Eat, Pray, Live.

Liz and José weren’t about to get married; with two grown children living in Australia, he had been through his own horrific divorce. So instead José spent a couple of years getting three-month visas to stay in the U.S. with Liz — then he’d leave. Sometimes, she went with him. They lived in Tennessee, where Liz taught college for a semester; they lived in Philly. They lived in Brazil, back in Bali, in Australia. Maybe not in that order — Liz can’t remember.
 
Then American immigration ordered José to stop popping in willy-nilly: No more visas. If the two of them wanted to be together in America, they had to tie the knot. It was spring 2006. Eat, Pray, Love had come out, made a moderate splash. José got kicked out of the country, and Liz went with him. Now what?
 
They took a gamble. Everybody advised them not to mess around with the INS, that maybe José, at this point, wouldn’t be granted so much as a 30-day visa to re-enter the U.S., even if it was to marry Liz. They decided to bet on winning: Liz bought a converted church in Little York, a village just north of Frenchtown, on Craigslist, while they were in Laos. (Infamously terrible with maps and directions, Liz thought it would be a half-hour from Catherine in Wayne; it’s an hour and a half.) Next, they shipped over two big containers of stuff they’d been collecting on their travels, in order to start their business. Liz came home and rented a warehouse in Frenchtown for their shop, Two Buttons. And José got his 30-day visa.
 
It was either get married then, or José would never be allowed back into the United States. “I see the INS as agents of destiny,” Liz says, and she might even mean it. “They helped us in the sense of these two people needed to get married and never would have if it wasn’t almost at gunpoint.”
 
In early 2007, EPL came out in paperback and José arrived in America, this time permanently, where Liz greeted him with, Here’s your house, here’s your business, I have to go on a book tour. And that’s when all hell broke loose: two visits to Oprah, two years on the New York Times best-seller list, thousands of women who claimed the book changed their lives. Liz Gilbert had become a phenomenon, just as her own new life was beginning.
 

WE’RE WALKNG UP along the old railroad bed that follows the river to Two Buttons, Liz and I. It’s dusk, and there’s no one else on the long tunnel of the path. Liz huddles inside her puffy green jacket — always cold! — but she isn’t in any hurry.
 
She tells me she’s just finished her next book, a historical look at marriage — could her next book have been about anything else? — that’s scheduled to come out within a year. It took a couple of drafts, spent some time in a drawer, because she decided, as the Eat, Pray, Love extravaganza unfolded, to make it a little less personal. So that the attention on her, Catherine says, didn’t get even larger. Now it’s done.