On September 3, 2004, a 34-year-old writer sat on a plane bound for Rome and felt the force of takeoff pressing her back into her seat, a sensation she still remembers two decades later as vertigo and fear. Below her, in the life she was leaving, sat a house, a marriage, and a job she described as one of the best in journalism, writing for GQ about men. Elizabeth Gilbert, speaking in a September 2023 YouTube video to mark the twentieth anniversary of that flight, said she could no longer do it. What followed became Eat Pray Love, and what she announced in the same video is a newsletter built on a spiritual habit that predates the book by years: writing yourself a letter from love. That habit, she said, is the thread running from the Rome bathroom floor of the memoir to a Substack community she is now starting.
The departure in the video is not romanticized. Gilbert describes a life that looked right from the outside and was making her physically unwell. "That path that I had been on that had stopped working for me and in fact was making me so sick I thought I was going to die," she says, and then she lists what she walked away from: "a house a marriage a really good job." She admits she had a good job, which is the point. The pressure she describes was not a crisis of circumstance. It was, in her words, "something that was arising within me that was demanding expression."
That detail matters for anyone who has read the book as a travel story. The journey was not a vacation from a bad situation. It was a response to a internal pressure that a life built on the wrong foundations could no longer contain. Gilbert holds the memory of that takeoff with a kind of tenderness, noting that she has flown many times since and never felt that particular force again.
One of the most telling moments in the video is a story she calls one of her favorite anecdotes about the book. Returning from two months of travel through Costa Rica, Colombia, and Panama, she was questioned at customs. When she said she was a writer of a book called Eat Pray Love, the officer's reaction changed the room. Gilbert recounts that the officer called her colleagues over and told them this was "the real Eat Pray Love person." Her explanation was that women arriving at JFK after time abroad often answered the question about their trip with some version of "I was having my own Eat Pray Love journey."
"Every single day women come through here coming from traveling abroad and I ask them what the purpose of their visit was and they say I was having my own Eat Pray Love journey."
— Elizabeth Gilbert, September 2023 YouTube video (about 2:21)
The anecdote does more than flatter. It shows how a book about one woman's search became a shorthand for a whole category of inner reckoning, the kind that people undertake in the middle of ordinary lives. Gilbert treats that long reach as something to be grateful for and something to keep serving, rather than a finished legacy.
The practice began in one of the darkest scenes of the memoir. Gilbert points listeners to page 53 of the first edition, a moment in Rome when she was, in her description, having an emotional breakdown, full of depression, shame, and anxiety. She medicated herself through it, and she also did something less conventional: she wrote a letter from love. Alone in a city where she knew no one, in the middle of the night, she opened a notebook and wrote a line that anyone who has been there will recognize: "I need your help."
What came back is the heart of the method. Gilbert says a response arrived in her own handwriting: "I'm right here what can I do for you." The reply that followed is the letter she reads aloud in the video, and it is worth quoting in full in spirit. It says that love will stay up with her all night if she needs to cry, that it will support her if she needs the medication and will love her just as much if she does not, and that "there's nothing you can ever do to lose my love." It promises to protect her through death and beyond, and it declares, "I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness."
"That strange interior gesture of friendship brought me Solace when nothing else could."
— Elizabeth Gilbert, September 2023 YouTube video (about 5:38)
The phrase "strange interior gesture of friendship" is precise. The practice is not a diary entry, and it is not affirmation in the usual sense. It is an act of addressing yourself as someone who is genuinely on your side, and then letting that voice answer with the specific tenderness you would want from a friend who could never be disappointed in you.
Gilbert is clear that this is not a one-time rescue. She says she has been doing the practice for 25 years and that it is something she does nearly every day. She has also taught it for a long time. Students of her creativity workshops know that the final assignment is to write yourself a letter from love, and she says she has read "thousands" of these letters over the years. The practice is therefore both a private discipline and a teaching tool that has traveled widely.
The mechanics are simple enough to try tonight, and Gilbert's own account suggests a few principles. Begin with a true, unpolished request, the way she did with "I need your help." Let the reply come in your own hand, even if it feels strange at first. Make the reply unconditional: it does not wait for you to be less anxious, less ashamed, or more productive. And keep it concrete, offering presence and specific care rather than vague cheerleading. The gap between the first line and the answer is where the practice does its work, because it asks you to imagine the voice of someone who is not frightened of you.
- Write the question you are actually afraid to ask, without editing it into something tidier.
- Let the answer come from a place of care, not from the critic who wrote the question.
- Stay with the unconditional part, which is the hardest and the most important.
- Return to it regularly, because, as Gilbert says of her own life, the work does not end on a final page.
The newsletter emerged from a wider reckoning with social media. Gilbert says many readers have told her they missed her presence there, the way she used to connect in the early days of the platforms. She is also candid about what changed. She describes how a seemingly fun medium turned out to be, in her phrasing, "addictive" and "engineered to be addictive," and she says it has been bad for the self-esteem of girls and women. She is trying, she says, to find a space where that early sense of community can exist more safely. Substack, which she notes is used by writers including Patti Smith, George Saunders, and Samantha Irby, is her answer for now.
The project she is building there is called Letters From Love, with the slogan "opening the imagination, healing the heart." She reads its mission statement aloud, and it is a manifesto that frames the practice as both a learning space and a spiritual discipline. Its central claim is that "self-loathing is a rampant virus in our contemporary culture," so prevalent it has become "the default setting in most of our minds." The aim is to help people discover their "inherent value and exquisite preciousness" and to learn to speak to themselves from love.
"Self-loathing is a rampant virus in our contemporary culture so prevalent as to have become the default setting in most of our minds."
— Elizabeth Gilbert, reading the Letters From Love mission statement, September 2023 YouTube video (about 9:03)
According to the video, subscribers will receive a weekly dispatch from Gilbert, but the content will be shaped around a shared project in which people write and speak to themselves from love. She mentions a subscription price of five dollars in the video, and invites people who want to join the community to sign up through the Substack link she provided. The intent is less a broadcast than a collective exercise, where her own long-practiced method becomes the curriculum and her readers become the participants.
What makes the announcement interesting beyond the anniversary is the continuity it reveals. The woman who wrote in a Roman notebook in 2004 is the same woman who still writes to herself today, and who now wants to build a room for others to do the same. Gilbert says plainly that her life "didn't end on the last page," and that "Earth School is still happening." The newsletter is her way of saying the lesson is not finished, and that she is willing to keep doing the homework in public, with a community.
If you read Eat Pray Love years ago, the most useful thing to return to is page 53, the notebook and the question "I need your help." If you have never tried the practice, start small: write one honest sentence to yourself, let the answer arrive in your own hand, and keep the reply unconditional. Gilbert's video makes clear that the practice is meant to be repeated across a lifetime, not performed once. For those who want the community she is building, her Substack, Letters From Love, is the place she points to, with a sign-up link provided in the video's description. Watch the full announcement for her own voice on the anniversary, the customs story, and the letter itself, which lands harder when you hear her read it.
