Eat, Pray, Love, Discuss

Elizabeth Gilbert wants to talk to you. That’s right—you.

The same Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote the New York Times bestseller Eat, Pray, Love—the autobiographical story of Gilbert leaving an unhappy marriage and spending a year traveling around the world—wants to chat with Minnesotans this Friday at the Burnsville Performing Arts Center. As part of the Metropolitan Library Service Agency's Club Book series (which has seen the likes of Garrison Keillor and Alison McGee), Gilbert will read a few pieces from her ever-expanding catalog of work before turning her attention to the crowd. “Then it becomes more of a conversation than a lecture,” she says.

What’s the topic, you ask? Gilbert says she expects questions on everything from the creative process and personal relationships to calls for explanations regarding her characters and views on religion. If you’re taking notes, she’s also focusing on the new dynamics of what it means to be female in the 21st century.

“It’s a conversation we can have for a long time,” Gilbert says. “It revolves around the idea that we have all these opportunities that our mothers and grandmothers didn’t have. We’re almost like a new species of human. There is no precedent for what we can do now and it’s extremely exciting—but unnerving.” Of course, any amount of preparation (or none) is fine; Gilbert likes the unstructured capacity of her talks. (For an example, check out her 2009 talk about nurturing creativity).

Her visit to the Twin Cities comes after Eat, Pray, Love became, in Gilbert’s words, a “big, mega-sensation, international best seller thing” (it was adapted into a film, starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert, released in August 2010) and just as the public has begun to sink its teeth into her follow-up memoir, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. Gilbert describes Committed, which is also a Times bestseller, as the story of a reluctant bride who is more flushed than blushing.

“It’s a more common story than we think—I just knew I couldn’t be the only person who had these feelings of anxiety about marriage.” In addition to her readings and Q&A, Gilbert will also take time on Friday to sign books and personally address attendees. One popular inquiry that can be skipped this time around: What it’s like to be portrayed by Julia Roberts.

“She’s luminous. A piece of magic,” Gilbert says.

—Kate Smith

METRO Magazine | February 2011