Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert
Gilbert at TED 2009
Born	(1969-07-18) July 18, 1969 (age 47) Waterbury, Connecticut, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, memoirist
Nationality	American
Alma mater	New York University
Period	1997–present
Genre	Fiction, memoir
Notable works	Eat, Pray, Love (2006)
Spouse	Michael Cooper (1994–2002) Jose Nunes (2007–2016)
Partner	Rayya Elias (2016–present)
Website
ElizabethGilbert.com

Elizabeth M. Gilbert (born July 18, 1969) is an American author, essayist, short story writer, biographer, novelist, and memoirist. She is best known for her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which as of December 2010 has spent 199 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and which was also made into a film by the same name in 2010.

Gilbert was born in Waterbury, Connecticut. Her father was a farmer, her mother a housewife. She is of Swedish descent. Along with her only sister, novelist Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Gilbert grew up on a small family Christmas tree farm in Litchfield, Connecticut. The family lived in the country with no neighbors: they did not own a television or record player. Consequently, the family read a great deal, and Gilbert and her sister entertained themselves by writing books and plays.

Gilbert earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from New York University in 1991, after which she worked as a cook, a bartender, a waitress, and a magazine employee. She wrote of her experience as a cook on a dude ranch in short stories, and also briefly in her book The Last American Man (Viking 2002).

Esquire published Gilbert's short story "Pilgrims" in 1993, under the headline, "The Debut of an American Writer". She was the first unpublished short story writer to debut in Esquire since Norman Mailer. This led to steady work as a journalist for a variety of national magazines, including SPIN, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Allure, Real Simple, and Travel + Leisure. As stated in the memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert made a career as a highly paid freelance writer.