A Man's Guide to 'Eat Pray Love'

Book of the Month

Hard as it may be for some guys to believe, there was actually a time when Elizabeth Gilbert—she of the phenomenally successful (and unfairly labeled) "chick lit" memoir / movie, Eat Pray Love—wrote primarily for GQ. And for a good stretch of time back in the late 90's and early 00's, there was perhaps no writer who better captured and articulated in her unforgettable profiles what it means to be a man. It was a success born of a fundamental question.

"I wanted to understand who is this species that we share the planet with," Gilbert says with a laugh. It's the morning after the opening of the film and she's talking to me from her home in western New Jersey. "I've always loved men and been fascinated with men and I guess you might say that I embedded myself in different tribes as a way to understand them, to figure out how they want to be seen."

Three of those pieces took her into quite different tribes—a profile of Hank Williams III; a story about bartending at a New York City dive bar (which became the movie Coyote Ugly); and a portrait of a modern-day Davy Crockett living in the woods of Connecticut—but each of them revealed to Gilbert a similar insight: "If I learned anything about men in my decade writing for GQ, it is that they have an enormous fragility inside them. Men have an enormous desire to be regarded as important and vital and not be dismissed. And if you love a man, you must be very careful with that part."

It's the kind of fundamental and wise insight that is at the center of Eat Pray Love as well—and no doubt why it has resonated so deeply.

"It's funny that it's seen as a 'woman's book,'" Gilbert says, "When really it's about those questions that are basic humans, not just men or women: 'Who am I?' 'Why am I here?' 'I don't know, so I must make a quest.'"

It's that quest around the world that re-enforced another Gilbert insight about men.

"I tell all my friends, there is still no better man than an American man. He is the most under-appreciated breed of man on the planet. There is no partner more evolved than an American man."