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"  On a sunny, cold afternoon, Elizabeth Gilbert is driving me around Frenchtown, New Jersey, where she lives, and talking about the challenge of finding the peace and solitude to finish her new book. The struggle is partly because so many people want a piece of her since her memoir,  Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman&amp;#039;s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, cruised up the paperback best-seller list in 2007 and parked in the No. 1 spot for 57 weeks straight. But it&amp;#039;s also because she&amp;#039;s extremely social\u2014&amp;quot;a cross,&amp;quot; she writes in that book, &amp;quot;between a golden retriever and a barnacle.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I have this artist friend who&amp;#039;s very disciplined,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;and he went through his contacts list and made a conscious decision about who he could not live without. He came up with five people and got rid of everyone else.&amp;quot; She glances dreamily out the window, then snaps back, her blue eyes clear and focused again. &amp;quot;First of all, if I were to do that, the list of who I couldn&amp;#039;t live without would be like 68 people. And then the other ones, I would just feel too bad to...you know? And yet, I have to find a way to get my work done. And that&amp;#039;s my struggle. It&amp;#039;s not a fucking crisis, it&amp;#039;s just...I don&amp;#039;t picture Philip Roth having to take a weekend off from writing because he promised his sister&amp;#039;s kids he&amp;#039;d take them to the Renaissance fair.&amp;quot; She ponders briefly. &amp;quot;But then, I don&amp;#039;t know that I want to be Philip Roth, either!&amp;quot;  You mean, I suggest, that you don&amp;#039;t need to write 75 books?  She nods. &amp;quot;So I don&amp;#039;t get 75 books. But I get to go to the Renaissance fair!&amp;quot;  We are partway into our three-hour journey, which might be titled Drive, Walk, Eat, Pant; Gilbert, it turns out, is as peripatetic in person as in print. First, she picks me up at the bus stop\u2014looking simultaneously radiant and down-to-earth in tiny, butter blond pigtails, a bright orange scarf, and work boots\u2014and drives us to a woodsy path along the Delaware River for a brisk stroll. (&amp;quot;Thank you!&amp;quot; she says, after apologizing for dragging me around. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve been super cooped up.&amp;quot;) Next, we drive to a bakery/bistro that&amp;#039;s not yet serving dinner. (She&amp;#039;s so visibly disappointed that they toss her a free blondie. &amp;quot;Yay!&amp;quot; she yells, like a happy kid.) Then it&amp;#039;s on to a fancier restaurant that is serving now. In fact, we drive almost everywhere in quaint Frenchtown except to Gilbert&amp;#039;s house, mostly because her husband, who is &amp;quot;very private,&amp;quot; also lives there. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the least I can offer him,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Given all this.&amp;quot; At any rate, skirting Gilbert&amp;#039;s residence seems fitting for an interview with a woman who has risen to international fame because of her memoir about leaving home to travel the world and heal herself from the stress of, well, leaving home.   If you&amp;#039;re one of the two people left who haven&amp;#039;t read Eat, Pray, Love, here&amp;#039;s what you need to know: The outrageously successful book\u2014which outsold every title in &amp;#039;07 except Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and The Secret, according to Nielsen&amp;#039;s BookScan; spawned a soon-to-shoot movie starring Julia Roberts; and sparked a genre of parodies (watch for Drink, Play, F@#k, by Andrew Gottlieb, and Eat, Pray, Fart, by Sarah Silverman)\u2014is the plucky true tale of Gilbert&amp;#039;s year of soul-searching travel after a nasty divorce followed by a tortured rebound relationship. On the trip, she trades her antidepressants for pleasure, spiritual awakening, and plenty of love, both self and otherwise\u2014first by indulging in Italy (think hazelnut gelato and Italian lessons with 25-year-old Giovanni); then by meditating and praying at an ashram in India; and finally by, well, you can guess what happens in Bali. I&amp;#039;ll just say it involves a divorced &amp;quot;handsome older Brazilian man.