Before Eat, Pray, Love was a movie and a travel tour, it was a memoir by the award-winning writer Elizabeth Gilbert, whose story of losing and finding herself resonates with just about every woman who looks in the mirror. With Eat, Pray, Love and its follow-up, Committed, Gilbert’s connection to readers has been immediate and enduring. What woman hasn’t sobbed in secret on the bathroom floor, after all?Yet Gilbert is more than these two books. Her collection of short stories, Pilgrims, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her debut novel, Stern Men, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her 2009 TED Talk on creative genius, where she claimed mysticism and the divine as allies in the creative process, has been viewed nearly five million times. Currently, she is putting the final touches on her next novel, The Signature of All Things, due out October 2013.You experienced enormous success, and then you moved to a small town and took up gardening. Why the retreat?It was after the tsunami of Eat, Pray, Love, and it was quite literally grounding. This thing had happened in my life, which was every inc …