just as complex and daring as he is as a chef and musician—and he will never take the easy path. Each one of his books has tackled some impossible karmic puzzle, or has been told in some brave and unusual new way. He never shies away from moral dilemmas or artistic conundrums that would leave a less courageous writer shaking in their boots. As you will see by the prompt he has offered this week, even as a child Jonny Miles was not afraid to look darkness in the eye, to feel big feelings, and to shirk easy conclusions.
Every time Jonny writes a new book, I tell him, “This is your best one yet!”—because it is. Each novel has been bolder and better than the last. That’s the beauty of knowing a fellow creator for so many decades—you can watch them grow, watch them step into their greatness.
Jonny’s new book is called Eradication, and guess what, you guys? This one really is his best novel yet. I could sit here praising it all day long, but let’s just say that the legendary book critic Ron Charles, in what might have been his final review for the Washington Post, has officially declared it “an instant classic.” And so it is.
Only my courageous writer friend Jonny could place an entire novel on an island filled with goats, throw in one man with a terrible set of moral decisions to make, and create from that stark world a book that is as funny as it is frightening, as humane as it is scary—and, for better or for worse, incredibly timely.
I am so proud of you, Jonny. Thank you for being my brother, and for being the best. Over to you for a prompt!
And rest up, Suleika. We will keep a candle burning in the window for you.
Love,
Liz Gilbert (email address, phone number, and home address redacted!)
Our Next Journaling Club—
Mark your calendars for next Sunday, March 1, 2026 from 1-2pm ET—for our virtual hour of writing and conversation, where we create together and find inspiration and accountability. We’ll be talking about how a daily creative practice is enriched by community, both the online and the in-person kinds. Paid subscribers will receive the Zoom link the day before.
Prompt 372. When Doves Cry by Jonathan Miles
Picture a skinny little boy holding an old-timey BB gun. It’s mid-afternoon in a Phoenix suburb, the arid desert light blanching everything in sight including the soda cans the boy has been lazily plinking. The boy is alone: a “latchkey kid,” in the parlance of the times, occupying an empty house and yard until his parents return from work. He’s bored. The cans don’t stand up very well once they’re riddled with excess BB-holes and aren’t as much fun to plink. He’s already guzzled a six-pack of his mother’s Tab for these targets and another twelve ounces might burst his insides. And then he spies, on the branch of a Palo Brea tree, a bird.
That little boy is me. I’m eleven years old, and aside from shoe scorpions and garage black widow spiders and the few unlucky fish I’ve hooked at a park pond, I’ve never killed or harmed anything in my life. So I don’t know what I’m thinking as I line up the bird—a small Inca dove, gray as wood ash—in my gun sights. Not malice, I don’t think, though recklessness can be a form of malice. Curiosity, perhaps. The dumb haze of childhood boredom. It’s a distant shot; I’m sure to miss. The BB gun pops as I pull the trigger. I don’t miss.
Tears go springing from my eyes before the bird has even touched the ground. I’m sobbing by the time I reach it, and though the bird is still, I pump a dozen or more BBs into its head to ensure no suffering, using my forearm to wipe the tears from my cheeks between shots. I kneel beside it. “I’m sorry,” I tell it, over and over again, the gravity of what I’ve done—killing—so heavy upon me that I’m not sure I can stand back up, now or ever. Gravity, and shame: guilt so piercing that I find myself scanning the yard for possible witnesses, human or otherwise, envisioning their scowls of disgust and unable to conjure even a single word in my defense. Aside from a lizard scaling a concrete block wall, though, there are no witnesses. I’m all alone. Just me and my crime.
How do you right a wrong? I hold the warm bird in my hands, gently, as though not to injure it, my eyes still leaking tears. I’ve seen my cat, Miss Kitty, kill birds, and while I wish she wouldn’t do that, I’ve never deemed her kills criminal or immoral because Miss Kitty always eats the birds she catches, just like the Inca dove must’ve eaten ants and beetles. Gradually, a form of atonement becomes clear: I need to eat the bird in my hands. Eating it is the only way to square what I’ve done.
