Elizabeth Gilbert – Eat Pray Love

An American journalist and author best known for the Book Eat, Pray, Love which sold 12 million copies worldwide and was translated into 30 languages.

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006)

Growing up on The Christmas Tree Farm

Elizabeth Gilbert was born July, 18 1969 in Waterbury, Connecticut. Her father, John Gilbert, was a chemical engineer at Uniroyal; her mother, Carole, was a nurse and established a Planned Parenthood clinic.

As a little girl, Gilbert’s parents purchased a Christmas Tree Farm in n Litchfield, Connecticut and moved the family to the country. They did not have a television or record player, so Gilbert and her sister (Older sister Catherine Gilbert Murdock) developed a love for reading and writing. She was influenced by books and authors like The Wizard of Oz, Charles Dickens, and Ernest Hemingway‘s short story collection, In Our Time (as stated in an interview with New York Times); which added to her becoming a writer.

Gilbert attended New York University and studied political science. After collage she gained experiences through travel and moved to Philadelphia. Here she worked as a bartender. She saw life experiences and travel as food to fuel her stories and books and investigates the world for writing topics.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s writing career

Gilbert published her first short stories in 1993 called Pilgrims. They were published in Esquire under the headline “The Debut of an American Writer”. This led to steady journalism work in a variety of magazines including Spin, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Allure, Real Simple, and Travel + Leisure.

In 1997, a GQ Article titled “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon” was written by Gilbert and led to the feature film Coyote Ugly (2000). This article was a memoir of her time as a bartender in the East Village section of New York City.

In 2006, Gilbert published Eat, Pray, Love. As the travel and exploration for this book was financed by a publisher’s advance; many writers refer to the book as a “priv-lit” (literature of privilege). The memoir appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list of nonfiction in the spring of 2006, and was still #2 on the list 88 weeks later, in October 2008.

2010: Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace with Marriage (a sequel to Eat, Pray, Love)

2013: The Signature of All Things

Her latest novel is City of Girls. It is a rollicking, sexy tale of the New York City theatre world during the 1940s. It will be published in June of 2019.

Confessions of a Seduction Addict – Elizabeth Gilbert

Gilberts personal life as described by her in a 2015 Article article for The New York Times titled “Confessions of a Seduction Addict”; is a series of heists. She feels her love life has been one game to the next and her book Eat, Pray, Love was an exploration away from this continuous pattern.

Elizabeth Gilbert has been married twice and in a committed relationship with the writer Rayya Elias from 2017 to 2018 before she died of terminal cancer.