Elizabeth Gilbert Discusses Her Book, Eat, Pray, Love | Big Think

Elizabeth Gilbert Discusses Her Book, Eat, Pray, Love

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As a writer with the freedom and time to travel, Elizabeth Gilbert used Eat, Pray, Love as a way of taking others on a spiritual journey.

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Elizabeth Gilbert:

Her most recent book is the #1 New York Times Bestselling memoir "Eat, Pray, Love," about the year she spent traveling the world alone after a difficult divorce. Anne Lamott called Eat, Pray, Love "wise, jaunty, human, ethereal, heartbreaking." The book has been a worldwide success, now published in over thirty languages with over 7 million copies in print. It was named by The New York Times as one of the 100 most notable books of 2006, and chosen by Entertainment Weekly as one of the best ten nonfiction books of the year. In 2008, Elizabeth was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, by Time Magazine.

In addition to writing books, Elizabeth has worked steadily as a journalist. Throughout much of the 1990’s she was on staff at SPIN Magazine, where – with humor and pathos – she chronicled diverse individuals and subcultures, covering everything from rodeo's Buckle Bunnies (reprinted in The KGB Bar Reader) to China’s headlong construction of the Three Gorges Dam. In 1999, Elizabeth began working for GQ magazine, where her profiles of extraordinary men – from singers Hank Williams III and Tom Waits (reprinted in The Tom Waits Reader) to quadriplegic athlete Jim Maclaren – earned her three National Magazine Award Nominations, as well as repeated appearances in the “Best American” magazine writing anthologies. She has also written for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, Real Simple, Allure, Travel and Leisure and O, the Oprah Magazine (where her memoir "Eat, Pray, Love" was excerpted in March, 2006.) She has been a contributor to the Public Radio show "This American Life", and -- perhaps most proudly -- has several times shown up at John Hodgman's Little Gray Book Lecture Series, most notably during Lecture Four on the subject "Hints for Public Singing."

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Why do you think Eat, Pray, Love was so popular?

Gilbert: I don’t know. I don’t know why “Eat, Pray, Love” has had the impact that it’s had. I also don’t know… I mean, I’ve written books before this, you know, and they sold upwards of dozens of copies each, you know. I don’t know how that happened. If I knew how that happened, I would do it again or I would’ve been doing it all along, you know. It’s… There’s a… There’s a certain randomness in the way that my questions, for some reason, about my life intersected… dovetailed with questions that apparently a lot of other people, women in particular, at this moment in history were asking about their lives. One possible answer is… I mean, I do feel like I’m a pretty representative example of my culture, you know. I’m pretty representative 21st century, middle-aged, American woman in the way that I’ve been educated in the way that… you know, the things that I’ve been led to believe that my life should feel like and the disappointments that I experience when my life doesn’t feel like that, the particular kinds of questions that haunt me at the things that I want and wonder about. You know, I don’t think I have any particularly special… I think I feel that stuff the same way that certainly everybody I know feels those things, you know. And, again, pointing to the question of privilege because of the fact that I’m a writer, I have… and because of the fact that I’ve been able to build a career as a writer and sort of organize my time in a certain way, I have access to a lot more time than other people might have to think about those things. I was able to say, I’m going to take one entire year and do literally nothing every minute of the day except think about all these questions. I remember, before I left on the trip, this friend of mine who’s a mother of two, she’s a doctor. She’s, you know, at home right now with her kids but certainly has this ferociously intelligent mind. You know, she just sat me down and said, “Take us with you,” you know, “All of us who are asking these same things but are staying here, you know, with our families, with our kids, with our work.

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