"I do not know how to write a beloved bestseller," she writes, perhaps pointedly to those detractors who saw in her first book's mix of memoir, self-help, self-improvement and spirituality a rather obvious route to bestsellerdom.Īlthough, like millions of others, I adored Eat, Pray, Love, I wasn't overwhelmed with joy when I heard Gilbert had chosen to write, as her follow up, a "sociocultural dissection of marriage". In her "Note to the Reader" at the start of Committed, Gilbert talks of the impossibility of repeating her "freakish" success. The book sold seven million copies.Īny subsequent effort was always going to be as much about the difficulty of writing anything again, ever. Women didn't just love Eat, Pray, Love they assimilated it, spun narratives out of it, as if it was their story Gilbert had told. This neatly captures Gilbert's very particular success with her previous book, Eat, Pray, Love, her memoir of a year spent abroad reassembling herself post-early-30s divorce and subsequent breakdown: global recognition on the one hand, individual female adoration on the other. W hen Elizabeth Gilbert appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show, Winfrey declared she hadn't been so excited since Bono was on.
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