By Lilit Marcus, CNN
(CNN) — It was when she got to San Diego, of all places, that Elizabeth Gilbert realized everything had changed. She had left home as the author of a reasonably successful, year-old memoir titled “Eat, Pray, Love,” a first-person fusion of travelogue, confessional, and self-help manual, tracing her post-divorce journeys to Italy, India and Indonesia. On tour to promote the book’s paperback release, Gilbert recalls, she’d been speaking to audiences of “10, 15, 20 people.”
Now, heading to yet another appearance, she saw “people like three deep wrapped around the block.” Gilbert was confused: “I said to the driver, ‘what’s going on tonight in San Diego? Is there some kind of a concert or show?’ And he said, ‘No, they’re here to see you.’”
Suddenly “Eat, Pray, Love,” which came out 20 years ago this week, was no longer Gilbert’s idiosyncratic personal project — ”I remember just thinking, nobody’s going to want to read this, yet I have to do it anyway” — but a phenomenon that would span the globe. The book took on a life beyond its pages, in the hotels, cafes, spas, and beaches where legions of its readers set off seeking their own transformative journeys.
‘A human permission slip’
In 2019, Gloria Caseiro, a Portugal-born New Jersey resident, was the mother of two grown kids, and she had gotten divorced after the children moved out. On her own and newly retired, she says she found the answer about what to do next in the form of an “Eat, Pray, Love” paperback: “I decided, ‘You know what? I’m now going to go to all the places that I’ve never gone to.’” At age 51, she set off on her first-ever solo holiday, to Italy.
That sort of experience — not the millions of copies sold or the $200 million box office gross of the 2010 film adaptation, starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert and Javier Bardem as the new love she made on her travels — was what made “Eat, Pray, Love” an enduring sensation. Gilbert says that friends describe her as a “human permission slip” — someone who essentially told an entire generation of women it was OK to just travel for the sake of traveling.
“There’s an old blues song that says, When a man gets the blues, he grabs a train and rides, when a woman gets the blues, she hangs her head and cries,” Gilbert says. “And so much of that is because women couldn’t grab a train ride.”
By the time the book appeared in 2006, the world had started to congratulate itself on how “easy” it had become for a woman to travel alone for leisure — a claim that says more about the restrictions that came before than about any great leap forward. Only recently had many countries stopped treating solo female travelers as a problem to be managed, no longer refusing them hotel rooms when traveling without a man, or denying them credit cards to pay for it.
Globalization and the growing democratization of travel made it easier to get to distant places, and ever smarter mobile devices with SIM cards and Google Translate made it easier for travelers to get around when they got there.
One word kept coming up among women who talked about their journeys in those years. It wasn’t just more socially acceptable for a woman to travel alone, they say. It was safer. A traveler could navigate a new neighborhood alone just with her phone, without having to pull out a paper map that announced her unfamiliarity to anyone around. It was possible to send a text to someone back home as soon as a plane landed, rather than waiting to get somewhere with a satellite phone.
“Freud spent a lot of time saying, ‘what do women want?’” Gilbert says. “And it’s like, apparently, they want a year to travel around the world by themselves, to eat a lot of pizza, to fall in love with a handsome Brazilian man, to have adventure.”
Many of the women inspired by “Eat, Pray, Love” thought that their opportunities to travel