OAK BROOK, Ill. — Eat, pray, love, and, sheesh, folks, relax.

Elizabeth Gilbert is not a messiah or guru. She is a writer, a person, like other people who eat, pray, love, do stuff. Yet, on a cold night in Oak Brook recently, the moment she speaks, you understand the hoopla, the adoration, the intense recognition she arouses in readers — the reason that Oprah, the first of three times she had Gilbert on her talk show, said, “I haven’t been this excited since Bono was here! I am quivering now that you’re here!” Gilbert, 40, has the soothing voice of a very together best friend, not a guru or motivational speaker but the smart, rational professional you wish you were; she speaks with confidence, hard-won certainty, but sounds knowing and skeptical enough to avoid smarm.

That’s her public voice. In private, before her Borders appearance, before she read from her new book, “Committed,” which debuted last week at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, she sounded a bit less smooth — and just as confused as you would expect a writer to sound if she had become an unwitting spiritual guide who transforms lives but intended nothing of the sort.

Her first three books, a novel, a book of short stories and a nonfiction work — “The Last American Man,” a finalist for the National Book Award — sold seven copies, she said. “Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia,” her fourth, a memoir, has sold 6 million.

So unwilling life coach it is.

“Everything that’s happened to me has become not a crisis so much as a puzzle. I have to respect that feverish reaction people have, but I am still learning how to address it without being rude,” she said.

“What I want to say is that my books are all there is. In terms of what I have to offer. Certainly in terms of spirituality. I am not going to have a talk show or start one, and no one has offered. Though I suppose if I wanted one I could push for one. And I am not angling to build a motivational empire. All I have are the conclusions I arrived at in my books. I am happy to share, but I am so grateful for my sanity — I don’t know, it’s so confusing, you know?”

An hour before Gilbert read from “Committed” and took questions, Tonya Melendez of Oak Park, Ill., sat in a metal folding chair with a slight smile, fingering the dust jacket on a hardcover edition of “Eat, Pray, Love.” The woman seated in front of her had been saying that Gilbert’s books had not changed her life; she was attending out of curiosity. Melendez leaned forward and interjected quietly: “It changed my life. It changed it forever.”

This is a relatively commonplace encounter at an Elizabeth Gilbert book reading.

Of the almost 20 fans randomly interviewed at the Oak Brook book signing, three said that after reading “Eat, Pray, Love,” they had quit their jobs and decided to transform their lives.

Samantha Chavis said she had been in a bad relationship in New York and was resenting her job in music publishing until she read “Eat, Pray, Love” and found the encouragement to move to Chicago and start a new life. Jeanette Kay of Downers Grove, said she read the book as she was coming out of a painful divorce, and the book provided the grounding to help her move on and start a new relationship.

The book, if you haven’t read it by now, is about how Gilbert, having gone through an ugly divorce, packed up her life and traveled the world (courtesy of a book advance from Viking). She ate transcendent meals, discovered spiritual peace, and, finally, met a new, equally wounded man. It moves in a breezy, accessible fashion — as if she were writing an intimate letter to a close friend, which is how many of her fans have come to think of her.

Which is perhaps why the book not only sat for a year at No. 1 on the Times’ paperback best-seller list but inspired global journeys of self-discovery — and a cottage industry of travel companies scrambling to launch unofficial “Eat, Pray, Love” theme vacations to the book’s locales.

Which is why none other than Julia Roberts will play Gilbert in the movie version, slated for release in August.

And which is why Melendez, a couple of years ago, quit her job as a school librarian in Cicero, Ill. “The book spoke to me,” she said. “It told me I had to love myself and follow my own path.” Melendez became a yoga instructor and spiritual counselor and is writing a memoir.

It’s all slightly surreal if you followed Gilbert’s early years as a journalist — a freelancer in the ’90s who turned out snarky profiles of Tom Waits and Hank Williams III for Esquire and Spin. A brief stint as a bartender, a journalistic stunt for a GQ article, became the basis for the movie “Coyote Ugly.” But it’s a writing voice, she said, that doesn’t suit her anymore, and only reminds her “I was a defensive, brittle person and not very nice.”

It took divorce to sever that life, to send her on the trip that became “Eat, Pray, Love.” The book, however, didn’t become a hit until the paperback. These days, she said, the interest can feel overwhelming.

She is careful to remind fans “Eat, Pray, Love” was not intended as a blueprint or as self-help. “Their journey is theirs, and most understand and use the book, I think, as more of a permission slip to ask themselves the questions about their lives that they didn’t realize they could ask.”

But there are those who don’t understand, and partly because of that, she has stopped not only replying to fan letters but reading fan letters. “I don’t feel besieged or anything, but I had to stop,” she said. “After a while you’d jump off the roof if you read them all. They want to know what they should do about their drug addictions and tragic marriages and bladder infections and which city to visit in Italy, and I was becoming everything from travel agent to psychiatrist and, with respect, I am not capable of being all that.”

The audience at her readings, she said, is female. “I don’t get Stephenie Meyer or Stephen King fans — no one to be afraid of. I get nice women who have had disappointments. For fans, believe me, you couldn’t do better than 45-year-old divorced women.”

She also says she looks forward to the day when she is not asked for advice and figures that day is coming soon.

“Committed,” which follows her relationship with the man she met in “Eat, Pray, Love,” is about marriage and how they got married. It’s less likely to be taken as self-help.

Gilbert lives in New Jersey with her husband. They run a store that sells trinkets from around the globe. Not long ago, a woman came into the store and walked up to Gilbert’s husband. Some really famous bestselling author owns this place, she informed him.

Yeah, he said, who? Barbara Kingsolver, she said.