In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.

The memoir was on the New York Times Best Seller List of non-fiction in the spring of 2006 and in October 2008 after 88 weeks the book was still on the list at number 2. She is best known for her 2006 memoirs Eat Pray Love which as of December 2010 has spent 199 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list and was also made into a film by the same name in 2010. Along with her only sister novelist and historian Catherine Gilbert Murdock Gilbert grew up on a small family Christmas tree farm in Litchfield Connecticut.

Gilbert (born July 18 1969) is an American author essayist short story writer biographer novelist and memoirist. She is best known for her 2006 memoirs Eat Pray Love which as of December 2010 has spent 199 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list and was also made into a film by the same name in 2010.