Too Much Gilbert

I.

Fifty-six-year-old Elizabeth Gilbert is one of the bestselling authors of this millennium. Her nine books—memoirs, fiction, and a 2015 self-help guide titled Big Magic for people who think of themselves as “creative”—have sold about 25 million copies between them. The top Elizabeth Gilbert seller of all is her 2006 offering Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything, which accounts for nearly half of her total book sales. Still in print after nearly two decades, it tells the story of Gilbert’s year-long, globe-circling quest to “find herself” after a bad divorce and an even worse post-divorce love affair. It spent nearly four years on the New York Times bestseller list and generated a hit 2010 film starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert and Javier Bardem as “Felipe,” the Brazilian import-export entrepreneur in Bali who became her new romantic interest in 2005 and her second husband in 2007. Uniformly terrible reviews notwithstanding, the movie grossed more than US$200 million on a budget of US$60 million.