Name: ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ turns 20: How it changed Elizabeth Gilbert’s life
Uploaded: 2026-02-16T17:17:06.000Z
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I never thought I would be talking about eat, pray love 20 years after it came out.

I never thought I would be talking about Eat, Pray Love.

2026 marks the 20th anniversary of Elizabeth Gilbert's bestselling Eat, Pray Love, a travel memoir of self discovery set in Italy, India and Bali that sold more than 18 million copies in over 30 languages, evolved into a blockbuster phenomenon, and

launched a solo travel movement around the world.

CNN spoke with Elizabeth Gilbert on the book's impact 20 years on.

I am Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray Love and Big Magic and a bunch of other books, and

Eat, Pray Love changed my life entirely and still is.

When I left my job to go for that year, I had every intention at the, you know, eventually coming back and asking for that job back.

I was going to see if I could get that job back.

And I have never had to have a job again.

I still work really hard because I love my work, but I don't work for anyone.

For a long time, people have asked me this question of essentially, why do you think the book had the impact that it did, or what do you think it was that it released in women or triggered in women or inspired in women?

And I think it was a giant permission slip to say you can start your life on one course and then you can radically alter that course.

And I think given the fact that women's lives have always been so narrow, even growing up when I did in the.

In the 70s and in the 80s, like, there's still a pretty narrow path that a woman was allowed to have.

And the idea, I guess the idea that Eat Pray Love released kind of publicly on the grand scale is like, we want a lot more than that.

We want a lot more than maybe a marriage and a house and a kid and a stable job.

And Freud, you know, spent a lot of time saying, what do women want?

And it's like, apparently they want a year to travel around the world by themselves, to eat a lot of pizza, to fall in love with a handsome Brazilian man, to have adventures, women want a lot of things.

I can remember the moment when I realized that the book was becoming, like, strangely and unexpectedly successful.

I remember that the first few events were like, what I had always had.

You know, 10, 15, 20 people in the Audience at a bookstore.

But then, like toward the end of the book tour, I was being driven to the event and there were people like three deep wrapped around the block.

And I said to the driver, what's going on tonight in San Diego?

And she said, no, they're here to see you.

Like, what happened in that two week period between when the book was published in paperback and when it exploded into what it then became.

My friend Martha Beck always tells a story about somebody she knows who was at one of my events and overheard a woman behind her say, well, it must be nice to live the way Liz Gilbert is living.

If I were to live like that, I would have to divorce my husband, quit my job and sell my house.

And the other woman said, that's literally what she did to me.

It felt like at the time, such a huge risk to publish this book, such a huge departure from what I had been doing.

Because up until that point, the little writing success that I had had was a life where I had spent all of my energy writing and talking about men.

I worked exclusively for men's magazines.

I wrote for gq, I wrote for Spin, I wrote for Esquire, and

I quit my job, my really good job at gq, to go have this adventure and write this book about my own.

And I remember just thinking, nobody's going to want to read this, and

I guess I was wrong when I said nobody wanted to read it.

When I met my future husband traveling that year, I said to him, I'm writing this book about everything that's happening to me this year, and

And I wonder if you would feel comfortable if I wrote about our love story.

And he said, well, what would the impact of that be if you wrote about us?

There won't be any people don't read my books.

He brought that up a lot in the, in the years that followed.

The first time I saw the film, the producers let me and my then husband watch it alone in a giant movie theater in New York City in the middle of the day.

Like, this is a dream within a dream within a dream.

Like, you're Javier Bardem and I'm Julia Roberts.

And I don't know if it's the very first line of the Film.

But very, very, very early on in the film, there's a moment when Julia Roberts walks into the Indonesian medicine man's hut, and

she introduces herself and she says, I'm Liz Gilbert.

I'm writing a magazine article on Bali, and I wanted to meet a medic.

Like, we literally screamed because we were like, you're.

Like, it's so weird to hear Julia Roberts say, I'm.

When people ask me what I think of the film, I.

One is that I love it, and two is that I still haven't processed it.

I think I kind of gave up on even trying to make sense of it because it doesn't make any sense that that would happen.

So I'm just like, I. I don't even know what to say.

I don't think it happens so much anymore, but

there was a while during what I call peak Eat, Pray, Love, which was around the time the moon, between the time when the book had its sort of biggest success and when the movie came out.

And there were a lot of people who were doing this kind of, like, ritualized recreation of the book, where they were as closely as possible, trying to stay in the same neighborhood in Rome, trying to eat the same pizza that I ate in Naples, trying to find the ashram where I was in India, trying to find the healers that I went to in Bali.

And I was getting letters from women saying, like, you know, I did it.

And at the time, I was more excited by people who were taking inspiration from the book to go create their own version of that, you know.

And I used to say to people, you know, it's a line from the Ramana Maharshi, the great Indian saint, used to say, don't do what I did.

When people would say, like, how did you find enlightenment?

Ask these questions, ask the same questions I asked, but don't do the things I did.

But I realized somewhere along the way that you could.

You could, like, faithfully, step by step, completely recreate my journey, and

you're still going to get your own journey.

Like, you're going to have your own experience at that pizzeria in Naples.