Gilbert's career has been defined by one book: Eat, Pray, Love, a runaway bestseller about self-discovery and meeting her now ex-husband—the man she would, years later, end up leaving for Rayya Elias. 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 in June. 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 Elias's illness and death. She says she has no plans to write a "cancer memoir" about that experience, but she is planning on talking about it, including, quite possibly, during her appearance in Seattle. by Katie Herzog