Backgrounder: Elizabeth Gilbert

By Rebecca Cathcart

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Elizabeth Gilbert. Photos by Debra Lopez.


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Lecture: Elizabeth Gilbert

“I don’t think of myself as a journalist,” said Elizabeth Gilbert in a May 29, 2002 interview with Powell’s Books website. “I’m not a beat reporter covering Washington. I only know how to tell a story the way I know how to tell it … [as] if we were friends sitting in a bar.”

Unorthodox as her approach to narrative nonfiction may be, it has earned Gilbert critical kudos. Men’s Journal calls her writing “wise and knowing,” while Publisher’s Weekly praises her “smart, sassy humor.” Much of Gilbert’s work deals with people at society’s margins. Her portrayals of men like Jim MacLaren, a quadriplegic athlete and motivational speaker, have earned her a reputation for empathy and insight.

Born in Connecticut in 1969, Gilbert moved to New York City in the late ’80s to attend NYU. Graduating with a B.A. in political science, she traveled the country, working in bars and restaurants. “Everything I did in my twenties was with an eye toward creating new experiences to write about, gathering landscapes and voices,” she said in a May 2002 interview with Poets & Writers.

The characters and contexts Gilbert observed on the road inspired much of her early work. Her first published piece, a short story titled “Pilgrims”, appeared in 1993 in Esquire magazine. It led to her first book, the 1997 short story collection of the same name, which won the prestigious Pushcart Prize. Throughout the ’90s, she was a staff writer at Spin magazine. Her stories explored everything from the little known world of rodeo groupies, to the Chinese government’s protracted attempt to build a super-dam.

In her second book, Stern Men (2000), Gilbert detailed the territorial disputes of lobster fishermen in the coastal waters off Maine. Her 2002 book, The Last American Man, earned a National Book Award nomination for non-fiction. In the book, she creates a nuanced portrait of Eustace Conway, a modern day mountain man, whose seemingly idyllic lifestyle masks a tumultuous inner life.

Since 1999, Gilbert has written a number of profiles for GQ magazine, three of which have garnered National Magazine Award Nominations for feature writing. But she is best known, perhaps, for the 2000 film Coyote Ugly, which was adapted from a piece she wrote for GQ about her experiences as a bartender on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

In her most recent book, Eat, Pray, Love (2006), Gilbert turns her reportorial eye inward. A memoir, the book chronicles the year-long, global journey that paralleled her inner odyssey after a difficult divorce. “Gilbert fully engages readers in the year’s cultural and emotional tapestry,” wrote a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, “conveying rapture with infectious brio, recalling anguish with touching candor.”

Rebecca Cathcart is a graduate journalism student at NYU, where she is studying magazine writing.

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