ennifer Gilbert has the kind of life for which the phrase
“having it all” seemingly was invented. Named an “Entrepreneur of the Year” by Ernst & Young, she’s the founder and chief visionary officer of Save the Date, a New York–based special events company, which, with a client list ranging from Oprah Winfrey to the Bill Gates Foundation, successfully combines high gloss and substance. A polished blonde, Gilbert divides her time between Man-
hattan, where she both works and lives with her husband and three children, and the Hamptons. She is glamorous enough to have been added to the cast of the third season of “The Real Housewives of New York City” reality show, and likable enough to have been dropped from the show for — critics speculated — being too nice.
Behind her perfect exterior, however, Gilbert for many years hid what she calls her “scary, bad, ugly”: As a young woman just starting out in New York, she was followed from the subway and into an apartment building by a man who stabbed her 37 times with a screwdriver. Kicking, screaming, and clawing, Gilbert fought off her attacker, and was certain that she was dying.
The experience left her scarred and feeling damaged, iso- lated, and joyless — like “a heart beating without a soul,” she writes in her recent memoir, I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag: A Memoir of a Life Through Events — the Ones You Plan and the Ones You Don’t. She told no one about her attack and went on to become an event planner, because she was good
‘There was always this shiny, fabulous outside person. Then inside of me was this broken girl who just never felt good enough.’