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At 34, after two years of brutal wrangling over her divorce, she took off to guzzle pasta in Rome (Eat), explore her spirituality in an Indian ashram (Pray) and meet her future second husband in Bali (Love).
In the interim, as the memoir briefly mentions, she had met her first husband (whom she didn't name, and with whom she has had no contact since) in her early 20s, married him at 25, and, as she turned 30, found herself sobbing on the bathroom floor of a large house in the suburbs of New York, feeling empty and trapped, tormented by the fact that she didn't want children and unsure of how to communicate that to everyone who expected her to become a mother - including her husband.
(Image: https://media.istockphoto.com/id/613135154/de/foto/kinder-essen-gesundes-gemBCse-lebensmittel-isoliert-auf-wei9F.jpg?b=1&s=170x170&k=20&c=FE-9t_sNakANsAlZ-uiA0koqNNmWgA43cG4YYeDbAa4=)‘But when I did, I was struck by how sad that person was. I had forgotten the visceral sorrow and depression and confusion and shame, of having blown a marriage and caused such chaos and upheaval. I was so ashamed of myself, and so lonely,' she says. ‘I wanted to reach an arm back and say to my younger self: “It's going to be fine; you're going to get through this; you have no idea how well this is all going to turn out.”'
She has godchildren and nieces and nephews ‘all over the place', she says; her sister Catherine has a son and a daughter, whom she adores, and her step-children and step-grandchildren in Australia, to whom she is close, are very much merged into the Gilbert clan too.
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Creative work can often involve persistence and endurance, she agrees, but it's also hugely gratifying. ‘Of all the ways that a human could spend their time on earth, you get to invent a non-essential luxurious item such as a painting, or a piece of music, or a novel. Who is luckier than you?'
‘We're going to get those corsets off, and we're going to let those girls have some fun with some sailors who are about to ship out,' she laughs. ‘There are some 99-year-old showgirls out there that I need to talk to, before they go to the great standing ovation in the sky.'
‘I think there are women who are meant to be mothers and I think there are women who are meant to be aunties, and I think there are women who are not meant to be within ten feet of a child. There's a really big difference, and I'm so happy to be in the auntie camp.'
‘Eat, Pray, Love grew out of conversations I was having with my female friends,' she says. ‘What if I don't want to be a mother? What if I don't want to stay married? What if, what if, what if, what if?' The resulting book was not intended as self-help; it was a highly personal account of her own journey back to health and happiness. However, its message - of not settling for second best, and of ploughing one's own furrow - was one millions of women responded to passionately, feeling that she had seen into their soul.
I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form, separate from us, but capable of interacting with us. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner.
That things turned out well is something of an understatement. Elizabeth's story of her year-long travels to Italy, India and Indonesia, a healing solo expedition in the wake of a traumatic and protracted divorce, went on to sell more than 12 million copies, was turned into a Hollywood film starring Julia Roberts, and made the American novelist a household name.
‘I'm never anywhere for long these days, but this is a great luxury to have, a little corner in my favourite place in the world,' she sighs, setting down dishes of fruit and crisps on the glass-topped coffee table before settling beside me on the sofa.
I must admit, I generally abhor the self-help industry (and am also irked by the widespread use of ‘artist' to describe anyone who has ever made anything, from a film to a fancy dress costume) so I was wary of a book about ‘the creative process'. But I needn't have been concerned. By creative living, Elizabeth is not talking about, necessarily, a life that is professionally or exclusively devoted to the arts, but ‘living a life that is driven more strongly by creativity than fear'.
Elizabeth grew up, the youngest of two (her sister Catherine is also a novelist), in comfortable, middle-class Connecticut. Her father was a chemical engineer, her mother a nurse; they were not, she says, hippies or artists. They were, however, rebels, who ‘did whatever the hell they wanted to do with their lives'. Her father dreamt of being a Christmas-tree farmer, so when Elizabeth was four, he moved the family to a farm and began growing Christmas trees alongside his real job. He wanted to raise goats, too, so he bought some goats, and then some beehives. Her mother, meanwhile, made everything the family needed - from clothes to bread - herself, grew and harvested vegetables, birthed goats and slaughtered chickens.