Coffee with Elizabeth Gilbert

It’s hard to meet the bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert without picturing her collapsed in tears on the floor of a suburban bathroom. That’s the image that opens her 2006 book Eat, Pray, Love, and one that seems to stick in the minds of more than 5m readers, from Oprah fans to book-clubbers to New York subway users, about a fifth of whom seemed to be reading the book on their commutes this spring.

I came across the book when a friend pressed it on me, confessing she didn’t buy it herself, too embarrassed to be one of the crowd. Instead, she got her fiancé to pick up a copy. And then she couldn’t put it down.

It’s not an ideal book for a man to buy his betrothed. Once Gilbert peels herself off the bathroom floor, she decides to leave her husband of six years, briefly takes up with a younger lover, and embarks on a year-long, multiple-continent journey to explore sensual pleasure in Italy, spiritual transcendence in India and ways to balance the two in Indonesia. There she meets the man who will become her second husband.

But Gilbert’s murder of a marriage isn’t what makes urban intellectual types like my friend squirm. Rather, it’s her relationship with religion: it is the voice of God that helps raise Gilbert from the bathroom floor; serious prayer leads her to stop taking antidepressants; and in India, learning how to meditate, she enters a higher realm in which “I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe”. Urban intellectuals expect tracts on spirituality to be delivered in world religion courses or by serious, scholarly tomes. Or even, at a stretch, in yoga classes. Not by the gushy heroine of her own real-life chick-lit.

But when we meet at the Bridge Café in Frenchtown, New Jersey, it is clear that Gilbert (number 67 in Time magazine’s 2008 list of most-influential people this year – just below Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, just above the architect Rem Koolhaas) is no calorie-counting Bridget Jones. First off, she wants to order as many doughnuts as the café can offer. “They’re home-made,” she explains, “and amazing. I just love them.” When the girls behind the counter confess there are only two left, Gilbert suggests we supplement those with raspberry strüdel.

She is tall, slim and blonde, with smooth skin and blue eyes that flicker only briefly with shyness – or, later, irritation as the photographer takes his time – and you begin to see why her book is free of the anxiety about beauty that weighs down many memoirs by women. While Gilbert writes about feeling rejected by her lover in New York, she never worries that it’s because she’s not pretty enough. In the section on Italy, five or six lines address feelings of physical inadequacy, but mostly she feels beautiful and eats her way through the country. In Indonesia, when she’s ready to start dating again, she never wonders whether she’ll have trouble attracting a man.

Male readers do react differently to Gilbert. Even before our meeting, three different men had sent me the same internet magazine article arguing that if Eat, Pray, Love had been written by a man, women would find it self-absorbed and sexist: “It’s tempting to conclude that women have serious double standards when it comes to defining acceptable behaviour,” stated the writer (he also said reading the book was like travelling the world with a girlfriend who won’t stop talking about herself). But if women do find the book self-absorbed, they also seem to find it invigorating.

Gilbert is sanguine about critics: “I’m sympathetic to people who don’t like it. Every year there are books that everyone reads, and finally I cave in and I pick it up at the airport, and I’m like, ‘I don’t get why this is so popular, I don’t understand why everyone loves this.’ Not everyone has to like it.”

She’s a regular at the café, or has been since moving to New Jersey in early 2007. While still in Indonesia on the final leg of her EPL odyssey, Gilbert logged on to the internet, found an advertisement for a converted church near Frenchtown and bought it sight-unseen. The mountains of money she’s made through Eat, Pray, Love obviously permit a certain financial confidence. A movie version – starring Julia Roberts and produced by Brad Pitt – is now in production, and it’s not the first time Hollywood has shown interest in her work: her first-person magazine account of life as a New York City bartender became the 2000 film Coyote Ugly.

It’s easier to succeed at something when you’re “not burdened by being multi-talented”, says Gilbert in modest contradiction of the determination to write that has taken her from a childhood spent in a Christmas-tree farm in Connecticut to becoming the author of three acclaimed books – Pilgrims (1997), a collection of short stories ; Stern Men (2000), a novel; and The Last American Man (2002), the biography of a backwoods survivalist. By the time she divorced her husband, she was a feature writer for GQ magazine and the main breadwinner. And when she realised her marriage wasn’t making her happy, she took measured steps to get out of it.

Why, then, does the book’s account of those measured steps make her seem so flaky? “I’m not going to deny I’m flaky,” she says after some thought. “But I think it’s the condition of the times in some ways – to live in an era when you have so many options. You worry that if you’ve chosen one thing you’ve lost the opportunity to do 10 other things. So I think I’m a very representative, 21st-century, educated woman. And if that’s flaky, that’s what we are.”

Flaky is a good description for the raspberry strüdel, so I swap to a chewy doughnut and ask Gilbert about differences in the way British readers have responded to the book. Eat, Pray, Love was first published in the UK in April 2006, and hasn’t had quite the success there that it enjoys in the US. “[In Britain], that kind of rank, emotional self-examination is not done,” she posits. “That said, I doubt very much that there’s much difference between me and what would be my 38-year-old equivalent in London.”

The day before we met, Gilbert typed the last word of the first draft of her next book, which will almost certainly fall into this revelatory road-trip genre: it’s a meditation on marriage, written while travelling through south-east Asia, and tentatively titled Weddings and Evictions.

Gilbert explains: when she and her new husband, José (EPL’s Felipe) – a handsome, older Brazilian – met in Bali, neither had any intention of marrying, having both come out of acrimonious divorces. “It was the most safe, reassuring feeling in the world to be promised you never had to do that again,” Gilbert says. But a few years later, en route to New Jersey, José was stopped by border control at Dallas-Fort Worth airport and told he’d better get married if he planned on staying in the US. The couple had three choices: they could separate, they could move elsewhere, or they could marry, and “the idea of never, ever being with him here was really hard. He loves America.”

