Elizabeth Gilbert is selling her 'Italianate Victorian' home for just $1m. Buy it and you'll surely get a role in her next book thrown in
Praying for a good price … Julia Roberts in the film version of Eat, Pray, Love (2010). Photograph: Everett/Rex Features
Elizabeth Gilbert is selling her house in New Jersey, offering her fans an appetising opportunity to play a part in the inevitable follow-up memoir to Eat, Pray, Love, and so potentially become a character in the hit Julia Roberts movie's sequel. On a dedicated website called Eat, Pray, Crib, Gilbert deploys all her gifts for gush in depicting the nine-room "mini-estate" (confusingly described as "Italianate Victorian" in style) as so perfect that her need to move is puzzling.
Apparently it's so she and Jose – the Brazilian importer who provides the book with its happy ending, played by Javier Bardem in the film – can live closer to Two Buttons, their "pan-Asian emporium" in Frenchtown, NJ, which is so-called because the two "lifelong travellers" were told by "a priest in Laos that we had so much love for life that we needed nothing more than two buttons in our pockets to get by in this world".
Happily, her subsequent book and film earnings mean the priest's words will never have to be tested, and the house sale – asking price: $999,000 (£600m) – will take her further away from her years as a restless, far from affluent nomad hunting for a guy and a guru. Judging by Gilbert's paean to the property, though, it seems if anything to be underpriced: among its attractions are a 500-bottle wine cellar, a "chef's kitchen", a "powder room [with] an automated Japanese toilet-bidet and an exotic Balinese lava stone sink", and above all an attic "Skybrary" ("handcrafted for me over three years by a master woodworker") that is "too magical to be described".
What may surprise admirers with a spare million dollars, however, is the lack of dedicated spaces for spiritual activity – there's no shrine, and even yoga is only catered for in a brisk mention of a "tastefully designed workout/yoga/home gym area". Religion seems unlikely to figure in the title of Gilbert's next autobiographical volume, though it may be too cynical to guess that it might be called Write, Decorate, Sell.
Apparently it's so she and Jose – the Brazilian importer who provides the book with its happy ending, played by Javier Bardem in the film – can live closer to Two Buttons, their "pan-Asian emporium" in Frenchtown, NJ, which is so-called because the two "lifelong travellers" were told by "a priest in Laos that we had so much love for life that we needed nothing more than two buttons in our pockets to get by in this world".
Happily, her subsequent book and film earnings mean the priest's words will never have to be tested, and the house sale – asking price: $999,000 (£600m) – will take her further away from her years as a restless, far from affluent nomad hunting for a guy and a guru. Judging by Gilbert's paean to the property, though, it seems if anything to be underpriced: among its attractions are a 500-bottle wine cellar, a "chef's kitchen", a "powder room [with] an automated Japanese toilet-bidet and an exotic Balinese lava stone sink", and above all an attic "Skybrary" ("handcrafted for me over three years by a master woodworker") that is "too magical to be described".
What may surprise admirers with a spare million dollars, however, is the lack of dedicated spaces for spiritual activity – there's no shrine, and even yoga is only catered for in a brisk mention of a "tastefully designed workout/yoga/home gym area". Religion seems unlikely to figure in the title of Gilbert's next autobiographical volume, though it may be too cynical to guess that it might be called Write, Decorate, Sell.
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