Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, will speak at 61传媒 on Wednesday, September 23, at 7:30 p.m. in Garrison Theater, as part of the Alexa Fullerton Hampton Speaker Series: Voice and Vision. A book signing follows in the theater lobby. The event is free and open to the public.
In Eat, Pray, Love (Viking, 2006), Gilbert tells the story of her world travels in search of personal restoration after a painful divorce. Because of its humor and insight, the book has exploded in popularity, especially with women. It has been published in more than 30 languages and has sold more than 5.7 million copies.
According to writer Anne Lamott, “Elizabeth Gilbert is everything you would love in a tour guide; she’s wise, jaunty, human, ethereal, hilarious, heartbreaking, and, God, does she pay great attention to the things that really matter.”
With a rural Connecticut upbringing in an educated, aesthetic family, Elizabeth Gilbert came to her writing career with fearless reporting skills, an abiding appreciation for working-class values, and skepticism of political correctness. A clear vision of the irony in life informs an easy, at times wicked, wit that shuns any ideological or political agendas.
After graduating from New York University, she used money earned at a Philadelphia diner to travel, she says, “to create experiences to write about, gather landscapes and voices.” She went west to work in diners and bars for the same reason. Her work for Spin Magazine caught the attention of the editors at Gentlemen’s Quarterly, which resulted in a run of colorful profiles and stories that eventually turned into books 鈥� and movies.
Her first article for GQ, “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon,” chronicled her experience as a waitress at the New York City bar of the same name, and was the basis for the 2000 motion picture Coyote Ugly. A profile of Hank Williams III in GQ won the National Magazine Award and was anthologized in Best American Writing 2001.
“Everything I learned about being a journalist I learned by being a bartender,” she said in an interview at Powell’s Books. The most exquisite lesson of all is that people will tell you anything. There’s no question you can’t ask if your intention is not hostile. People want to tell the story that they have.”
A Pushcart Prize winner and National Magazine Award-nominated journalist, she works as writer-at-large for GQ and makes her home in New Jersey. She has been published in Harper’s Bazaar, Spin, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Mississippi Review. Her nonfiction account of the back-to-basics woodsman Eustace Conway in The Last American Man (2002) was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.