Author Elizabeth Gilbert, best known for her Bali-set book Eat, Pray, Love, which turned into a screen adaptation of the same name, has told her followers that she and her husband Jose’ Nunes are separating after 10 years together.
Gilbert revealed her separation on a Facebook post on Friday saying: “Because I have shared details of my private life with you all so intimately over the years, I feel the need to share with you this recent change in my personal life. I am separating from the man whom many of you know as Felipe, the man I fell in love with at the end of my Eat, Pray, Love journey.
“He has been my dear companion for over 12 years, and they have been wonderful years. Our split is very amicable. Our reasons are very personal.”
Gilbert asked fans to respect her privacy during this time of transition, as “this is a story that I am living – not a story that I am telling.”
She also told her followers that she would be taking a break from social media, and shared a poem called Failing and Flying by ‘poet-of-my-heart,’ Jack Gilbert.
Elizabeth Gilbert was born in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1969, and grew up on a family Christmas tree farm. She attended New York University, where she studied political science by day, working on her short stories by night.
After college, Gilbert spent several years traveling the United States, working in bars, diners and ranches while collecting experiences to transform into fiction.
During her time in New York, she worked as a journalist for Spin, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine.
She was a three-time finalist for The National Magazine Award for an article she wrote in GQ about her experiences bar tending on the Lower East Side – that article became the basis for the hit movie Coyote Ugly.
Throughout 2000 and beyond, Gilbert publish her first novel, and her first true story of the modern day woodsman Eustace Conway.
Her hugely popular hit Eat, Pray, Love eventually came to the big screen and featured Julia Roberts who played Gilbert. The book became so popular it was translated into 30 languages and sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.
She has been featured in the top New York Times bestsellers, and has been named by Time Magazine as the top 100 influential people in the world today.
She also published a follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love entitled Committed. The book was a memoir of her feelings on the institution of marriage – that book became a number one best seller.
Gilbert lives in the small river town of Frenchtown, New Jersey, where she and her husband run an imports store called “Two Buttons,” no word on what will happen to the store, or her life in Frenchtown.