Elizabeth Gilbert is a member of no particular church, but she also lives in one—an 18th-century chapel in rural New Jersey which she purchased on Craigslist, “sight unseen,” after her mega-best-selling memoir Eat Pray Love left her with the kind of money that allows a person to impulse-buy houses of worship on the internet.
At first, Gilbert lived in the church with her Brazilian second husband, who she met on the post-divorce, round-the-world journey described in the aforementioned memoir. But the space wasn’t right for a couple. There was too little privacy and not enough heat, and the acoustics of the place were designed for “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” rather than domestic bliss. So they left.
But Gilbert kept the church.
As metaphors for a spiritual deficit go, an empty church is almost too on the nose; it’s a sign not just of the wealth Gilbert had amassed as the voice of midlife self-help, but of a woman who, despite all her success, could neither eat nor pray nor love enough to fill the void where faith should be. But her new memoir, All the Way to the River, out this week, tells the story of how she ended up back in that church.
It’s been almost 20 years since Eat Pray Love, published in 2006, reshaped the landscape of women’s literary nonfiction, and in some ways, we’ve been living in Gilbert’s world ever since. It’s a world of confessional essays, polyamory memoirs, and aspirational female midlife crisis narratives. It’s a world of pessimism about heterosexual relationships, in which it’s glamorous for women to divorce their husbands, and it might not be this way had Eat Pray Love not introduced the notion that self-actualization via hedonism was the ultimate expression of female empowerment.
