Elizabeth Gilbert reflects on Eat, Pray, Love at 20 (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I never thought I would be talking about Eat, Pray, Love 20 years after it came out. I never thought I would be talking about Eat, Pray, Love the year that it came out.

[00:00:08] Speaker 2: 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling Eat, Pray, Love, a travel memoir of self-discovery set in Italy, India, and Bali that sold more than 18 million copies in over 30 languages, evolved into a blockbuster phenomenon, and launched a solo travel movement around the world. CNN spoke with Elizabeth Gilbert on the book's impact 20 years on.

[00:00:31] Speaker 1: I am Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic and a bunch of other books, and I'm coming to you from rural New Jersey. Eat, Pray, Love changed my life entirely and still is. When I left my job to go for that year, I had every intention at the, you know, eventually coming back and asking for that job back. I knew that it wasn't guaranteed, but I was going to see if I could get that job back. And I have never had to have a job again, and it's been 20 years. Now I've worked, I still work really hard because I love my work, but I don't work for anyone. For a long time, people have asked me this question of essentially, why do you think the book had the impact that it did? Or what do you think it was that it released in women or triggered in women or inspired in women? And I think it was a giant permission slip to say, you can start your life on one course and then you can radically alter that course. And I think given the fact that women's lives have always been so narrow, even growing up when I did in the 70s and in the 80s, like there's still a pretty narrow path that a woman was allowed to have. And the idea, I guess the idea that Eat, Pray, Love released kind of publicly on the grand scale is like, we want a lot more than that. We want a lot more than maybe a marriage and a house and a kid and a stable job. Like there's a hunger, there's a tremendous hunger. And Freud, you know, spent a lot of time saying, what do women want? And it's like, apparently they want a year to travel around the world by themselves, to eat a lot of pizza, to fall in love with a handsome Brazilian man, to have adventures. Women want a lot of things. I can remember the moment when I realized that the book was becoming like strangely and unexpectedly successful. I went on my book tour and I remember that the first few events were like what I had always had, you know, 10, 15, 20 people in the audience at a bookstore. But then like toward the end of the book tour, I was being driven to the event and there were people like three deep wrapped around the, like the block. And I said to the driver, what's going on tonight in San Diego? Is there some kind of a concert or a show? And she said, no, they're here to see you. To this day, nobody knows what happened. Like what happened in that two week period between when the book was published in paperback and when it exploded into what it then became. My friend Martha Beck always tells a story about somebody she knows who was at one of my events and overheard a woman behind her say, well, it must be nice to live the way Liz Gilbert is living. If I were to live like that, I would have to divorce my husband, quit my job and sell my house. And the other woman said, that's literally what she did. To me, it felt like at the time, such a huge risk to publish this book, such a huge departure from what I had been doing, because up until that point, the little writing success that I had had was a life where I had spent all of my energy writing and talking about men. I worked exclusively for men's magazines. I wrote for GQ. I wrote for Spin. I wrote for Esquire and I quit my job, my really good job at GQ to go have this adventure and write this book about my own life. And I remember just thinking, nobody's going to want to read this. And yet I have to do it anyway. And I guess I was wrong about that. I guess I was wrong when I said nobody wanted to read it. When I met my future husband traveling that year, I said to him, I'm writing this book about everything that's happening to me this year, and you seem to be happening to me. And I wonder if you would feel comfortable if I wrote about our love story. And he said, well, what would the impact of that be if you wrote about us? And I said, there won't be any. People don't read my books. He brought that up a lot in the years that followed. The first time I saw the film, the producers let me and my then husband watch it alone in a giant movie theater in New York City in the middle of the day. We felt like two little tiny children. We were sitting in this giant theater like, what is this? This is a dream within a dream within a dream. You're Javier Bardem and I'm Julia Roberts. This is so wild. And I don't know if it's the very first line of the film, but very, very, very early on in the film, there's a moment when Julia Roberts walks into the Indonesian medicine man's hut and she introduces herself and she says, I'm Liz Gilbert.

[00:05:19] Speaker 2: I'm writing a magazine article on Bali and I wanted to meet a medicine man.

