Elizabeth Gilbert: the novelist steering through a social media storm

“Dear Ones,” the American author Elizabeth Gilbert announced online last week, using her customary form of address to her legions of fans. “I have big, wonderful news!” She went on to reveal the details of her latest novel, The Snow Forest — a “miraculous” story about a Russian family living alone in the Siberian wilderness who went undetected for half a century, ignorant of world events before their discovery by Soviet geologists in 1978.

A week later, however, the novelist, journalist and memoirist famous for Eat, Pray, Love returned with a new announcement: “I’m making a course correction and removing the book from its publication schedule”. This, she said, was in response to a “massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers, expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment and pain about the fact that I would choose to release a book into the world right now, any book, no matter what the subject of it is, that is set in Russia.” 

The withdrawal of the historical novel sparked criticism: in the febrile age of cancel culture, Gilbert was said to be self-censoring, scoring a victory for internet trolls. Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN America, which campaigns for literary freedom, admits online criticism “can be thunderous and intimidating”. However, she warns, it is dangerous if novelists are not prepared to set books in countries doing “terrible things”. “It’s important that people do, or as a society we are deprived of ideas.”

Others saw Gilbert’s decision as a bold statement by an influential author prepared to sacrifice her own art for a higher principle. Sasha Dovzhyk, special projects curator at the Ukrainian Institute London, argues the book would have added to “the romanticisation of Russia at the time when we face the cruelty and barbarity of this country, its culture, and its people”. Uilleam Blacker, associate professor in Ukrainian and East European Culture at University College London and recent International Booker judge, sees her decision as reflective. “There are cases in which it is better not to speak, or to wait, out of respect for others, until a more suitable time to say what you want to say.” 

While the decision to withdraw The Snow Forest has been cast as knee-jerk panic in response to digital dissent, Gilbert’s success has been built precisely on her closeness to her online audience and a philosophy — to use the self-help parlance — of living by one’s truth. “Here is the thing about truth,” she once wrote. “Once you see it, you cannot un-see it.”

Born in 1969 to a mother who was a nurse and an engineer father, Gilbert grew up on a Christmas tree farm in Connecticut, nurturing an early interest in writing. After graduating from New York University, she worked as a journalist for The New York Times Magazine and GQ. Her first book Pilgrims, a short-story collection, was published in 1997, followed by a novel, Stern Men, in 2000. Two years later, she published The Last American Man, which became a finalist in the National Book Award.

In the wake of divorce in her early thirties, she obtained a hefty advance to chronicle her spiritual recovery in what would become Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006). It was a commercial hit, translated into more than 30 languages, selling more than 12mn copies. It later became a film starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert, opposite Javier Bardem, playing the man who became her second husband. 

The memoir’s success was, according to Leigh Gilmore, Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University, partly due to its hopeful sentiment and thoroughly modern self-help message. The heroine “was unhappy but resilient, sexually well-adjusted, ate carbs, did yoga and found a prince in the end”. 

Gilbert followed her blockbuster memoir with another, Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace with Marriage. But the fans’ enthusiasm took its toll. “They want to know what they should do about their drug addictions and tragic marriages and bladder infections and which city to visit in Italy,” she once said. “I was becoming everything from travel agent to psychiatrist.”

In 2016, she announced on Facebook that she had separated from her husband after falling in love with her best friend, Rayya Elias, who was dying of cancer. “I need to live my life in truth and transparency,” she wrote in the post, “even more than I need privacy, or good publicity, or prudence, or other people’s approval or understanding.” Elias died in 2018. 

Gilbert’s decision to delay her latest book has only heightened the debate about social media’s influence on the publishing industry — as well as the relationship between art and geopolitics. After Moscow sent its troops over the border last year, Ukraine’s minister of culture called on allies to pause performances of Tchaikovsky’s “works until Russia ceases its bloody invasion”. Controversy over when, and if, The Snow Forest will be published takes this into new terrain. Paul Goldberg, the author of The Dissident, a thriller set in Moscow, said withdrawal “can only serve to impoverish our understanding of Russian history, which — let’s never forget — includes courageous expressions of dissent and a rich literature of protest.”

Whether Gilbert’s decision is an example of the dangers of online culture or a sign of her market nous is not yet clear. The author has cultivated what Gilmore calls a persona of “advice-giver, pain-feeler, and friend”. That role, and the devotion it inspires, may prove hard to give up.

emma.jacobs@ft.com