Eat, Pray, Love, Get Rich, Write a Novel No One Expects

Jeremy Liebman for The New York Times

When Elizabeth Gilbert was in fourth grade, her teacher, Ms. Sandie Carpenter, announced a fund-raiser. Students were asked to sell grinders — New Englandese for "sub sandwiches" — to pay for a class trip. There was never any question whether Gilbert would participate. Still, door-to-door sales of a perishable foodstuff can prove intimidating, even to a zealous 9-year-old.

Carmen Valdes/Photo Image Press

Gilbert and Julia Roberts at the New York premiere of "Eat, Pray, Love" in 2010.

So her mother, Carole, initiated a training program. She made Gilbert go outside and close the front door. Gilbert then had to knock, introduce herself and explain what she was selling and why. "Our family's going on vacation next week," Carole might announce. "What if we want the grinders two weeks from now?" To which Gilbert would generally respond, "I don't know!" and start crying. "Back it up," her mother would say. "Try it again. Get it right, kid." And close the door.

They did this, Gilbert recalls, for what felt like a whole afternoon.

A decade and a half later, Gilbert took an elevator up to the offices of Spin magazine to ask for a job. Her only connection at the magazine was having met the publisher, Bob Guccione Jr., at a party once. She had no experience as a journalist — her degree from N.Y.U. was in international relations — and enough good sense to be terrified. The doors to the elevator opened. Gilbert took a deep breath. Come on, she told herself. You're Carole Gilbert's daughter. Go do this!

The receptionist was, to put it gently, unmoved by her appeal. A concerned secretary appeared, then a personal assistant. Gilbert politely refused to budge. Guccione eventually agreed to see her but had no recollection of having met her. Look, he said finally, my assistant is going out of town for three days. You can do his job. At the end of this stint, Guccione pulled out his wallet, handed Gilbert 300 bucks and wished her good luck.

Some months later, Gilbert placed her first short story in Esquire, which published it with the subtitle "the debut of an American writer." She sent the story to Guccione with a note that read, "I told you I was a writer!" He called and offered her an assignment on the spot.

The lesson was obvious. Life was just a big grinder sale. Your job was to knock on the door and not to leave until your ambitions were met.

Next month, Viking will publish Gilbert's sixth book, a novel titled "The Signature of All Things." It is her first work of fiction in 13 years and unlike anything she has ever written. The book's heroine is Alma Whittaker, the brilliant, restless daughter of an imperious botanical explorer. Its prose has the elegant sheen of a 19th-century epic, but its concerns — the intersection of science and faith, the feminine struggle for fulfillment, the dubious rise of the pharmaceutical industry — are essentially modern.

What sets Gilbert, 44, apart from other novelists, of course, is that she's best known in the world at large as the author of "Eat, Pray, Love," an account of her spiritual journey from depression to enlightenment spiced by its exotic locales. The 2006 memoir sold a gazillion copies, spawned a movie starring Julia Roberts, made Gilbert the unwitting guru to her predominantly female fans and more or less devoured her literary reputation.

Despite having spent the first decade of her career writing three critically acclaimed books, critics cast her as a pampered solipsist peddling self-help. "Even worse — chick lit, if you really want to get ghetto," Gilbert says. "What little respect I clawed my way to, I totally erased."

Her overriding concern in those years, though, was living up to her own professed grace. She received mountains of letters from anguished fans and for a time tried to answer every one personally. And she struggled with the crushing expectations that acclaim bequeaths. "The biggest thing I had to prove was, 'Is she going to be able to come out of this tsunami and ever do anything again?' Or am I going to Harper Lee out? Go J. D. Salinger for the rest of my life?"

She began researching a novel about the Amazon but abandoned it after her lover Jose Nunes — the sexy Brazilian gem trader known as Felipe in "Eat, Pray, Love" — was deported. The only way Nunes would be allowed to return to the States was if Gilbert married him, an unsettling prospect given the haunting failure of her first marriage. To sort out her complicated feelings about matrimony, Gilbert resolved to write about the subject. As a midlist author, she'd rarely felt self-conscious at the keyboard. As a cultural icon, the pressures of undertaking another memoir activated her most primal fear: that she would disappoint people. "Committed" wound up being her most arduous project. When it was published, in 2010, she felt more apprehension than elation. "I threw it out into the world like a grenade. I was like, 'All right, everybody, whatever you have to say about the last book, whatever resentment you've built up over the last few years, let's just catharsis it out and move on.' And it did that."

Steve Almond is the author of, most recently, the story collection "God Bless America" and a frequent contributor to the magazine.

Editor: Adam Sternbergh

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