Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Readalikes
Elizabeth Gilbert was born in 1969 in Connecticut. She grew up on a
small family tree farm, with her sister, novelist and historian Catharine
Gilbert Murdock (author of Dairy Queen, the first in a series for teens).
She attended New York University and graduated in 1991 with a BA in Political
Science.
In addition to writing books, she has worked steadily as a journalist.
Throughout much of the 1990’s she was on staff at SPIN Magazine, where she
chronicled diverse individuals and subcultures, covering everything from rodeo's
Buckle Bunnies (reprinted in The KGB Bar Reader) to China’s headlong
construction of the Three Gorges Dam. In 1999, Elizabeth began working for GQ
magazine, where her profiles of extraordinary men – from singers Hank Williams
III and Tom Waits (reprinted in The Tom Waits Reader) to quadriplegic athlete
Jim Maclaren – earned her three National Magazine Award Nominations, as well as
repeated appearances in the “Best American” magazine writing anthologies. She
has also written for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, Real
Simple, Allure, Travel and Leisure and O, the Oprah Magazine (where her memoir
"Eat, Pray, Love" was excerpted in March, 2006.) She has been a contributor to
the Public Radio show "This American Life", and has
several times shown up at John Hodgman's Little Gray Book Lecture Series, most
notably during Lecture Four on the subject "Hints for Public Singing."
In recent years, Gilbert lived in Frenchtown, New Jersey, with her husband, Jose Nunes, who she met in Bali (as recorded in her memoir Eat, Pray, Love). They married in 2007 and run an Asian import store called "Two Buttons". In June 2016 it was announced that they have separated.
Elizabeth Gilbert's website
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The realization that you did not want to have children serves as a turning point in the reevaluation of your life that led to divorce. Later you quote Virginia Woolf—“Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword”—writing about a woman’s choice between convention and tradition versus “a far more interesting” yet “perilous” life. Do you think this is as true today for the modern, urban American woman?
When modern American women make the deliberate choice not to have children they are still called upon to defend that choice, in a culture where motherhood is still regarded as the natural evolution of a woman’s life. But I remember my own mother musing once that she thought women had been “sold a bill of goods” during the 1970s, in terms of being promised that they could have everything simultaneously—family, career, marriage, privacy, equality, femininity, and autonomy. Reality has taught us that no woman can build an honest life without sacrificing something along the way. Deciding what will be sacrificed is not easy. But the good news is this: increasingly, that decision is ours.
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Stuart Archer Cohen was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1958. After graduating from high school he spent a year hitchhiking around the United States, hopping freight trains and traveling with a circus as a prop man, then attended... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Eat, Pray, Love
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Rinker Buck began his career in journalism at the Berkshire Eagle and was a longtime staff writer for the Hartford Courant. He has written for Vanity Fair, New York, Life, and many other publications, and his work has won the... (more)
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Eat, Pray, Love
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