Elizabeth Gilbert was just 34, burnt out, her marriage in tatters when she left New York to travel the world. Her confessional book, Eat Pray Love, with its happy-ever- after ending, has sold millions. No wonder she says she's a 'favourite of destiny'.
In this memoir, a blockbuster of self-discovery, Elizabeth has catalogued, uncensored, the depression, disintegration, infatuation and masturbation that followed the breakdown of her marriage and the year abroad she spent trying to recover from it, as well as her relations with her ex-husband, sister, parents and boyfriend. There are currently five million copies of Eat Pray Love in circulation.
To read her last book, The Last American Man, and Eat Pray Love in succession is to remind oneself that there is no heroic journey for women, no concomitant woman of destiny trope, that doesn't involve childbirth. Perhaps this is the key to Eat Pray Love's success; that after spending all that time watching and listening to the agonies of Conway, Gilbert went off and listened to herself in a way that thrilled lots of women.
Her journey started with an act of bona fide bravery: an admission that she didn't want to have children, not with her husband, not with anyone, ever. In this book she details how she dealt with her husbands pressure to have kids, her appeal to God from the bathroom floor while her husband sleeps innocently in the bedroom next door, because she didn't know what else to do; she hated her marriage and didn't want to have a baby at that point. But she was only 31 - what was the big deal?
The end of her marriage constituted the first real failure Gilbert had dealt with. The crisis was so huge, she says, because she was not used to disappointing people or herself, a sneaky piece of self-promotion. She believes that her breakdown was also fanned by grief for the children she'd never have. "When I diagnose my depression now, I think it was partially about saying goodbye to these kids that I always expected to have but already knew that I wouldn't."
When asked why not? She replies "Because I know my own energies. [Having children] would be the only thing I could do, and that would be devastating to me, because of what else I am and what else I want to do. So it's no accident that I fell in love with a much older person who didn't want to have kids." This is her second husband, Felipe, whom she met in Bali at the end of Eat Pray Love. "It was such a relief. Magic trick! Companionship with no pressure for family! Free built-in stepkids who have already been exquisitely raised by another woman! It's like, how'd I get away with that?"
A lot of people who loved the book for its honesty, and I did also (although I do think her first husband got a raw deal -he's barely in it and we don't learn his name or anything about him!) which had lead to this books great success. Eat Pray Love started off selling slowly; it was in the US bestseller list for two weeks then fell away. But instead of disappearing altogether, it hovered outside the top 10, shifting a hefty 1,000 copies a week for a year or so, and then the paperback went crazy - the film rights have also been sold.
Interestingly, Gilbert's sense of her own beneficence isn't just a matter of style; she puts her money where her mouth is. When she wrote The Last America Man, she divided profits from the book equally with Eustace Conway, a rare gesture from a biographer, and in Eat Pray Love she raised $18,000 to buy a poor woman in Bali a house by emailing her friends and asking for donations. When the woman tried to screw more money out of her, Gilbert cannily defused the situation and they still came out of it as friends. And then there is Felipe, whom she met at a dinner party in Bali and whose worldliness she welcomes as a counter to her credulousness. "In Bali, I'd come back with reports of these magical events and he'd say, 'What a bunch of bullshit.' It was good for me to be around someone like that."
Now Elizabeth is nearly 40, is happily re married and living in New Jersey. She didn't want to get married again, but Felipe is Brazilian and there was no other way to get him in the country. After a year of long-distance dating, they moved to Frenchtown and opened a furniture importing business. She has just finished her next book, another memoir that is also "a meditation on marriage". Her second wedding was very different from her first, low key, in normal clothes. "I didn't want this marriage to be based in any sense on an illusion. I've done that. Sanity and clarity are more important for me and I'm willing to give up a lot of shimmer for it. I'm willing to have more boring friends, who are sane." Anyway, she is happy, which is what her readers turned to her in such numbers for in the first place. Now that’s a very good ending.
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
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