&amp;quot;  If, on the other hand, you&amp;#039;re among the legions of people who have read the book (it has sold almost 6 million copies worldwide and is slated for publication in 40- plus countries\u2014even Hillary Clinton fessed up to loving it), here&amp;#039;s an anecdote you might like: Post-Bali, after Gilbert transported &amp;quot;Felipe,&amp;quot; whose real name is Jos\u00E9, back to the U.S. and they settled in Philadelphia and then departed for further travels, they were stopped coming back by border-control authorities in Texas, who handcuffed Jos\u00E9 and told them he couldn&amp;#039;t return unless they were married. Having both long ago decided never to marry again, they were faced with a frustrating choice: live continents apart, or reenter an institution they&amp;#039;d both sworn off in order to be together in the country they now considered home. &amp;quot;Immediately I knew that&amp;#039;s what we&amp;#039;d do,&amp;quot; Gilbert says, &amp;quot;but it felt like a death. We were both heartsick.&amp;quot;  Worse, Jos\u00E9 was jailed for the night and then ordered to leave\u2014&amp;quot;anywhere but here,&amp;quot; they told him. He chose Australia, where he had a passport, and Gilbert soon met him for what turned into 10 more months of travel (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand) while they waited for the visa to allow them to return to the U.S. and marry. &amp;quot;It was just this great irony that we had to fight so hard to get married,&amp;quot; Gilbert says. The newlyweds settled in New Jersey and opened their furniture importing company, Two Buttons, which Jos\u00E9, a longtime businessman, operates out of a warehouse near their home. &amp;quot;It all worked out great,&amp;quot; Gilbert says now, with a smile. &amp;quot;Suddenly, being home in New Jersey seems like the most wonderful thing in the entire world.&amp;quot;  Happy endings to taxing\u2014if fascinating\u2014 journeys are the 39-year-old author&amp;#039;s trademark. She was raised on a Connecticut farm milking goats and wearing clothes her industrious mother made by hand, only to move to New York City and tend bar at the classic East Village dive Coyote Ugly, where a friend once called her &amp;quot;the Queen of the Gutter&amp;quot; because of all the &amp;quot;miserable and pathetic&amp;quot; drunken customers there who adored her. At 27, she turned the experience into an article for GQ that was later optioned by Disney and made into a movie. She published three books, mostly about men doing manly things (lobster fishing, bronco riding, shooting animals), and garnered significant literary acclaim.  But it was her fourth, a self-proclaimed &amp;quot;chick book&amp;quot; starring none other than herself as a bright and lovable flake, that catapulted her to celebrity status among women\u2014from midlife working mothers to twentysomething book clubbers. In Gilbert, women\u2014 many, many women\u2014saw themselves, or the self they wanted to be, or the best friend they wish they had; in her journey, they saw a way to change their own frustrating, guiltridden, or simply stalled-out lives. Which is partly why so many people love her, or at least love the memoir that&amp;#039;s got her wit, vulnerability, and humility in every line. And when I say love, I mean worship. On an EPL Facebook fan page\u2014created by an anonymous Gilbert acolyte &amp;quot;to spread the joy received from reading the book&amp;quot;\u2014some 3,095 diehards (and counting) can&amp;#039;t stop gushing, &amp;quot;Loving and savoring every moment,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;This book is me right now. I am in her shoes. I am walking this path.&amp;quot;  And then there&amp;#039;s Oprah. &amp;quot;I haven&amp;#039;t been this excited since Bono was here,&amp;quot; she effused at the first of two (yes, two) Gilbert appearances in late &amp;#039;07. The second show featured fans of the book who, inspired by Gilbert, made either mini life changes (an art gallery owner threw a birthday party featuring food from all the EPL countries) or major ones (dropping out of law school, taking off for their own trips to Italy or Bali to sample the pizza, meet the medicine man, try the same multivitamin lunch special &amp;quot;Liz&amp;quot; did). &amp;quot;She tapped into the middle-aged woman culture of self-reinvention,&amp;quot; explains Sara Nelson, the former editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, about Gilbert&amp;#039;s almost cultish fan base. That, and she nailed the voice. &amp;quot;There are other books about food in Italy that we don&amp;#039;t all know about. The truth will out in the writing and the sensibility.