The problem is that I’m eleven and know neither how to clean a bird or cook one. The former turns out to be easy, a pocketknife being all I need to carve out some purple slices of meat. My latchkey kid cooking repertoire, however, is a single dish: the Triscuit pizza recipe on the side of the Triscuit box. I lay the slices of meat on some Triscuits and slide them into a toaster oven. As the oven glows orange, I can see my face reflected in it, my eyes puffed, my cheeks still glossed. The toaster oven dings.
What happens next will go ricocheting through the next forty-four years of my life. I carry the Triscuits to the counter, take a deep breath, and then, a small bite. Instantly, the sobs return. But I’m not crying for the bird this time, or rather not the bird alone. Because it isn’t until this moment, when my teeth encounter the meat, that I understand, with a lightning strike of realization, where meat comes from: not from the Safeway butcher case, swaddled in cellophane, no, but from sentient animals, from living breathing mothered fathered creatures, like the bird, that don’t just die for my supper but are killed for it. Behind nearly every meal I’d ever savored—my mother’s lasagna, my grandmother’s roast beef, the pepperoni dotting my Triscuit pizzas—was an animal someone had slaughtered, was a face that someone had made sure I didn’t have to see. Nature wasn’t separate from me: Nature was me, and I was nature.
This would be a tidier story if I’d ended that afternoon a vegan. But I didn’t. I finished eating the bird that afternoon and still eat meat today—but never without the twinging awareness of where it comes from, what it means. Only by taking a life was I able to apprehend life’s—and death’s—true dimensions, dimensions expertly concealed by modern life. Behind almost everything we do, I learned—don leather shoes, swipe on lipstick colored red from crushed insects, rest our heads on down pillows—there’s a figurative bird. Or there was.
This is your prompt:
Write about a scalding experience that gave you knowledge—wanted or unwanted—about the world and its ways. What illusions were shattered? How did you contend with losing those illusions?
Today’s Contributor—
Jonathan Miles is the author of the novels Dear American Airlines and Want Not, both New York Times Notable books, Anatomy of a Miracle, and most recently Eradication. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, where he served as a columnist. In 2024 he toured as a multi-instrumentalist in the band of the Grammy-winning artist Jon Batiste. He currently serves as Writer-in-Residence at the Solebury School in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and makes the best pork ribs east of the Mississippi.
If you fell off from our our 30-Day Journaling Project in January, or just felt the need to ease into the year, you can find the full 30-Day Journaling Project archived here—along with musical pairings and video conversations with Jennifer Garner, Jon Batiste, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Michael Bierut for creative inspiration.
As community member Laura wrote, “I started the 30 days strong then got behind and will likely spread it to 60 days or even use the prompts all year—they are magical.” They’re ready when you are, whether you’re picking back up, like Laura, revisiting, or just beginning.
A true confession that doesn't have anything to do with an animal, but did give me wanted and unwanted knowledge. Maybe this one popped into mind because Liz is hosting this week.
When Eat, Pray Love was wildly popular, someone gave it to me to pass the time in the hospital where my four-year-old daughter was being treated for stage IV high-risk neuroblastoma. As I read it, I became enraged. Oh my goodness, I thought, you can replace your partner, but I can't replace my daughter. Get up off the bathroom floor, Liz, and carry on. After all, it was your decision to get divorced.
And then...
Fifteen years later, a week after dropping off our kid at college (the one who had cancer), my husband of 21 years blindsided me with a divorce. Can I tell you how many times I thought about my insensitive thoughts regarding Liz's pain around her divorce? Hard. Lesson. Learned.
Going through the divorce was harder than going through my daughter's illness. People think I forget about how hard the cancer days were. I do not. Yes, I was frantic about whether she'd live or die but I always felt loved and supported. During the divorce, I was so lonely and heartbroken. I didn't know if I'd survive. Yet, I did. And learned so much.
No matter the situation -- an unintentional hit on a bird or an unexpected divorce -- the hard things offer us a better way to live if we're willing to trust there's a better way to live and love.
The thing that makes this piece work is the Triscuit. Not the bird, not the tears — the Triscuit. Because that’s the detail that tells you this is an eleven-year-old trying to perform a ritual of atonement using the only tools available to him. A pocketknife and a toaster oven recipe from the side of a box. The gap between the enormity of what he’s feeling and the absurdity of how he’s processing it — that’s where all the power lives. And Liz’s intro is doing something similar in a quieter register. A friendship that started because someone really read someone else’s work. That’s still the rarest thing in the world.