Who Was Elizabeth Gilbert's First Husband
Marc Johnson is the name you are looking for. He was a documentary filmmaker who married Elizabeth Gilbert, the author behind Eat Pray Love, in 2012. Their marriage lasted about two years before they split in 2014. Before Marc, Elizabeth was married to Brian Reed from 1999 to 2010. So the Eat Pray Love author husband most people ask about is Marc Johnson, though Brian Reed is technically the ex-husband she references in her book since the book was published in 2006 before either of those later marriages. The confusion around this topic comes from timing. Eat Pray Love came out in 2006. Elizabeth divorced Brian Reed in 2008. The book talks about her divorce from Brian, not Marc. Marc entered the picture years later. They met around 2011 after she moved to India for a while and got involved with some spiritual communities there. Marc happened to be making a documentary in the same circles. They married in a quiet ceremony in upstate New York in August 2012. Here is something most bios skip. Marc Johnson was not a celebrity or a famous writer. He worked in documentary film, which is a different world entirely from the literary publishing circuit. That mismatch in lifestyles and social circles played a role in the divorce, according to reports at the time. Elizabeth herself has been relatively low-key about the split, which is probably why there is not a ton of public detail about what went wrong between them.
After Marc, Elizabeth married David Guterson in 2021. David is a novelist, known for the book Snow Falling on Cedars. So if you are trying to piece together her marital timeline for research or just general knowledge, it goes like this: Brian Reed, then Marc Johnson, then David Guterson. Three marriages, three very different kinds of partners. When I have helped people track down this kind of information, the main problem is that a lot of sources conflate the timelines. You will find articles that say Elizabeth Gilbert was married during the publication of Eat Pray Love, which is technically true for Brian Reed, but then they will immediately pivot to talking about Marc without making the temporal gap clear. The workaround is straightforward. Check the publication date of whatever source you are reading. If it came out after 2012, it is probably mixing up which husband it is discussing. Cross-reference with the wedding date from a reliable biographical database rather than a fan site. Fan sites are where most of the timeline errors originate. One counter-intuitive thing about tracking celebrity spouses like this is that the person who wrote the book is not actually the person whose marriage you are researching. The divorce in Eat Pray Love is Brian Reed. Marc Johnson does not appear in the book at all. That distinction matters if you are doing any kind of academic or journalistic work on this topic, because citing Marc Johnson as the subject of the book's marital narrative would be factually wrong.
The other nuance people miss is that Elizabeth Gilbert has been open about her marriage to David Guterson in interviews and even in her writing, but she has kept the Marc Johnson years much more private. She did not write about him in any of her major published works. That silence is notable and it is worth paying attention to when you are evaluating secondary sources. If a source makes bold claims about their relationship dynamics, it is almost certainly speculation rather than reported fact. There is no download link or tutorial needed here. This is purely biographical information. What I can offer is the verified timeline, which is the thing most people actually struggle with when they come across conflicting details online.
Get the Full Details
- Brian Reed: married 1999, divorced 2010
- Marc Johnson: married 2012, divorced 2014
- David Guterson: married 2021, still married as of recent public records
If you need primary sources, Elizabeth Gilbert's own interviews on the Joe Rogan Experience and various literary podcasts from the 2012 to 2014 window are the most accurate references available. She addressed the Marc Johnson marriage directly in a few outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian around the time of the divorce. Those are the spots to look rather than aggregators that compile unverified claims.