&amp;quot;  Of course, like anyone who rises from mid-list &amp;quot;literary&amp;quot; author to giga-selling, internationally known guru-star, Gilbert also has her skeptics and detractors, most of whom can be found online at Amazon.com or on blogs yapping about how she&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;whiny&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;culturally oblivious.&amp;quot; The New York Post &amp;#039;s Maureen Callahan wrote that the book demonstrates &amp;quot;the worst in Western fetishization of Eastern thought and culture, assured in its answers to existential dilemmas that have confounded intellects greater than hers&amp;quot; (to which Gilbert responded, in USA Today, &amp;quot;Mine is just a simple old human story\u2014of one person trying, with great rigor and discipline, to comprehend her personal relationship with divinity&amp;quot;). And then there are the snobs, initially spurning EPL as another fluffy It Memoir only to find themselves eventually sneaking it onto the subway (hidden inside The New Yorker, of course) or at home, turning pages in bed. &amp;quot;I was prepared to hate it, to roll my eyes at her narcissism and deplore the mealymouthed New Age\u2013speak,&amp;quot; says one anonymous convert who works in publishing. &amp;quot;She writes so precisely about delicately shifting mental states, and so palpably about pleasure\u2014 physical, spiritual, sexual\u2014without dipping too far into blowsiness. I felt annoyed with myself for having avoided the book for so long.&amp;quot; In the end, her fans and admirers well outnumber her disparagers\u2014 a fan base that could remain, grow, or shift with the release of her next book, loosely scheduled for publication late this year or early next.  Throngs of readers are poised to devour a sequel to EPL\u2014dying to hear, in Liz&amp;#039;s convivial voice, if she married &amp;quot;Felipe&amp;quot; and what transpired. And originally, that&amp;#039;s partly what the next book was. Called Weddings and Evictions, it was a &amp;quot;meditation on marriage&amp;quot; that started with the idea that neither she nor Jos\u00E9 wanted to remarry, and suddenly they felt forced to. In some ways, she says, the book was &amp;quot;me writing my way through all my hostility and fear and ignorance about marriage.&amp;quot; She did a lot of research, reading and thinking, &amp;quot;because I don&amp;#039;t think that failing miserably at something makes you any kind of an expert about it.&amp;quot;  The problem was, when she finished the book last June\u2014just as it was due to her publisher\u2014she realized that she didn&amp;#039;t like it. &amp;quot;Almost the minute I wrote the last word, I was like, No,&amp;quot; she laughs, &amp;quot;no, that doesn&amp;#039;t work. I was trying to kind of affect a sort of chatty, conversational tone that I think people who read Eat, Pray, Love would recognize. But when I read it, I was like, That&amp;#039;s not the person I know who is pretty stable and serious.&amp;quot; So she shelved the book and spent the summer gardening, napping with her cats, inner-tubing with Jos\u00E9&amp;#039;s two twentysomething kids, and wondering, a bit facetiously, if she&amp;#039;d ever go back to it\u2014or, frankly, to any other book again, ever. But come fall, she inched back to her desk and the manuscript\u2014which she renamed Matrimonium and &amp;quot;started completely over.&amp;quot; As in, &amp;quot;I just had to...offer myself permission to write it in the voice that is my current voice.&amp;quot; At present, the book is an effort to understand exactly &amp;quot;what [marriage] is, what it has been, what it never was supposed to be. Because I think we all feel that we have this great body of knowledge and expertise on this, but it&amp;#039;s staggering what you don&amp;#039;t know about it. And every single piece of information I&amp;#039;ve found has been so useful. Like, Oh, that would have been good to know 10 years ago! &amp;quot; Interestingly, her research has made her respect marriage more, not less. Before the book, she says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d have said that it&amp;#039;s an extremely dusty, archaic suit of clothes that do not fit me. But it&amp;#039;s so much more interesting and complex than my sort of bohemian resistance. Now, if you asked me what marriage is, I&amp;#039;d say, it&amp;#039;s a fascinatingly adaptable institution that will...do anything it takes to exist. It will change itself so that it&amp;#039;s unrecognizable from generation to generation but will still endure as an idea.