Where to Start with Elizabeth Gilbert: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Elizabeth Gilbert — whether to begin with Eat Pray Love or Big Magic. A complete reading guide to the bestselling memoirist and novelist.
By Natalie Osei
Elizabeth Gilbert (born 1969) is the American author whose Eat Pray Love (2006) — a memoir of a year spent travelling through Italy, India, and Indonesia in search of recovery after personal crisis — became one of the defining memoirs of its decade, selling over twelve million copies, generating a 2010 film with Julia Roberts, and establishing Gilbert as one of the most widely read American memoirists working today. She has also written fiction (The Signature of All Things, 2013, her most ambitious novel) and Big Magic (2015), a book about creative living that became a further bestseller. Gilbert’s work is characterised by warmth, directness, and a willingness to examine her own experience without either self-flagellation or false modesty.
Where to Start: Eat Pray Love (2006)
The essential Gilbert — and the book that made her. Gilbert is thirty-two years old, in the middle of a miserable divorce she initiated, and is lying on her bathroom floor at three in the morning asking God to help her. She makes a deal: she will spend a year travelling, one destination for each word of the title. Italy for eating; India for praying; Indonesia (Bali) for love.
The book’s popularity rests on its honesty about the specific experience of a woman who had done everything she was supposed to do — married, tried to build a house, tried to have children — and discovered she was profoundly unhappy. Gilbert does not sentimentalise the dissolution of her marriage or the difficulties of the search; she writes with the kind of specificity (the particular failure of a particular meditation session; the particular texture of a particular Neapolitan pizza) that makes memoir feel lived rather than performed.
The cultural debate around the book — is it a model of brave self-reinvention or a meditation on the privileges available to wealthy white Western women? — is itself a document of the moment it represents. Both things can be true simultaneously.
Big Magic (2015)
Gilbert’s guide to creative living — unconventional in its framework (creativity as an external force seeking collaboration) and practical in its advice. Her most useful book for readers who are not specifically interested in her personal story.
Reading Elizabeth Gilbert
Begin with Eat Pray Love — it is her essential work and the book that defines her voice. Read Big Magic if you want her perspective on creative practice. Her novel The Signature of All Things (not in this collection) is her most ambitious fiction and worth reading for her range.
For the full Elizabeth Gilbert bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Elizabeth Gilbert author page on Editors Reads.
Affiliate disclosure: Links to Amazon on this page are affiliate links. We earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Elizabeth Gilbert?
Eat Pray Love (2006) is the essential starting point — Gilbert's memoir about the year she spent travelling through Italy, India, and Indonesia after a painful divorce and the disintegration of a subsequent relationship, searching for pleasure, spiritual practice, and balance. The book became a cultural phenomenon, sold over twelve million copies, and was adapted for film with Julia Roberts; it is among the most widely read memoirs of the century.
What is Eat Pray Love about?
Eat Pray Love is structured in three sections, each covering four months of a year of travel. In Italy, Gilbert learns to eat and enjoy pleasure without guilt. In an Indian ashram, she learns to meditate and finds a measure of peace. In Bali, she studies with a medicine man and falls in love. The book's argument — that it is possible to deliberately reconstruct a life around what you actually need rather than what you are supposed to need — resonated with an enormous readership, particularly women in their thirties and forties.
What is Big Magic about?
Big Magic (2015) is Gilbert's book about creative living — the sources of creative energy, the management of fear, the relationship between the work and the life, and the permission to pursue creative projects regardless of whether they are financially viable or professionally credible. Gilbert presents creativity as a force that moves through the world seeking collaboration with willing humans; the framework is unconventional but the practical advice (do the work regardless of the fear; finish what you start; protect your time) is useful.
Is Eat Pray Love considered a good memoir?
Eat Pray Love is a commercially successful and culturally significant memoir with genuinely divided critical reception. Its admirers find it honest, warm, and usefully direct about the experience of reconstruction after loss. Its critics find it self-absorbed, culturally appropriative (a wealthy American treating non-Western spiritual traditions as a personal growth resource), and representative of a certain kind of privilege. Both responses reflect real aspects of the book. It is most usefully read as a document of a particular moment in American women's cultural experience rather than as a universal guide.
