Background

Elizabeth M. Gilbert was born on July 18, 1969, in Waterbury, Connecticut, the daughter of John Gilbert, a chemical engineer, and his wife Carole, a housewife.

Along with her only sister, novelist Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Gilbert grew up on a small family Christmas tree farm in Litchfield, Connecticut. The family lived in the country with no neighbors; they did not own a television or record player. Consequently, the family read a great deal, and Gilbert and her sister entertained themselves by writing books and plays.

Education

Elizabeth Gilbert earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from New York University in 1991.

Career

After graduation, Gilbert spent several years traveling around the country, working in bars, diners, and ranches, collecting experiences to transform into fiction.

These explorations eventually formed the basis of her first book - a short story collection called Pilgrims (1997), which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award, and which moved Annie Proulx to call her "a young writer of incandescent talent".

During these early years in New York, Gilbert also worked as a journalist for such publications as Spin, GQ and The New York Times Magazine. She was a three-time finalist for The National Magazine Award, and an article she wrote in GQ about her experiences bartending on the Lower East Side eventually became the basis for the movie Coyote Ugly.

In 2000, Elizabeth Gilbert published her first novel, Stern Men (a story of brutal territory wars between two remote fishing islands off the coast of Maine) which was a New York Times Notable Book.

In 2002, she published The Last American Man - the true story of the modern-day woodsman Eustace Conway. This book, her first work of non-fiction, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Elizabeth Gilbert is best known, however for her 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which chronicled her journey alone around the world, looking for solace after a difficult divorce. The book was an international bestseller, translated into over thirty languages, with over 12 million copies sold worldwide. In 2010, Eat, Pray, Love was made into a film starring Julia Roberts.

In 2010, Gilbert published a follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love called Committed - a memoir which explored her ambivalent feelings about the institution of marriage. The book immediately became a #1 New York Times Bestseller and was also received with warm critical praise. As Newsweek wrote, Committed "retains plenty of Gilbert’s comic ruefulness and wide-eyed wonder", and NPR called the book "a rich brew of newfound insight and wisdom."

Her 2013 novel The Signature of All Things is a sprawling tale of 19th-century botanical exploration. O Magazine named it "the novel of a lifetime", and the Wall Street Journal called it "the most ambitious and purely-imagined work of (Gilbert’s) twenty-year career." The Signature of All Things was a New York Times Bestseller, and Janet Maslin called it "engrossing…vibrant and hot-blooded." The novel was named a Best Book of 2013 by The New York Times, O Magazine, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The New Yorker.

In 2015, she published Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear - a book that encapsulates the joyful spirit of adventure and permission that Elizabeth has always brought to her work and to her life.

Her latest novel is City of Girls - a rollicking, sexy tale of the New York City theater world during the 1940s. It was published on June 4, 2019.

Elizabeth divides her time between New York City, rural New Jersey, and everywhere else.

Achievements

• Elizabeth M. Gilbert is an author, who is best known for her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which as of December 2010 had spent 199 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and which was also made into a film by the same name in 2010.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Last American Man

    (From the New York Times, bestselling author of Eat Pray L...)

    2002
  • Stern Men

    (Off the coast of Maine, Ruth Thomas is born into a feud f...)

    2000
  • Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

    (Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love touched the world and c...)

    2006
  • Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

    (Balancing between soulful spirituality and cheerful pragm...)

    2015
  • The Signature of All Things: A Novel

    (In The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert returns...)

    2013
  • City of Girls: A Novel

    (Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with ...)

    2019
  • Committed: A Love Story

    (At the end of her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbe...)

    2010
  • Pilgrims 1997

Views

Quotations: "If life gives you lemons, don't settle for simply making lemonade - make a glorious scene at a lemonade stand."

"I think a lot of people who feel as though they desperately want to be married oftentimes simply desperately want to have a wedding."

"If I could read while I was driving, showering, socializing or sleeping, I would do it."

"My career started young and I was really ambitious, and then I had success and I hung out with people who were much older. I think I might have been temporally misplaced, so I thought I was 40. It was a premature midlife crisis."

"Marriage is not simply a romantic union between two people; it's also a political and economic contract of the highest order."

Connections

From 1994 to 2002, Elizabeth Gilbert was married to Michael Cooper, whom she met while working at the Coyote Ugly Saloon.

In 2007, Gilbert married José Nunes, whom she met in Bali while on the travels she describes in Eat, Pray, Love.

On July 1, 2016, Gilbert announced on her Facebook page that she and Nunes were separating, saying that the split was "very amicable" and that their reasons were "very personal".

On September 7, 2016, Gilbert published a Facebook post saying that she was in a relationship with her female best friend, writer Rayya Elias, and that this relationship was related to the breakup of her marriage. The relationship began because Gilbert realized her feelings for Elias following Elias's terminal cancer diagnosis. On June 6, 2017, the two celebrated a commitment ceremony with close family and friends. The ceremony was not legally binding. Elias died on January 4, 2018.

On March 25, 2019, Gilbert posted on Instagram that she is in a relationship with United Kingdom-born photographer, Simon MacArthur, who was also a close friend of Elias.

Father:

John Gilbert

Mother:

Carole Gilbert

ex-partner:

Rayya Elias

Sister:

Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Ex-husband:

Michael Cooper

Ex-husband:

José Nunes

Partner:

Simon MacArthur