Elizabeth Gilbert became a publishing sensation when she chronicled her one-woman odyssey to find happiness and love post divorce in the bestselling Eat, Pray, Love and its sequel Committed: A skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage which ultimately sees her tying the knot with her lover, the Brazilian Australian importer Jose Nunes whom she met in Bali.

Four years later Nunes' first wife, Queenslander Elizabeth Lowrie, has put on the public record her version of the marriage breakdown with Nunes in a self published book, dedicated to "all the women who work hard to make their divorces gracious".

Entitled Committed Undone, the Lowrie memoir is a public rebuttal of suggestions made in publicity that the marriage had long been unhappy before separation and the divorce messy.

In fact, Lowrie maintains their divorce was respectful and discloses she had tried but failed to elicit a public apology from Gilbert and Nunes immediately after publication of Committed. The matter had been referred to lawyers and she and Nunes had not talked since.

Competition for "truth" in media is not new. Prince Charles and Princess Diana used television to air their marital grievances. Gilbert's first husband, Michael Cooper, was contracted to write a rebuttal book, Displaced, by Hyperion but cancelled the venture in 2010.

Nora Ephron, the screen writer of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, wrote Heartburn in 1983, inspired by the events of her break-up with her second husband, the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein.

Lowrie, a practising Buddhist, says Committed Undone was "written simply to tell my truth as I lived it". With neither the publicity machine of Gilbert, nor the financial resources to press for a public apology and retraction, she says she had no choice but to go public with her hurt.

Nunes and Lowrie married in a small Canberra registry office after a whirlwind courtship in March 1982, with their three-month-old son present. It was in mid-1996, when she returned from London working as First Secretary at the Australian High Commission in London, that their marriage start to unravel.

One of the prime reasons for their separation, Lowrie says was Nunes' struggle to deal with the death of his best friend, on top of that of his father, sister and brother.

Lowrie maintains the couple kept their relationship cordial during separation for the sake of their two children, and the no-fault divorce in the ACT court went as "smooth as creamy milk" with Nunes notified but not in attendance.

In setting the record straight, Lowrie says her husband was never denied access to their two children, and was never asked for on-going child support.

Gilbert has remained silent about the book's imminent release and a request by Fairfax Media for a response to Lowrie's claims via her London agent has gone unanswered.

Lowrie attempts to place her issues with the Gilbert books in the context of her own search for spiritual belief, connection with nature and healing, traversing the very same territory of self discovery which Gilbert's two memoirs explored. Lowrie had tried to have it published traditionally but the manuscript had been rejected. She acknowledges there is a danger some people will see her memoir as sour grapes.

"My divorce was some 14 years ago – I could hardly be jealous. I wish the couple no harm, I just want my voice heard," she says. "And you know a very small part of the  book clarifies my personal divorce history – around four chapters in all.

"The book's great value and strength is in understanding my inner journey and where it can assist others to heal through the application of spiritual principles to grief – a much more important and positive role for the manuscript."

In many ways Lowrie and Gilbert come across as like-minded and it remains to be seen if Gilbert's legion of female readers are sympathetic to Lowrie's personal disclosures.

"In the book there is a continuing and major theme about the tension between my personal wish to set the public record straight and the effect that doing so will have on the family. I am not sure there is a right answer for this question," she says.

"Perhaps the devil is in each person's personal circumstances. In the end I decided to go public because there seemed to be continuing publicity about my divorce which compelled me to clarify the circumstances of it, my children were well-adjusted adults and I felt they could handle it, and there was a personal need to correct my personal history before I died."

Lowie now runs a website in retirement, deciphering dreams, and says Committed Undone was published with the aim to teach that pain and psychological suffering can be caused by words. Part of any profits for the book will go to pay those who helped her put down her story and "charitable and good intentioned work".

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