&amp;quot; She shakes her head, smiling. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like some sort of Darwinist victory.&amp;quot; She tells me, cautiously, that she thinks she&amp;#039;ll finish the new manuscript in a few weeks. It&amp;#039;s not marriage that&amp;#039;s stopping her, she assures me, it&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;everything else that I do.&amp;quot; By now we&amp;#039;re at the Delaware River path, which, she says, continues to Philadelphia. &amp;quot;You could ride your bike all the way there. Or your kayak, I suppose, if you knew how to do those sorts of things.&amp;quot;   Though she presents herself, in both Eat, Pray, Love and in person, as vulnerable, squeamish, and not particularly rugged, a romp through her history suggests otherwise. She is the daughter of a chemical engineer father and a Minnesota-farm-raised nurse mother who made sure that Gilbert and her older sister, Catherine, were no wusses: They grew their own food and washed their hair in a rain barrel. Her town was affluent, she says, but the Gilberts (who raised Christmas trees on their farm) were visited often by trueblue Yankee farm types, elderly neighbors, local oddballs (&amp;quot;the coolest people&amp;quot;), and there was much laughter and sharing. Her father&amp;#039;s family was &amp;quot;all really talented writers and huge readers,&amp;quot; and her mother had &amp;quot;a tremendous reverence for learning. She fed us books when we were kids.&amp;quot; Both she and Catherine (a young-adult novelist) started writing &amp;quot;as soon as we mastered the alphabet.&amp;quot; She describes her childhood home as &amp;quot;a petri dish to create writers.&amp;quot;  After high school, Gilbert attended NYU, where she majored in political science and took writing classes\u2014one with the novelist Helen Schulman, who says, &amp;quot;She was a standout from day one. It was as if she were born fully formed as a writer.&amp;quot; She graduated in 1991, and, rather than get an MFA, she alternated waiting tables with traveling (Europe, Mexico, Scandinavia, Wyoming) to find something to write about. Ultimately, she came back to New York and continued writing and working odd jobs\u2014including the stint at Coyote Ugly, where, as a bartender, she was expected to match the clients drink for drink. (&amp;quot;I worked there for a year, but I think it aged me by half a decade,&amp;quot; she says.) Finally, in 1993, a story she sent to Esquire was published, under the heading, &amp;quot;The Debut of an American Writer.&amp;quot; And her writing career was launched. &amp;quot;All of a sudden, people were like, `Do you want to write for magazines?&amp;#039; &amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;And I was like, `Can one?&amp;#039; &amp;quot; One could, and Gilbert did, for The New York Times Magazine, Spin, Travel + Leisure, and eventually GQ\u2014first the Coyote Ugly piece, and then profiles of Hank Williams and Tom Waits, raking in National Magazine Awards nominations.  During much of this time, Gilbert was with her first husband, Michael, whom she met at Coyote Ugly one night and married two and a half years later, when she was 25 and he was 30. Six years later, they were living in &amp;quot;the big house in the suburbs&amp;quot; that the money from the movie helped them buy, where they waited for her to grow &amp;quot;weary of traveling&amp;quot; and want to have a baby. But after a year in the house, she still didn&amp;#039;t. Seven months later, she left the marriage, commencing the bitter divorce and then the tumultuous affair\u2014with an actor and yoga enthusiast whom she&amp;#039;d met when he starred in a play based on her book Pilgrims\u2014 that would launch her into the trip that became Eat, Pray, Love.  For a woman who&amp;#039;s exceptionally revealing, Gilbert discloses little about her ex or what went wrong, either in the book or to me. When asked, she says only that she &amp;quot;got married too young&amp;quot; and that she &amp;quot;made legions of errors,&amp;quot; but was &amp;quot;matched fuck-up for fuck-up&amp;quot; by her ex. I point out that a decade later, she has ended up in a seemingly similar situation (husband, house, small town) to the one she fled. &amp;quot;You know, it&amp;#039;s a very similar-looking situation, but the problem was the marriage and...not wanting to have children,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;In the book, I was unable or unwilling to talk directly [about] what the problems were...for a million reasons, from I don&amp;#039;t think people should have to fucking read that, to I&amp;#039;m scared I&amp;#039;m gonna get sued...to I don&amp;#039;t have the right to tell one side of a very confusing story.