ELIZABETH GILBERT is an American journalist and author born on this date. She is best known for her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which has sold over 12 million copies and has been translated into over 30 languages. The book was also made into a film of the same name in 2010.

After college, Gilbert moved to Philadelphia and worked as a waitress or bartender to save up enough money to travel. Gilbert stated in a New York Times interview that she was influenced by Ernest Hemingway’s early career, and his short story collection, In Our Time. Gilbert believed that writers find stories not in a seminar room but by investigating the world. She held various jobs including a trail cook, bartender, and waitress while storing up experiences for her writing.

In 2006, Gilbert published Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, a chronicle of her year of “spiritual and personal exploration” spent traveling abroad. She financed her world travel for the book with a $200,000 publisher’s advance after pitching the concept in a book proposal. The best-seller has been critiqued by some writers as “priv-lit” (“a literature of privilege”) and a “calculated business decision”. 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. It was optioned for a film by Columbia Pictures, which released Eat Pray Love, starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert, on August 13, 2010. Gilbert appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007, and has reappeared on the show to further discuss the book, her philosophy, and the film. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, and named to Oprah’s SuperSoul 100 list of visionaries and influential leaders

In a 2015 article for The New York Times titled “Confessions of a Seduction Addict“, Gilbert wrote that she “careened from one intimate entanglement to the next—dozens of them—without so much as a day off between romances.” She acknowledged, “Seduction was never a casual sport for me; it was more like a heist, adrenalizing and urgent. I would plan the heist for months, scouting out the target, looking for unguarded entries. Then I would break into his deepest vault, steal all his emotional currency and spend it on myself.” She realised that, “I might indeed win the man eventually. But over time (and it wouldn’t take long), his unquenchable infatuation for me would fade, as his attention returned to everyday matters. This always left me feeling abandoned and invisible; love that could be quenched was not nearly enough love for me”.

Gilbert was married to Michael Cooper, whom she met while working at the Coyote Ugly Saloon, from 1994 to 2002. The marriage ended when Gilbert left Cooper for another man.

In 2007, Gilbert married José Nunes, whom she met in Bali while on the travels she describes in Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert and Nunes lived in Frenchtown, New Jersey; together they ran a large Asian import store called Two Buttons until they sold it in 2015.

In July 2016, Gilbert announced on her Facebook page that she and Nunes were separating, saying that the split was “very amicable” and that their reasons were “very personal”. In September 2016, Gilbert published a Facebook post saying that she was in a relationship with her female best friend, writer Rayya Elias, and that this relationship was related to the breakup of her marriage. The relationship began because Gilbert realized her feelings for Elias following Elias’s terminal cancer diagnosis. In June 2017, the two celebrated a commitment ceremony with close family and friends. The ceremony was not legally binding. Elias died in January 2018.