![]() She writes that she “became a student of my own depressed experience.” Research has long been Gilbert’s preferred coping mechanism. ![]() Gilbert was suicidal after her marriage ended, sitting, at one point, with kitchen knife in hand, contemplating her wrists. Gilbert has always been interested in restless characters seeking extraordinary experiences, and eventually she became one herself.įirst came despair. She has compared herself to “a fussy baby who can fall asleep only in a moving car.” Before Gilbert wrote her best-seller, she had already published “Pilgrims,” a short-story collection about drifters and pioneers, and “The Last American Man,” a biography of the contemporary naturalist Eustace Conway, who abandoned a comfortable suburban life to wear animal skins in the wilds of Appalachia, where he used a cave as his office. The heroine wanted to roam free, and so she did.Īfter her divorce, Gilbert travelled across Italy, India, and Indonesia. But Gilbert’s memoir is a cultural artifact of the new millennium, not the late nineteenth century. Marriage, in “Eat, Pray, Love,” is a prison, destined to derange its female inmates. I don’t want to have a baby.” Elizabeth Gilbert recounted this crisis toward the beginning of her monstrously successful 2006 memoir, “Eat, Pray, Love.” In that bathroom, in that marriage, Gilbert was a heroine out of Ibsen, or possibly Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Unfortunately, she had succeeded at the wrong life: “ I don’t want to be married anymore. She didn’t want to be married anymore, she realized: “I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me.” She had accomplished a great deal, domestically speaking-she had answered the questions of where to live and with whom. Late one cold November night, in the suburbs of New York, a thirty-one-year-old blonde was sobbing on her bathroom floor. Single women, Gilbert says, are more successful in their careers than married ones the real benefits of marriage go to men.
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