The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure... I'm lonely... I'm a failure... I'm lonely...) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.

The memoir was on the New York Times Best Seller List of non-fiction in the spring of 2006 and in October 2008 after 88 weeks the book was still on the list at number 2. She is best known for her 2006 memoirs Eat Pray Love which as of December 2010 has spent 199 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list and was also made into a film by the same name in 2010. Along with her only sister novelist and historian Catherine Gilbert Murdock Gilbert grew up on a small family Christmas tree farm in Litchfield Connecticut.

Gilbert (born July 18 1969) is an American author essayist short story writer biographer novelist and memoirist. She is best known for her 2006 memoirs Eat Pray Love which as of December 2010 has spent 199 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list and was also made into a film by the same name in 2010.