Living your life debt-free almost meant more to him than anything else. It was really important to both of my parents, but to my dad it was almost to the point of hysterical importance that we’d be fiscally responsible people. “My dad was a hardliner on self-accountability.
RELATED: 60 Novels Everyone Should Read Read article So you know, it’s just like a weird birthday… ‘Happy birthday, kid. And it went like that sort of all the way up. Except for at Christmas you might get a nice sweater or something, but you know, you have a babysitting job. By the time we got to high school we were in charge of our own clothing they no longer bought clothes for us. If you want it to be clean you’re going to have to clean it.’ I think was around 11 or 12. So if you want it to be a pigsty, it can be a pigsty. There was a point in which my mother said, ‘Your room is your own, and I don’t do anything in it. That if I never wanted to wash my hair again, if I didn’t want to wear clean clothes to school, she wouldn’t do anything about it. That’s what she told me in a sort of formal statement. And my new responsibility was my mother no longer was in charge of my physical appearance. So when I was nine I got a birthday present but I also got a new responsibility.
And it was all planned out ahead what it was going to be. “Every year on our birthday our parents gave us a gift – and they gave us a new responsibility.
Not surprisingly, credit goes to her parents, whom she describes as, “the only people she knew who made their own goat milk and voted for Reagan.” Here’s what Gilbert says her parents did right: She’s lived the kind of life many of us want our sons and daughters to experience. 2002’s The Last American Man, provided the blue print for the Mountain Men reality show genre and her pre-fame life was a filled with adventure, travel, some bad-ass journalism, and self-reliance. You may know her as the woman who wrote the memoir that launched several thousand book clubs, and you’d be partly right - Eat, Pray, Love was the kind of publishing phenomenon that follows a writer around permanently - but prior to that global bestseller, or her new book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote of the kind of guys you watch on the Discovery Channel. Here’s what she says her parents did right.