&amp;quot; And she&amp;#039;s still not interested in defending herself against the finger waggers\u2014and sometimes even sympathizes with them. &amp;quot;When people have made other choices, when they&amp;#039;ve stuck through their own bitterness and disappointments, I think, understandably, it can seem very irritating to them that somebody else blew off what they didn&amp;#039;t,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;The angriest letter I&amp;#039;ve ever gotten was someone who was like, `You don&amp;#039;t think I was on the bathroom floor too? You don&amp;#039;t think that I fucking hate my life? Well, I stayed with it, bitch!&amp;#039; And I was like, `Well, good for you!&amp;#039;&amp;quot;   That&amp;#039;s another thing that makes Gilbert so appealing; her willingness to criticize herself with humor and insight. (&amp;quot;If a more likeable writer than Gilbert is currently in print,&amp;quot; Jennifer Egan wrote in the New York Times Book Review, &amp;quot;I haven&amp;#039;t found him or her.&amp;quot;) So how, I ask, is this marriage different? &amp;quot;I have a much better husband than I had the first time,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;but he&amp;#039;s getting a way better wife too.&amp;quot;  Now, she insists, she knows better what to expect of a relationship. But, she adds, these days, we place &amp;quot;insane&amp;quot; expectations on marriage. &amp;quot;Nobody until very recently would have thought that their husband was supposed to be their best friend, confidante, intellectual soul mate, co- parent, inspiration....&amp;quot; She shakes her head. &amp;quot;You know the old adage: Plant an expectation, reap a disappointment.&amp;quot; With Jos\u00E9, she has revised expectations\u2014 and needs. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re tired after a life....&amp;quot; Her voice fades then comes back. &amp;quot;We just want companionship and niceness, and we&amp;#039;re willing to...give each other what&amp;#039;s needed to make that happen. He doesn&amp;#039;t want me to do any of the things I don&amp;#039;t want to do; he doesn&amp;#039;t want me to be a mom.&amp;quot;  Looking back, Gilbert thinks that one reason for the depression that launched EPL was that, once she realized she didn&amp;#039;t want kids, she had to &amp;quot;grieve&amp;quot; the two children she always thought she&amp;#039;d have. &amp;quot;I had my kids named, I had them pictured,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;...and so I had to let them go.&amp;quot; But she&amp;#039;s long since made peace with that decision. &amp;quot;Besides,&amp;quot; she adds, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t see any big, giant kid shortage out there.&amp;quot; If that sounds misanthropic, don&amp;#039;t be fooled. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t hate humanity,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;and I&amp;#039;m not interested in people who do.&amp;quot; She thinks a moment. &amp;quot;Although, it&amp;#039;s funny, actually, some of my favorite writers really do.&amp;quot; She laughs. &amp;quot;Like Martin Amis. My dirty secret.&amp;quot; Another laugh. &amp;quot;London Fields is one of my favorite books ever. And it&amp;#039;s indefensible! But he&amp;#039;s so funny...I forgive him everything.&amp;quot; She sighs. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s a horrible person. But oh my God, the sentences are just magnificent.&amp;quot;  By now we&amp;#039;re eating dinner at the Frenchtown Inn: grilled salmon over baby spinach for her, a cheeseburger for me\u2014a choice she compliments. The waitress appears to check on us, and Gilbert flirts, admiring her thick ponytail, remarking, when it&amp;#039;s suggested that age thins your hair, that she herself will surely look like Ed Asner by the time she&amp;#039;s 60. She has said that her advantage as a writer is being able to befriend anyone, and I see why: the girl-next-door prettiness and charm, the genuine curiosity about people and life. But since EPL, she&amp;#039;s been deluged with those who want her time or friendship, and she&amp;#039;s had to develop boundaries and a sense of privacy\u2014a healthy change, she says, but sad, too, because she hates to disappoint people. After the book came out, she says, &amp;quot;people said to me, `Was it weird for you to reveal yourself so much?