Eat Pray Love - the book that started it all

Millions relate to one woman’s 'bathroom floor moment’.
By Melissa Whitworth
Published: The Telegraph, 27 Aug 2010

Guru: Elizabeth Gilbert, author of 'Eat Pray Love', reshaped her life

American writer Elizabeth Gilbert begins her memoir, Eat Pray Love with a vivid description of her crying alone on the bathroom floor. She is married to the wrong man (who is asleep next door in their bedroom), has found herself on the repressive suburban baby track and is living a seemingly perfect life that she doesn’t want.

Those bathroom-floor moments are a rite of passage for the thirtysomething brigade (mine, thankfully, came before I got married).
With that image of a terribly private moment, the author captured the attention of a huge female book-buying audience in the United States and beyond. Gilbert, a journalist and author based in New York, is 34 at the time the book is set.
As her crisis plays out, she appeals to God (“It was all I could do to stop myself from saying, 'I’ve always been a big fan of your work’,” she writes), divorces her husband, has a doomed affair and leaves for a year of self-discovery and healing. “I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two,” she writes.


Published in 2006, Eat Pray Love has sold seven million copies, and been translated into 30 languages. Julia Roberts snapped up the film rights early on. There is a perfume based on the book, a jewellery line, package holidays based on Gilbert’s route, and the places and people she visited that year are under siege from women from across the world eager to follow in the writer’s footsteps.


Full story in The Telegraph.