Now it's the husband's turn to tell all in battle of the ex-files

The book Eat, Pray, Love has been a publishing sensation. Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir of her search for post-divorce happiness by eating, meditating and romancing her way around the world has sold millions of copies and is to be made into a film starring Julia Roberts.

Now there is a twist in the tale. Gilbert's former husband, Michael Cooper, whom she dramatically and bitterly divorces at the start of the book, is penning his own memoir, called Displaced. Taking a leaf out of his ex-wife's book, it too will describe a global journey of self-discovery to find himself and overcome the trauma of a marriage that ended in fights and despair.

Details of the book have been kept secret by its US publisher, Hyperion, but it involves a "search for purpose" across the Middle East and the developing world. No doubt it was a journey that was made more difficult for Cooper after Gilbert's account of their marital failings became a global bestseller. Displaced is due to be published in autumn 2010.

That timing looks fortuitous, as publicity for the eagerly awaited film of Eat, Pray, Love will be starting to ramp up for a 2011 release in cinemas. The movie features Spanish actor Javier Bardem as the man Gilbert eventually finds love with on a one-woman odyssey that saw her explore Italian food and language in Rome, stay at an ashram in India and then find love on Bali.

"It sounds like a very well-timed book with the movie coming out. Especially as it sounds like he is doing something very similar to the book," said Carolyn Kellogg of Jacket Copy, the book blog of the Los Angeles Times

Cooper's decision to publish breaks a veil of secrecy over his thoughts about the break-up of his marriage and his former wife's subsequent rise to global fame. Though he was quickly identified after Gilbert's book came out, she refused to reveal much about him and he shied away from publicity, not giving interviews or speaking in detail about their marital problems. Gilbert has said that one of the prime reasons for their break-up was her unwillingness to settle down and have children.

Public interest in Cooper's side of the story is likely to be enormous. Eat, Pray, Love struck a chord with many readers, the vast majority of them women, in part because it did not flinch from personal disclosures. That potentially creates a market of millions.

"Readers have connected so strongly with Gilbert's book that they will probably see this book too in a very sympathetic light. People clearly want to know about the men in her life," said Kellogg.

Whether Cooper reveals much about his break-up with Gilbert remains to be seen. But there is a tradition of authors publishing "he said, she said" books to put forward differing accounts of the same incidents. Augusten Burroughs, author of the bestseller Running with Scissors, has written numerous accounts of his unorthodox childhood in the home of a prominent psychiatrist. They have been complemented by memoirs from his brother and mother, revealing yet more details.

Father and son David and Nic Sheff each wrote memoirs of the younger Sheff's battle with drug and alcohol addiction. The pair even held readings together.

That is unlikely to happen with Gilbert and Cooper. In an interview with the Guardian this year Gilbert spoke of their continuing estrangement. "We don't speak any more. It was really severed and we absolutely disagree on the narrative. There's zero intersection. After months of therapy together, we still absolutely disagreed on what happened," she said.

Kiss and break up

Philip Roth and Claire Bloom

In 1996, a year after the break-up of their five-year marriage, celebrated actress Bloom published Leaving a Doll's House, a memoir which depicted Roth as a "self-involved, all-controlling misogynist". Roth's 1998 novel I Married a Communist, whose protagonist is ruined when his self-hating actress wife writes an exposé of the same name, is seen by many as a retort.

Hanif Kureishi

The esteemed writer and film-maker's 1998 novel Intimacy, later made into a film of the same name, tells the story of a man leaving his wife and two young sons as a result of his wife's emotional and physical rejection. The book was assumed to be at least semi-autobiographical, as Kureishi had recently left his wife and two sons, leading to the author's family accusing him of exploitation.

Nora Ephron

The Oscar-nominated screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, wrote Heartburn in 1983, which was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. The book was inspired by the events of her break-up with her second husband, the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, whom she discovered was having an affair with British politician Margaret Jay while Ephron was pregnant with their son Max.

Liz Jones and Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal

Journalist Jones famously filled a weekly column and then book with Dhaliwal's failings as a (now ex) husband, telling how he would lie around all day, moping and writing a novel while she supported him. Tables were turned when the novel was actually published, with a protagonist who must deal with his "uptight, skeletal girlfriend" who keeps him in luxury by writing for women's magazines.

Richard Rogers

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