But she still shows up for speaking gigs, giving her all — karaoke, dancing! — to interlocutors like Rob Bell, the author, spiritual teacher and former megachurch pastor. They met in 2014, on “Oprah’s Life You Want Weekend,” a two-day self-help extravaganza and arena tour led by Ms. Winfrey.

In January, at the Largo comedy club in Los Angeles, Ms. Gilbert and Mr. Bell chicken-danced and mugged to “Can’t Stop,” the Red Hot Chili Peppers song, for what seemed like an eternity, a move designed to last, as Ms. Gilbert put it, “long past when it’s appropriate and so much that it becomes awkward.”

Such unabashed behavior, Mr. Bell suggested recently, is what draws people in. “So much around us is styled and Instagrammed within an inch of its life,” he wrote in an email, “but for she and I this is where the life, the juice, the mojo, the szoosh — whatever that word is that Liz uses — is. I’ve often felt like my job was to grow in public. I sense that in Liz as well. To search for the water and try to describe where we found it.”

The epigraph of “Eat Pray Love” is “Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth!” — an exhortation to Ms. Gilbert delivered by Sheryl Louise Moller, an actress and old friend, when Ms. Gilbert, pre-“Eat,” had embarked on the affair that would end her first marriage.

“She wrote this book that she thought maybe 60 people would read,” Ms. Moller said. “It was like a diary, a purge. Then I watched her become this person that Oprah would have on her show. Liz is an old-school storyteller: When she tells a story about you, you sit slack-jawed at the epic-ness of your own tale. I watched her become this person who could get up on stage and tell people what they needed to hear. And connect with those readers. I watched her become the patron saint of any author who’s been hugely successful and had to write the next thing. She knows what it’s like to be overwhelmed by fame. She is absolutely committed to the act of creation, which is why she is able to start again, over and over again.”

At 13 years and counting, how tiresome is it for Ms. Gilbert to keep answering questions about “Eat Pray Love”?

“I could do it all day, babe,” she said. “And often I do.”