&amp;#039; And I was like, I didn&amp;#039;t even know I was ! I had no secrets. I&amp;#039;d never had an unspoken thought.&amp;quot; And now? &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a lot more choosy with what I tell people about myself.&amp;quot;   She admits she&amp;#039;s glad she moved to Frenchtown before EPL went &amp;quot;viral.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;They know us as the people who own Two Buttons,&amp;quot; she says, and goes on to tell me about a recent moment at the local diner. &amp;quot;A waitress came up to me and she was like, `I can&amp;#039;t believe who you are!&amp;#039; And I had this little moment where I felt myself arranging a different face, the face of, Oh, thank you, that&amp;#039;s very great. And then the waitress said, `You&amp;#039;re the Two Buttons lady! That&amp;#039;s my favorite store!&amp;#039; I was like, `Oh\u2014yeah! I&amp;#039;m the Two Buttons lady! That is who I am!&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  A little later, we&amp;#039;re back in the van and she&amp;#039;s heading to the station; if I miss my bus, I&amp;#039;m here until almost her bedtime\u20149 p.m. these days. In turn, she gets up at 5:30 or 6 and writes until noon or 1, then does &amp;quot;everything else that has to be done.&amp;quot; So where, I ask, does she fit in the yoga and meditation, the molto bello Italian? &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t speak Italian anymore!&amp;quot; she laments. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s gone!&amp;quot; What&amp;#039;s more, &amp;quot;I recommend that if people want a spiritual role model, they should find someone who actually meditates, like every day. Or ever.&amp;quot; She laughs, then sighs. She does still do yoga a couple of times a week, she says. And she is not at all disavowing &amp;quot;sitting and contemplating the eternal,&amp;quot; \u00E0 la the pray part of EPL. &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s a magnificent path,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But right now? What I need to do is to finish this book.&amp;quot; Fair enough. I ask if she&amp;#039;s anxious about its reception after what she calls the &amp;quot;freakish success&amp;quot; of EPL. &amp;quot;In a funny way,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;it actually takes some of the pressure off. It&amp;#039;s such a complete statistical impossibility that I will ever have such success again that it would be unwise to even try.&amp;quot; That said, you can guess by now that Gilbert is not the sort of author who insists she doesn&amp;#039;t care what her fans think. &amp;quot;Of course, I would hate to let them down,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But the problem is that I&amp;#039;m not sure how I would go about generating more of the same, even if I tried with all my heart. I&amp;#039;m not sure how I did it the first time.&amp;quot; Back at the bus stop, I finger the blondie the bakery boys gave her, which she passed on to me. &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t want it?&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;d asked, and she said, &amp;quot;Oh, I do, but I get to eat those all the time. You should have it.&amp;quot; As with forgoing the cheeseburger, as with her current exhaustive schedule, as with her acquiescence to fit me into that schedule\u2014just as with her asceticism in India after her Italian food orgy\u2014I see once more in Liz Gilbert a woman who combines enormous appetites and enthusiasm with the remarkable ability to rein them in to accomplish her goals, whether writing a good book, keeping healthy, searching for life&amp;#039;s meaning, or simply being a generous person. An admirable quality, I think later, after we&amp;#039;ve hugged goodbye\u2014especially in someone who so clearly longs to break free again as soon as it&amp;#039;s time. And until then? &amp;quot;Dearest Everyone,&amp;quot; read her recent auto-reply to fans who wrote to her website, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m hard at work on a new book and I&amp;#039;m afraid I need to disappear until it&amp;#039;s done.... I send you warmest wishes in the meanwhile.\u2014Liz.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a10110/elizabeth-gilbert-317299/>