Eat, Pray, Divorce. Best-selling author separates

[NEW YORK] It was the romance that provided the happiest of endings to an iconic memoir that became an international bestseller and spawned a Hollywood movie starring Julia Roberts.

But Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert announced Friday that she was parting from her husband, Jose Nunes, with whom she fell in love at the end of a journey of self-discovery more than a decade ago.

"I am separating from the man whom many of you know as 'Felipe' - the man whom I fell in love with at the end of the Eat Pray Love journey," she wrote on her Facebook page.

"He has been my dear companion for over 12 years, and they have been wonderful years. Our split is very amicable. Our reasons are very personal."

The couple married in 2007 and lived in Frenchtown, New Jersey about 60 miles (96 kilometers) west of New York where they ran a store.

Eat Pray Love tells how Gilbert spent four months in Italy savoring food, four months exploring spirituality in India and then travelled to Bali, where she fell in love, following a messy divorce.

Published in 2006, it has been translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.

In 2010, she published a follow-up memoir called Committed which explored her ambivalent attitudes about marriage and which also became a New York Times bestseller.

The 46-year-old author and novelist also saw her experiences bartending, while trying to make ends meet in New York earlier in her career, become the basis for the 2000 movie Coyote Ugly.

Time Magazine named Gilbert one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2008.

AFP