Product Description

This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali. By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise and funny author (whom Booklist calls "Anne Lamott's hip, yoga- practicing, footloose younger sister") is poised to garner yet more adoring fans.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3176 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-29
• Released on: 2007-01-29
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.46" h x .86" w x 5.56" l, .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.ca
If wisdom could be traded like currency, author Elizabeth Gilbert would be a wealthier woman by far, though it's likely her fabulous memoir, Eat Pray Love, racked up a few bucks during its stay on the New York Times bestseller list. What Gilbert imparts in her story--basically, bracing self-knowledge acquired during a year of travel following a bitter divorce and a shattered rebound romance--is at once astounding yet totally obvious. As Gilbert would attest, albeit more eloquently, the most important stuff in life is pretty much under our noses, but we occasionally have to shake ourselves senseless in order to see it (enlisting a guru and a medicine man are highly recommended).

Take this simple but devastating observation posited while Gilbert was on the final leg of a global tour. "I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and then I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been the victim of my own optimism."

Ten million women are smiling wry smiles and nodding their heads in agreement (men too, probably, but the book has a definite female skew). Such emotional bulls-eyes are hit early and often in Eat Pray Love, each seemingly more poignant than the last. Alternately funny and heartbreaking and always deeply resonant, Eat Pray Love, takes the reader on two epic journeys – one through Italy, India and Indonesia and the other deep inside Gilbert's intense psyche. Charles Montgomery's towering The Last Heathen: Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in Melanesia notwithstanding, travel memoirs just don't get any better than that. --Kim Hughes

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Gilbert (The Last American Man) grafts the structure of romantic fiction upon the inquiries of reporting in this sprawling yet methodical travelogue of soul-searching and self-discovery. Plagued with despair after a nasty divorce, the author, in her early 30s, divides a year equally among three dissimilar countries, exploring her competing urges for earthly delights and divine transcendence. First, pleasure: savoring Italy's buffet of delights--the world's best pizza, free-flowing wine and dashing conversation partners--Gilbert consumes la dolce vita as spiritual succor. "I came to Italy pinched and thin," she writes, but soon fills out in waist and soul. Then, prayer and ascetic rigor: seeking communion with the divine at a sacred ashram in India, Gilbert emulates the ways of yogis in grueling hours of meditation, struggling to still her churning mind. Finally, a balancing act in Bali, where Gilbert tries for equipoise "betwixt and between" realms, studies with a merry medicine man and plunges into a charged love affair. Sustaining a chatty, conspiratorial tone, Gilbert fully engages readers in the year's cultural and emotional tapestry--conveying rapture with infectious brio, recalling anguish with touching candor--as she details her exotic tableau with history, anecdote and impression.
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From AudioFile
Elizabeth Gilbert was a 30-year-old successful journalist with a perfect life (husband, fancy New York City apartment, fabulous weekend home) when she realized she was miserable. After surviving an acrimonious divorce, Gilbert sold her remaining possessions to spend a year abroad--four months each in three countries with nothing in common except starting with the letter "I." The author's reading of this memoir adds depth; she's obviously not a professional narrator, but her vocal presence provides vivid color and quirky humor as she eats (in Italy), prays (in India), and finds love (in Indonesia). This is a delightful memoir that explores exotic countries as well as the author's heart and soul. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

26 28
The popular aspiration of the future
By Brian Griffith
Gilbert's adventures combine a challenging spiritual quest with dreamlike travel experiences. Her struggles with inner pain are real and gripping, while the exotic locales stoke the reader's appetite for more. She seems to mix it all very well -- inner growth, vocational renewal, and the best kinds of friendship. I just loved her Balinese friend Wayan.

Some people would consider this book spiritual tourism at its most escapist. But let me give one paragraph as an example of what Gilbert puts herself through:

"It took me a while to drop into real silence. Even after I'd stopped talking, I found I was still humming with language. My organs and muscles of speech -- brain, throat, chest, back of neck -- vibrated with the residual effects of talking long after I'd stopped making sounds. My head shimmered in a reverb of sound, the way an indoor swimming pool seems to echo interminably with sounds and shouts, even after the kindergarteners have gone home for the day. It took a surprizingly long time for all this pulsation of speech to fall away, for the whirling noises to settle. Maybe it took about three days."

I'm really glad to see this book topping the bestseller lists in North America, and I hope Gilbert's kind of adventure becomes the popular aspiration of the future.

145 178
Look at me eating, look at me praying, look at me loving
By Jofb
We used this book to launch our first bookclub and I have to say that it was the most annoying book I have read in a long time. First of all this woman needs to see a therapist to sort out her narcissism. Her self-obsession in places such as India and Indonesia bordered on some kind of pathological sickness. When I first began reading the book I really did believe that some sort of real hurt would explain her 'pain' but came to realise that her 'pain' was human heartache. Most of us have suffered loss, heartbreak, grief and have felt the desire to run away from it all but we have real lives and so we grow up and accept our pain and carry on with our responsibilities. Not Elizabeth Gilbert - she lies on the floor and cries. She then goes off for a year to heal herself from walking out on her relationship. She pays money to go and clean floors in an Ashram in India - which must be the height of self indulgence. She learns nothing about the reality of heartbreak in India that might arise from having to send your young children to beg for food on the streets or making them go to work at the age of 10 in sweatshops or worse. She talks about learning to love herself as though that had been an issue for her. She did not learn anything about humility, grace or altruism. In her section where she raises money for the healer she becomes obsessed with how her 'gift' is used and implies that all Indonesians are really cheats and are trying to rob generous westerners. No old colonial hangovers there then. 4 out of 5 in the book club hated this book. One found it impossible to read, one agreed that she is a total narcissist and the other found her extremely annoying. We did wonder who likes this book and we wondered why. We had expected real growth and awareness. The book ends with her finding a man who treats her like a pet. The way she writes about him and their affair makes him sound quite creepy. Do not buy this book if you are looking for something with more depth than a sheet of copy paper. And the writing is not that great either.

11 11
I didn't get it.
By J. Macgillivray
I know millions of women got a lot out of this book, but I just couldn't find anything enlightening in it. The author was also paid in advance to have the spiritual experience she writes about, which made me doubt its sincerity. I did enjoy the food descriptions in the 'eat' part, though.

The best book of this genre is "Gift From the Sea" by Ann Morrow Lindbergh.