Abrams & Chronicle has a good story to tell about its latest Emily McDowell & Friends greeting card collection, a collaboration with best selling Elizabeth Gilbert, best known for her books Eat Pray Love and Big Magic.
Elizabeth Gilbert earned the hearts and souls of many millions with Eat Pray Love, her true tale of self-discovery. The book has now sold well over 13 million copies with the blockbuster film, starring Julia Roberts becoming a fave ‘feelgood’ movie.
Now, Elizabeth Gilbert’s personal take on philosophy is being shared with the world on a range of greeting cards and stationery, being published under the Emily McDowell & Friends brand and distributed in the UK by Abrams & Chronicle.
With toasts to love and longevity, messages of comfort and support as well as euphemistic high-fives, the inaugural Elizabeth Gilbert collection of greeting cards spans an initial dozen designs, each enhanced with subtle foil-stamping.
A maestro of words herself (a pioneer of empathy cards), Emily McDowell, who has been a fan of Liz Gilbert’s work for almost 15 years, told PG Buzz a little more of the story behind the new greeting card collection.
“Several years ago, Liz and I started following each other on social media. We developed an online friendship (okay, I stalked her until she agreed to be friends with me), and along with the rest of her audience, I followed along as she beautifully and excruciatingly chronicled her experiences with the illness and death of her partner, Rayya Elias, processing her own love and grief in real time through the writing and sharing of her posts.”
Paying tribute to Elizabeth’s talents, Emily feels she has “a singular ability to capture the precise emotional truth of life’s hardest and most meaningful experiences, and to provide words of hope and comfort when most of us don’t know what to say.”
So, at the end of last year, when the Emily McDowell Studio brand was extended to become Emily McDowell & Friends, adding the work of other artists and writers alongside her own, Elizabeth Gilbert was at the top of Emily’s list of dream collaborators. “I sent her an email with what felt like a ‘pie-in-the-sky’ request, especially because Liz has never licensed any of her work outside of book publishing, and five minutes later, I received an enthusiastic “YES!” I definitely cried.”
To create the initial collection, the team went through about four years’ worth of Elizabeth’s social media posts, with passages picked out that were felt to best express the truths that we all want to say and hear, on love, loss, solidarity, comfort, and general reassurance that ‘it’s all gonna be okay’. Emily then curated these quotes, publishing them in physical form for the first time on the cards and stationery range.
Emily reveals her ‘top three favourites’:
- ‘Not This’ card – “This is my anthem. It exactly encapsulates what I want to say to the people I love when they’re in that excruciating not-yet place.”
- The Women I Admire journal – “The contents of every journal I’ve ever filled can be distilled into one sentence: ‘Shit is not working out’. Perhaps you can relate?”
- ‘Home’ card – “I just love this precise and meaningful and surprising way to say ‘I love you’.”
Top: Elizabeth Gilbert (left) with Emily McDowell.
