I later discovered that Gilbert was an acclaimed long-form journalist – her 1997 feature in GQ detailing her time working as a table-dancing barmaid in New York’s East Village provided the basis for the 2000 film Coyote Ugly(a movie that remained a guilty pleasure throughout my early 20s). This was in spite of several friends telling me that Eat, Pray, Love was actually very well written and that the movie had done the book a disservice. Like many who nurture literary prejudice, I had always been slightly dismissive of Gilbert, imagining her to be a glorified self-help writer. That book sold by the bucketload, made Bali a tourist destination for depressed divorcees and was later adapted into a schmaltzy film starring Julia Roberts. A ll I really knew about Elizabeth Gilbert before picking up her new novel was that she had written Eat, Pray, Love, a memoir detailing her search for spiritual enlightenment in the wake of a marital break-up.
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