They married but it still took 10 months for him to get permission to return to the US. During that time, travelling in Asia with José, Gilbert began to mull on the book that would follow Eat, Pray, Love. “I dove into my first marriage like a labrador into a swimming pool, and my sister pointed out that it might behove me, this time, to think about the history of this thing.” She approached her task with a scholar’s diligence, reading up on the history of marriage. She would wake up her new husband at three in the morning, she says, and say: “‘Did you know that in the 11th century women had more rights after divorce than they did in western Europe in the 1940s?’ And he’d be like, ‘That’s wonderful, that’s wonderful, but it’s three o’clock in the morning.’”

It’s this sort of cute anecdote, complete with predictable punchline, that grates on many of Gilbert’s detractors. A number of readers of Eat, Pray, Love have told me they hated Gilbert’s style – but finished all 350 pages. Gilbert says she’s noticed the too-cute tic herself: she tries to cull standalone lines at the end of long paragraphs, “The punchline or detraction or retraction or sarcastic self-demolition ... Whatever line is lying at the end is probably not as funny as I thought it was. If it’s funny at all.”

This self-censorship seems more evident in her fiction, however, which tends to treat its bright, eager female characters with scepticism and often reads more like Henry James in the American west than anything remotely chick-lit. She may return to fiction, in fact, having hesitated about publishing Weddings and Evictions. Gilbert says she writes each book as a letter: Eat, Pray, Love was a letter to Darcy Steinke, a friend and the author of the memoir Easter Everywhere, who also went through a divorce, suffered depression, and had, says Gilbert, “a spiritual journey of a different shape”. With the new book, Gilbert found herself writing to another friend, Ann Patchett, the Orange-prize-winning author of Bel Canto (2002), who is on her second marriage.

But, to judge by book sales and author events, many of Gilbert’s readers feel she is writing directly to them, helping them cut through confusion of their own marital mires by plumbing the depths of her own. She tells me about a book signing at which a woman approached and asked whether she should leave her husband. “I just said, ‘I know that you understand why I can’t do that. I know that if you think about that for just 10 seconds, you’re going to understand why that’s not possible.’” The woman came to her senses and began to laugh.

By now we have given up on the doughnuts and the photographer asks if he can take some photos of Gilbert talking, but also looking into the distance now and again. “Like you’ve caught me thinking about God?” she jokes, and obliges.

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The Bridge Café
8 Bridge Street
Frenchtown, New Jersey

2x cafe lattés $7.90
1x black coffee $2.25
2x homemade doughnuts $5.00
1x piece of raspberry strüdel $1.50
Total $16.65

‘Eat, Pray, Love’ is published by Bloomsbury (£7.99)

Rose Jacobs is the deputy editor of FT Weekend Magazine

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From Wife of Bath to ex-wife of New York

My local Waterstone’s bookshop is flummoxed about where to shelve Eat, Pray, Love. It could, of course, go in “Biography” – it is, the author tells us, a “spiritual memoir”. But that word “spiritual” could just as well relocate it in “Religion”, along with St Augustine’s Confessions. Its subtitle is “One Woman’s Search For Everything”. There’s no shelf for “Everything” but a whole corner of the store for “Women”. All very puzzling, writes John Sutherland.

To cut a long shelving dilemma short, the big W has dumped Gilbert’s book in “travel writing”. Oh, and in “Bestsellers”, of course. It’s currently breaking 5m copies worldwide.

All of these readers (and more – this is a book that women, particularly, love to pass on) won’t need any summary. Gilbert, a smart New York writer, finds herself trapped in what F Scott Fitzgerald called the “crack-up”.

Marriage broken, post-marital relationship screwed, and, to cap it all, 9/11. Prozac is one option (booze was Scott’s). But not this lady’s. Bags are packed. Like Bunyan’s hero, she departs the City of Destruction in search of her personal Celestial City on the hill. And God. And Love. And a number one spot on the NYT bestseller list wouldn’t go amiss.

Call it Pilgrim’s Progress, 21st-century style, or a voyage of self-discovery . In Italy, Gilbert eats herself into bovine serenity – taking in the high culture of the place as dessert. Then on to India, where she un-pampers herself into high spirituality and a respectable waist size, scrubbing ashram floors and almost attaining the “turiya state” – the elusive fourth level of human consciousness. Then on to Bali and she’s ready for love.

The frame of this book is as old as books themselves. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (five former husbands in her wake) set out for Canterbury with the same aims as our ex-wife of New York.

What gives Eat, Pray, Love its salt and savour (to use Bunyan’s homely phrase) is Gilbert’s shrewd eye, her sharp tongue and her indomitable will, not just to survive but to (Bunyan again) “progress”. And her niceness.

This last point is important because, if one turns it all around, very few Indonesian women on the rebound from a crappy relationship could circumnavigate the globe, first class, to “find” themselves. For most of the world spiritual enlightenment has to begin and end at home. Despite those months on her knees scrubbing the floor, Gilbert is always the privileged tourist. But a very nice one. And, more to the point, a damnably readable one.

Tourism of the Soul (no shelf in the bookshop for that, alas) sells big in the US from time to time. What Eat, Pray, Love inescapably calls to mind is Robert M. Pirsig’s superseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book which attained biblical status in the hippy 1970s. One Biker’s Search for Everything. Vroom vroom.

You’ll still find copies of Pirsig’s soul-manual in New Age bookstores. Pilgrim’s Progress, meanwhile, has been in print for nearly four centuries. I don’t think Eat, Pray, Love will be on the shelves for our great-great-great grandchildren. But, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it’s still got lots of juice left in the tank.

John Sutherland is emeritus professor of literature at University College, London and the author of ‘Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction’ (Oxford University Press