I thank Armenia de Oliveira for leaping into action in Rio de Janeiro to save Felipe’s immigration process on that end. Also holding up the Brazilian front, as always, have been the wonderful Claucia and Fernando Chevarria-who were just as relentless in their pursuit of antique military records as they were in their encouragement and love.
I thank Brian Getson, our immigration lawyer, for his thoroughness and patience, and I thank Andrew Brenner for helping us find Brian in the first place.
I thank Tanya Hughes (for offering me a room of my own at the beginning of this process) and Rayya Elias (for offering me a room of my own at the end).
I thank Roger LaPhoque and Dr. Charles Henn for their hospitality and elegance at the budget oasis of the Atlanta Hotel in Bangkok. The Atlanta is a wonder that must be seen to be believed, and even then it cannot really be believed.
I thank Sarah Chalfant for her endless confidence in me, and for her years of constant encircling protection. I thank Kassie Evashevski, Ernie Marshall, Miriam Feuerle, and Julie Mancini for completing that circle.
I thank Paul Slovak, Clare Ferraro, Kathryn Court, and everyone else at Viking Penguin for their patience as I wrote this book. There are not many people left in the world of publishing who would have said “Take as much time as you need” to a writer who had just missed a major deadline. Throughout this entire process, nobody (except myself) has put any pressure on me whatsoever, and that has been a rare gift. Their care hearkens back to an earlier and more gracious way of doing business, and I am grateful to have been the recipient of such decency.
I thank my family-especially my parents and my grandmother, Maude Olson-for not hesitating to allow me to explore in print my very personal feelings about some of their most complicated life decisions.
I thank Officer Tom of the United States Department of Homeland Security for treating Felipe with such an unexpected degree of kindness during his arrest and detention. And that is the most surreal sentence I have ever written in my life, but there it is. (We’re not really sure that your name was actually “Tom,” sir, but that’s how we both remembered it, and I hope that at least you know who you are: a most unlikely agent of destiny who made a bad experience far less bad than it might have been.)
I thank Frenchtown for bringing us home.
Lastly, I offer my greatest gratitude to the man who is now my husband. He is a private person by nature, but unfortunately his privacy ended the day he met me. (He is now known to an awful lot of strangers around the world as “that Brazilian guy from Eat, Pray, Love.”) In my defense, I have to say that I did give him an early chance to dodge all this exposure. Back when we were first courting, there came an awkward moment when I had to confess that I was a writer, and what that meant for him. If he stayed with me, I warned, he would eventually end up revealed in my books and in my stories. There was no way of getting around it; that’s simply how it goes. His best chance, I made clear, would be to leave right then, while there was still time to escape with dignity and discretion intact.
Despite all my warnings, though, he stayed. And he stays with me still. I believe this has been a great act of love and compassion on his part. Somewhere along the line, this wonderful man seems to have recognized that my life would not have a coherent story line anymore without him at the center of it.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of a short story collection, Pilgrims (a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award), The Last American Man (a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award), and, most recently, the #1 New York Times bestseller Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. For five years she worked as a journalist at GQ, where her feature writing earned her three National Magazine Award nominations. She lives in New Jersey.
