The author of Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic returns to the How To: Academy for an unmissable conversation on her journey through life and her new novel City of Girls.

From the dive bars of the Lower East Side to the beaches of Bali, the Connecticut Christmas Tree farm where she was raised to the Mumbai ashram where she sought solace after a difficult divorce, Elizabeth Gilbert is a world traveller whose unending search for answers to life’s biggest questions have made her the voice of a generation.

Since then she has produced one critically acclaimed bestseller after another. From Committed, her memoir about making her peace with the institution of marriage, to Big Magic, a book encapsulating the joyful spirit she brings to her creative work, her writings resonate profoundly with all of us who wish to confront heartbreak, tragedy and desperation with openness, imagination and wisdom.

Now Elizabeth Gilbert returns with her new novel, CITY OF GIRLS, bringing us a glittering coming-of-age epic stitched across the fabric of a lost New York.

‘For many years now, I’ve longed to write a novel about promiscuous girls whose lives are not destroyed by their sexual desires … I know many women – myself included – who’ve had seasons of their life that were dedicated to the hunt for excitement. Sometimes that hunt was fun, sometimes it was disastrous. But we all turned out all right. If anything, our riotous exploits, our mistakes and heartbreaks and wounds, made us into wiser and more interesting people …All the pain and anxiety and trauma of the world only made me want to write this novel more. Never has it felt more important for me to tell stories of joy and abandon, passion and recklessness.’

Elizabeth Gilbert
Elizabeth Gilbert is the number-one bestselling author of Eat Pray Love, which has sold over 15 million copies worldwide and been translated into over 46 languages, as well as other international bestselling books of fiction and non-fiction. She has published two novels, including The Signature of All Things, which was longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize.