[3] Her father, John Gilbert, was a chemical engineer at Uniroyal; her mother, Carole, was a nurse and established a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Gilbert's first book, Pilgrims (Houghton Mifflin 1997), a collection of short stories, received the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.

In 2006, Gilbert published Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (Viking, 2006), a chronicle of her year of "spiritual and personal exploration" spent traveling abroad.

[10] It was optioned for a film by Columbia Pictures, which released Eat Pray Love, starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert, on August 13, 2010.

[14] Gilbert's fifth book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, was released by Viking Press in January 2010.

The book is somewhat of a sequel to Eat, Pray, Love in that it takes up Gilbert's life story where her bestseller left off.

Committed also reveals Gilbert's decision to marry Jose Nunes (referred to in the book as Felipe), a Brazilian man she met in Manu, Indonesia.

A review of Big Magic in Slate stated that most of the advice in the book is matter-of-fact, but that, "Gilbert comes bearing reports from a new world where untold splendors lie waiting for those bold and hard-working enough to claim them.

[26] She also declared Jack Gilbert (no relation) as "the poet laureate of my life" when she succeeded him as a writer-in-residence at the University of Tennessee in 2006.

[27] In 2015, Gilbert and several other authors including Cheryl Strayed participated in fundraising efforts for Syrian refugees which raised over $1 million in 31 hours.

[28] In 2016, Gilbert shared a video of herself singing a karaoke version of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" to raise money for BlinkNow Foundation, an organization inspired in part by Eat, Pray, Love.

[29] In a 2015 article for The New York Times titled "Confessions of a Seduction Addict", Gilbert wrote that she "careened from one intimate entanglement to the next—dozens of them—without so much as a day off between romances."

[30] In 2007, Gilbert married José Nunes, whom she met in Bali while on the travels she describes in Eat, Pray, Love.

[32][33][34] On July 1, 2016, Gilbert announced on her Facebook page that she and Nunes were separating, saying that the split was "very amicable" and that their reasons were "very personal".

[39] On March 25, 2019, Gilbert posted on Instagram that she was in a relationship with United Kingdom-born photographer Simon MacArthur, who was also a close friend of Elias.