Elizabeth Gilbert's career has been defined by one book: Eat, Pray, Love, a runaway best seller about self-discovery and meeting her now ex-husband—the man she would, years later, end up leaving for a woman. She was wildly open about this development in her life, announcing on Facebook in September 2016 that she'd fallen in love with her best friend, who'd been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Gilbert was a successful magazine writer before Eat, Pray, Love and has now written 10 books, including City of Girls, which comes out June 4. The book, which is largely set in the 1940s, follows a 19-year-old Vassar dropout who gets involved in a major scandal in the New York theater world. It's light and—in typical Gilbert fashion—funny, but Gilbert wrote it from the depths of her grief over her partner's illness and death. by Katie Herzog