'Eat, Pray, Love' by Elizabeth Gilbert
Viking Adult, $24.95, 352 pages
By Marilyn Perez
Published: March 17th, 2006 | 5:37pm
Elizabeth Gilbert cannot understand why she's not happy with her life. Her story is a story that's been told before, we've heard it, we've lived it; a woman who appears to have everything in a successful career: a husband, a big house, travels the world. What gives? What keeps her up at night crying in the bathroom into hysterics? Gilbert finds the answers as she ventures out to write her memoir, Eat, Pray, Love
After an ugly divorce and a rocky rebound relationship with "David," Gilbert takes that step and uses this closing chapter in her life as an opportunity to start anew along with the help of advance money from her publisher to take a year off and go find herself. Her first stop is Rome, where she can practice her Italian and indulge her pleasures with Italian culture and cuisine to the point where she gained 23 pounds and loved every bite of it. Four months later, she moves on to India where she stays at an Ashram to continue seeking out God after first reaching out to Him one night in her bathroom when she prayed for the first time in her life. It is in India she truly discovers that you cannot escape the pain of the past no matter how far you travel and they must addressed head-on. Her attachment to the past, along with meditating, are the biggest challenges Gilbert faces on her journey. With the help of her Guru, "Richard from Texas," and the many other souls she encounters, she slowly gains the tools needed to let go. By the time she reaches Indonesia, she is content with where the year has taken her thus far and has found a balance between the pleasures life can bring and keeping your heart centered.
If you are looking for more depth in what brought her to the point where this trip was necessary, you won't find it, she leaves out much detail of the pain she experienced. In this story, her writing is light-hearted and inspiring, although I found her use of humor on some occasions a bit awkward, almost like a defense mechanism protecting herself from the vulnerability she's exposing to the reader. She's trying though, she really is, which is what makes her comes across as even more endearing and charming. She's not preaching or putting herself on a pedestal of enlightenment. She's humbled in sharing her account in the hopes it may help others who find themselves in a similar situation or with similar dreams. Eat, Pray, Love is a deeply intimate account of her journey, which can be read like a letter from an old friend playing catch-up with you.
Issue #35
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