Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert, born July 18, 1969, in Waterbury, Connecticut, is an American journalist and author whose work grew out of reporting, travel, and a strong belief that writers find material by moving through the world. She became best known for her 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which sold more than 12 million copies, was translated into more than 30 languages, and was made into a 2010 film starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert. Her public life belongs to an era when magazine writing, memoir, television talk shows, and film adaptation could turn a personal story into an international conversation.

Gilbert’s childhood was unusually quiet and bookish. Her father, John Gilbert, was a chemical engineer at Uniroyal, and her mother, Carole, was a nurse who established a Planned Parenthood clinic. When Gilbert was four, her parents bought a Christmas tree farm in Litchfield, Connecticut. The family lived in the countryside with no immediate neighbors, and they had no television or record player. Reading filled the space. Gilbert and her older sister, Catherine Gilbert Murdock, wrote books and plays to entertain themselves. Gilbert later described her parents as “modern pioneers,” noting that they made their own goat’s-milk yogurt and voted for Reagan twice.

After attending New York University, Gilbert resisted literature classes and writing workshops, saying she did not think the best place to find her voice was in a room of others trying to find theirs. She chose work and travel over graduate school. In Philadelphia she worked as a waitress and bartender to save money to travel, influenced by Ernest Hemingway’s early career and his story collection In Our Time. Her idea of an education was practical and outward-looking. While gathering experiences for writing, she also worked as a trail cook, bartender, and waitress.

Her career began in print with a rare break. In 1993, Esquire published her short story “Pilgrims” under the headline “The Debut of an American Writer,” making her the first unpublished short story writer to debut in the magazine since Norman Mailer. Magazine work followed in Spin, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Allure, Real Simple, and Travel + Leisure. Her 1997 GQ article “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon,” about her time as a bartender at the first Coyote Ugly table dancing bar in New York’s East Village, became the basis for the 2000 film Coyote Ugly. Her profile “The Ghost,” about Hank Williams III, appeared in Best American Magazine Writing 2001.

Gilbert’s books moved across fiction, biography, memoir, and advice. Pilgrims, her 1997 story collection, received the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her novel Stern Men followed in 2000 and was selected by The New York Times as a “Notable Book.” The Last American Man, published in 2002 and adapted from her reporting on Eustace Conway, was nominated for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Eat, Pray, Love appeared in 2006 and stayed on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list into 2008. She later published Committed in 2010, republished her great-grandmother Margaret Yardley Potter’s 1947 cookbook At Home on the Range in 2012, released The Signature of All Things in 2013, Big Magic in 2015, and City of Girls in 2019.

Gilbert’s words continue to draw readers because they are tied to appetite, doubt, work, and change, subjects she returned to in memoir, fiction, journalism, and books about creativity. In Big Magic, she wrote about overcoming self-doubt, avoiding perfectionism, and setting an agenda for creative living, then continued the subject through her Magic Lessons podcast. Her line, “It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away,” carries the plainness that often gives her writing its force: warm enough to comfort, blunt enough not to pretend.