by Mary Beougher

Created on: August 09, 2010   Last Updated: August 12, 2010

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is the memoir of a woman who had everything but the life she really wanted. On the outside her life looks perfect, but on the inside, Liz has reached her breaking point. After a night spent on the bathroom floor, crying and for the first time, praying, she comes to the conclusion that she doesn’t want to have a baby, she doesn’t want to live in the big fancy house and be the envy of her friends, and ultimately, that she doesn’t want to be married anymore. In a leap of faith, Liz files for a divorce.

Of course, divorce is never simple and never as easy as one might wish and months pass with her life in a strange state of limbo while the terms are hashed out. During this time, she is finally able to ask herself what it is that she really wants to do. It keeps coming up on her list that she wants to learn to speak Italian, so Liz goes for it. She also begins a volatile on again, off again relationship with a man named David, who is both, as she so elegantly puts it, “catnip and kryptonite”.  Of course, David is also the path by which Liz is introduced to her Guru. Before that, she had never thought about having a spiritual teacher. The third act of complete kismet comes in the form of a call from a magazine editor who offers to send her to Bali on assignment to write about Yoga vacations. While there, Liz meets an old Balinese medicine man who predicts that she will come back to stay for three or four months, live with him, and practice English with him.

Out of these events unfold the idea for a year of self-discovery in three different lands with three different purposes. Italy would be the land of pleasure, India, the land of devotion, and Indonesia, the land where Liz would learn to balance the two. The mockery of her friends notwithstanding, and hashing out the final settlement of her divorce, she is determined to take this path, if for no other reason than to save herself. A few weeks after the papers are signed and her gracious publisher agrees to purchase the book she will write about her travels, Liz starts on her way to fulfilling the ideas of Eat, Pray, Love.

For people who are skeptical of the unhappy woman redemption stories, this book reads nothing like that. Her humor, her honesty, and her blunt way with words is like a sigh of relief as she helps you to realize that no matter how dark things get or how desperate you might feel, it is always possible to find a way out.

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