Elizabeth Gilbert inspired a generation of women around the world with her bestselling memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. She was a woman who seemed to have it all: a beautiful home, a thriving career and a happy marriage. Inside, she was desperate to free herself from a life she felt was not her own. During her interview with Oprah on "Super Soul Sunday," Gilbert talks about why her yearlong quest of self-discovery that took her to Italy, India and Bali so deeply resonated with her readers.
"For some reason, and this just boggles my imagination, there are still just huge swaths of women who never got the memo that their lives belong to them," Gilbert says.
"I feel like, in a way, Eat, Pray, Love kind of was a permission slip from the principal's office that said you are allowed to ask yourself some really important questions about your life," she continues in the above video. "You are allowed to take accountability and ownership for your own journey."
It's OK, Gilbert says, for women to stop catering to others and live the life they want. "You're allowed to ask what serves you sometimes, because I know you've been trained up to serve everyone," she says. "But you're allowed to turn that on yourself and honor your own life that you were given. And I feel like [the book] just got to people somehow that they hadn't quite put together that they could do that."
Elizabeth Gilbert's full conversation with Oprah airs on "Super Soul Sunday" this Sunday, October 5, on OWN at 11 a.m. ET, during which it also streams live on Oprah.com, Facebook.com/owntv and Facebook.com/supersoulsunday.
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