[00:05:22] Speaker 1: And we both went like, we literally screamed because we were like, you're, but you're not, you're Julia Roberts. It's so weird to hear Julia Roberts say I'm, and then your, your name. Like, it's so surreal. When people ask me what I think of the film, I, there's two answers. One is that I love it. And two is that I still haven't processed it. I think I kind of gave up on even trying to make sense of it because it doesn't make any sense that that would happen. So, so I'm, I'm just like, I, I don't even know what to say. Like what? It's too, it's too surreal to even, it's too surreal to process. There was a while, I don't think it happened so much anymore, but there was a while during what I call peak eprilove, which was around the time, between the time when the book had its sort of biggest success. And when the movie came out and there were a lot of people who were doing this kind of like, ritualized recreation of the book, where they were as closely as possible, trying to stay in the same neighborhood in Rome, trying to eat the same pizza that I ate in Naples, trying to find the ashram where I was in India, trying to find the healers that I went to in Bali. And I was getting letters from women saying like, you know, I did it. I went on your eat, pray, love journey. And I, at the time I was more excited by people who were taking inspiration from the book to go create their own version of that. And I used to say to people, it's a line from the Ramana Maharashi, the great Indian saint used to say, don't do what I did, ask what I asked. When people would say like, how did you find enlightenment? Ask these questions, ask the same questions I asked, but don't do the things I did. But I realized somewhere along the way that you could faithfully step-by-step completely recreate my journey and you're still going to get your own journey. You're going to have your own experience at that pizzeria in Naples. You're going to have your own experience with a healer in Bali. You can go to the same ashram I went to do the same prayers, chants, and meditations all day. And you're going to have a completely different spiritual awakening than me. So at that point, I was like, do what you want with it. You know what I mean? Even if you try to be me, you're still going to end up being you. And that's kind of what the whole point of it is. And so yeah, I don't feel territorial or defensive about any of it. I just want people to leave home, you know, like whatever it takes to get you off your couch, go do it. When I got divorced from the wonderful man who I found and married at the end of Eat Pray Love after 12 years together, somebody said to me, are you afraid of what your fans are going to think and say? And I have to admit, and I'm very happy to admit that had not crossed my mind, like brand image management had not crossed my mind. I was going through something. I was going through something so difficult, and I was going through something so painful, and I was trying so hard to stay in my integrity through that painful and difficult transformation and to show up for myself and for him and for my best friend, Raya, who I left him for and for our families. And you know what I felt at the time and what I said was there are so many reasons I wanted this marriage to work and keeping my fans happy was not. I love my readers very much, but that wasn't on my list of reasons that I wanted the marriage to work. And what I mostly have found is so much identification and love and understanding from women about how the paths that we take in life don't turn out necessarily the way that we thought they would. I have a joke that I often say that by the age of 40, I think every woman in the world could write a memoir with the same title, and that title would be Not Exactly What I Planned. And that was not exactly what I planned, but I also am always reminding people that I wrote Eat, Pray, Love when I was 34, and that's pretty young to have your whole life figured out. I actually think that 34 is a really typical age at which people think they have their life figured out. I think that's what 34 is for. It's like, yep, I nailed it. I created this, and I got myself this, and I got myself that. And then midlife is where a lot of things start to fall away, and you're like, man, I really thought I had that thing all sort of squared away and set up. And it turns out that Earth School was still in session, and here we are. And I think that's everybody's story. So I think I got a lot more love than I got condemnation from my readers when it came to that, because they, too, in the last 20 years have had divorces, and they, too, have had things in their lives not turn out the way they planned. And yet here we are eating sandwiches and surviving. The great mystery of divinity is the most important thing in my life. And where I'm slightly different now, I think, from Eat, Pray, Love is it is now so foremost in my consciousness. A lot of Eat, Pray, Love was about I want to live a very spiritual life of devotion, and I also want to eat a ton of pizza, and I also want to have a lot of sex, and I also want to have a lot of adventures. And now I'm like, I really just want the spiritual connection, without which I have learned that I'm nothing but a meat puppet wandering around in circles lost. So yeah, I don't even know what I would be without that at this point. It's everything. I think of my novel, The Signature of All Things, that I wrote a few years after I wrote Eat, Pray, Love, was entirely financed. I was like, I'm financially independent. I'm a financially independent female artist. It's a glancingly rare across history that that has ever existed. And I thought, how do I honor that? I'm so aware of the privilege that I hold. And I thought, well, I can honor it by uplifting and supporting as many other female artists as I can, and I can also honor it by writing the most daring books that I can, because I can take those risks. And so Eat, Pray, Love has continued to finance and to fund my creativity and also the creativity of a lot of other women. I have a house that I use as an artist residency that I bought with that money that I give to women to come and use to write books. And it just feels like I have to and want to keep plowing those earnings back into women, and especially back into women's radical creativity. So it's still changing my life, yeah, in enormous ways.