Elizabeth Gilbert

Eat Pray Love grew out of a real divorce and a year of travelling on a book advance, and it sold in numbers that made her a category unto herself and a target for a decade of backlash about privilege.

Big Magic is the more useful book: creativity as something to be shown up for rather than agonised over, with a firm argument against the suffering-artist model. The Signature of All Things, following a nineteenth-century botanist, is the one that shows what she can actually do when nobody is reading it as memoir.