Author of the week: Elizabeth Gilbert

last updated 8 January 2015

Elizabeth Gilbert knows how to infiltrate a boys’ club, said Steve Almond in The New York Times. The author of Eat, Pray, Love began her career as a swashbuckling journalist, writing for Spin before becoming one of the few women on staff at GQ, where she specialized in profiles of rebels and daredevils. A 1997 story she wrote about working as a table-dancing bartender in a rowdy saloon became the feature film Coyote Ugly. Her trademark tenaciousness, she says, comes from her parents, who raised her in a formerly derelict farmhouse in Connecticut and pushed her to overcome her fears from an early age. “I was the baby of the family, but I was never babied, and that allowed me to take whatever artistic temperament I had and apply learned discipline.”

She’s braving guarded turf again with her new book. The Signature of All Things is her second novel, but the first since critics of Eat, Pray, Love decided that one mega-selling memoir makes Gilbert a narcissistic self-help peddler. Just don’t tell her that in writing a novel about a 19th-century botanist, she’s now courting a higher class of reader than the fans she already has. “It’s the worst kind of arrogance,” she says. “Shouldn’t the idea be that we want people to read, period? Isn’t it an honor if somebody chooses our books at all?” She recalls meeting a woman in Tulsa who told her that Eat, Pray, Love was the first book she ever read and it turned her on to reading. “If that’s the kind of reader I’m not supposed to want, well, Jesus Christ. Give me a few thousand more of those!”