GILBERT, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2008.

Octavo. Full blue leather. Spine with five raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design, lettering and fore-edges. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 334 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Viking, 2006.

Elizabeth Gilbert (b. 1969) published Eat, Pray, Love in February 2006 and watched it change her life in ways she had not entirely anticipated. The memoir remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 187 weeks — more than three and a half years — sold over twelve million copies worldwide, was translated into more than thirty languages, and was adapted into a 2010 film starring Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem. It is one of the most commercially successful memoirs of the twenty-first century, and its influence on the genre of women's travel and self-discovery writing has been substantial enough to generate a category of imitation.

The circumstances from which the book arose were painful. At thirty-four, Gilbert was educated, published, married, and by most observable measures successful. She was also unhappy in her marriage, filed for divorce, entered a rebound relationship that ended badly, and found herself sitting on her bathroom floor at three in the morning in genuine despair. The memoir is the account of the year she spent in three countries chosen for reasons that carry both the logic of the intellectual and the slightly arbitrary quality of genuine crisis: Italy, for the pleasure of eating and the study of Italian; India, for an extended retreat at the ashram of a guru; and Indonesia, specifically Bali, for balance. The three sections are structured by the book's three-word title, which also maps onto the three aspects of experience — physical, spiritual, and relational — that Gilbert identifies as the territories of her inquiry.

Eat, Pray, Love generated a cultural conversation that reached well beyond the readership of memoir: about what women are permitted to want, about the relationship between spiritual seeking and privilege, about whether a book so commercially successful can also be a serious work of introspection. These conversations continue, which is a different way of saying that the book continues to matter to its readers. Gilbert's subsequent books — Committed (2010), The Signature of All Things (2013), Big Magic (2015), and the novel City of Girls (2019) — have confirmed her as one of the most widely read American writers of her generation.

Near fine. Some very mild markings along gilt edges; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000551