Elizabeth Lowrie on how Eat, Pray, Love’s Elizabeth Gilbert wrote about her divorce

TWITTER spats are so 2014. The new way women are having it out? By writing tell-all books.

That’s what Elizabeth Lowrie did when she found out intimate details of her former marriage had been used, without her consent, to promote one of this decade’s best-selling books.

Author Elizabeth Gilbert became a literary sensation after chronicling her year-long round-the-world journey to “find herself” in Eat, Pray, Love and its sequel,Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, where she eventually marries her Brazilian Australian lover, Jose Nunes.

Committed is an examination of marriage by a reluctant wife, who swore to her new lover she’d never get married a second time. “Both were survivors of previous bad divorces. Enough said,” the book’s promotional blurb reads.

When Nunes’ first wife, Queensland woman Elizabeth Lowrie, heard her seemingly amicable divorced was being used as a marketing tool, she was shocked and offended.

“I was having a normal day at work when a friend called me and said, ‘I didn’t realise you were such a bitch when you were going through your divorce’,” Lowrie toldnews.com.au.

“That was a shock to me and the first I’d heard about it. I’d never really read Eat, Pray, Love.”

Lowrie claims her divorce was gracious and respectful.

“I had worked really hard to make the divorce great,” she said. “And here I was reading an account of my own marriage and divorce from someone who wasn’t there, who I’d never met. She was writing about my life. I was extremely upset and very hurt.”

Lowrie tried to have the wording in Committed changed and reached out to Gilbert and her ex-husband numerous times, but heard nothing back.

Lowrie wanted to “tell my version of the truth”. So she wrote her own rebuttal book,Committed Undone.

She spends several chapters detailing the embarrassment athaving her personal life continuously used by Gilbert to promote these two books.

“They still sell the books using the tagline about my marriage — ‘Both were survivors of previous bad divorces.’ If you Google her books you still get that phrase coming up. I think there’s 23 million search items for that specific phrase.

“When Gilbert comes to Australia she usually makes a comment on the divorce and there are continuous press releases as well. There is just so much out there. If you ask someone on the street, ‘What do you think of the Eat, Pray, Love couple?’, they say ‘Didn’t they both go through horrible divorces?’”

When asked if this has defined her life, Lowrie is philosophical.

“I actually have to thank Elizabeth and Jose for giving me such an experience, because through that grief I became a much stronger person. You know that saying that suffering is transformative?

“I do not wish the couple any harm and I believe that’s a sign that I’ve healed.”