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.
Why Eat Pray Love Is the Ideal First Book
For a reader new to Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love is the ideal first book because it is her breakout memoir, a phenomenon that reached a vast readership, and the fullest expression of her distinctive voice, the warm, honest, and searching account of a journey of self-discovery. Eat Pray Love recounts the year Gilbert spent traveling through Italy, India, and Indonesia in the wake of a painful divorce, seeking pleasure, devotion, and balance, and through this journey it explores the search for happiness, meaning, and a renewed sense of self. As an entry point, it offers the fullest expression of Gilbert’s appeal, the warm and honest voice, the searching exploration of self-discovery, and the engaging blend of travel, spirituality, and personal reflection. It welcomes the newcomer with its compelling story, its warmth and honesty, and its searching spirit, drawing the reader into a beloved journey of self-discovery. It is her best-known book and the one that best represents her voice, so that the new reader encounters Gilbert at her most characteristic. For the newcomer, then, Eat Pray Love is the natural and ideal starting point.
What to Expect as a New Reader
As a new reader, you can expect Eat Pray Love to be a warm, honest, and searching memoir of self-discovery, recounting a year of travel and inner exploration in the wake of a painful divorce. You can expect a compelling journey, for the memoir follows Gilbert through Italy, India, and Indonesia as she seeks pleasure, devotion, and balance, and recovers a sense of self and happiness. You can expect a warm and honest voice, for Gilbert writes with candor, warmth, and humor about her struggles, her search, and her growth, making the memoir intimate and engaging. You can expect a blend of travel, spirituality, and personal reflection, for the memoir combines the pleasures of travel writing with a searching exploration of meaning, happiness, and inner life. You can expect a searching and ultimately hopeful spirit, a journey from pain toward renewal and balance. Expect, in short, a warm, honest, and searching memoir of self-discovery, blending travel, spirituality, and personal reflection, an engaging introduction to Gilbert’s voice.
Going Deeper After Your First Book
Once Eat Pray Love has introduced you to Gilbert’s voice, the reader who wishes to go deeper can explore her other work, which ranges across memoir, reflection on creativity, and fiction, revealing the breadth of her gifts. Her celebrated work on creativity offers warm and encouraging reflection on living a creative life and overcoming fear, while her acclaimed historical novel reveals her gifts as a novelist, telling a rich and absorbing story with depth and imagination. Reading these after Eat Pray Love reveals the range of Gilbert’s work, from the searching memoir of self-discovery to her reflection on creativity and her accomplished fiction. Her characteristic qualities, the warmth, the honesty, and the searching spirit, run through her work, and the reader who has been engaged by Eat Pray Love will find them across her books. Building your reading journey through Gilbert’s work is a matter of following her warm and searching voice from her memoir into her reflection on creativity and her fiction. The reader who begins with Eat Pray Love and continues through her work will discover a writer of warmth, honesty, and range.
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.
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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.
