Who is Linda from Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia and what is their importance?

Elizabeth Gilbert's dreadlocked, pierced friend whom she first meets during a preliminary visit to Bali, travels with in Costa Rica prior to this memoir, and with whom she finally joins up with in Venice, Linda possesses supreme self-esteem and dismisses all questions of metaphysics. She has ferrets and lizards, and manages a software development team in Seattle. She serves as Liz's "temporary, special-order, travel-sized Venetian codega."