Highly readable, amusing, poignant and engaging autobiographical vignettes that allow us to laugh at our own dramas through the author's adventures in 3 seemingly different countries that all start with "I" :-)

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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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

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.
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
At the age of thirty-one, Gilbert moved with her husband to the suburbs of New York and began trying to get pregnant, only to realize that she wanted neither a child nor a husband. Three years later, after a protracted divorce, she embarked on a yearlong trip of recovery, with three main stops: Rome, for pleasure (mostly gustatory, with a special emphasis on gelato); an ashram outside of Mumbai, for spiritual searching; and Bali, for "balancing." These destinations are all on the beaten track, but Gilbert's exuberance and her self-deprecating humor enliven the proceedings: recalling the first time she attempted to speak directly to God, she says, "It was all I could do to stop myself from saying, 'I've always been a big fan of your work.'"
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
The only thing wrong with this readable, funny memoir of a magazine writer's yearlong travels across the world in search of pleasure and balance is that it seems so much like a Jennifer Aniston movie. Like Jen, Liz is a plucky blond American woman in her thirties with no children and no major money worries. As the book opens, she is going through a really bad divorce and subsequent stormy rebound love affair. Awash in tears in the middle of the night on the floor of the bathroom, she begins to pray for guidance, "you know -- like, to God." God answers. He tells her to go back to bed. I started seeing the Star headlines: "Jen's New Faith!" "What Really Happened at the Ashram!" "Jen's Brazilian Sugar Daddy -- Exclusive Photos!" Please understand that Gilbert, whose earlier nonfiction book, The Last American Man, portrayed a contemporary frontiersman, is serious about her quest. But because she never leaves her self-deprecating humor at home, her journey out of depression and toward belief lacks a certain gravitas. The book is composed of 108 short chapters (based on the beads in a traditional Indian japa mala prayer necklace) that often come across as scenes in a movie. And however sad she feels or however deeply she experiences something, she can't seem to avoid dressing up her feelings in prose that can get too cute and too trite. On the other hand, she convinced me that she acquired more wisdom than most young American seekers -- and did it without peyote buttons or other classic hippie medicines. When Gilbert determines that she requires a year of healing, her first stop is Italy, because she feels she needs to immerse herself in a language and culture that worships pleasure and beauty. This sets the stage for a "Jen's Romp in Rome," where she studies Italian and, with newfound friends, searches for the best pizza in the world. It's a considerable achievement because she is still stalked by Depression and Loneliness, which she casts as "Pinkerton Detectives" -- Depression, the wise guy, and Loneliness, "the more sensitive cop." They frisk her, "empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying" and relentlessly interrogate her about why she thinks she deserves a vacation, considering what a mess she's made of her life. After literally eating herself out of depression, she returns to the United States for Christmas holidays. Next stop: the ashram. It seems Gilbert has been a student of yoga and meditation for years. Her rural Indian experience features Gilbert grappling mightily with some of the meditative practices. She finds quirky co-practitioners such as Richard from Texas, a former truck driver, alcoholic and Birkenstock dealer. Richard nicknames her "Groceries" because of her appetite at meals and offers wise advice. Picture Willie Nelson in a non-singing cameo role. Gilbert acknowledges that Americans have had difficulty accepting the idea of meditation and gurus, and she does a mostly fine job in making her ashram education accessible. She deftly sketches the physical stress of sitting in one position for hours, as well as the metaphysical stress of staying on message. Still, Gilbert sounds like a giddy teenager as she describes her relationship with Swamiji, the yogi who founded the ashram where she is studying: "I'm finding that all I want is Swamiji. All I feel is Swamiji.... It's the Swamiji channel, round the clock." The concluding 36 beads find Gilbert in Bali, palling around with an ageless medicine man who looks like Yoda, a Balinese mother and nurse, Wayan, who is a refugee from domestic violence, and other colorful characters. Gilbert is healed enough by now to render a really good deed: She raises $18,000 via e-mail from American friends for Wayan to buy a house. ("Jen: Bigger Do-Gooder Than Brad?") And after 18 months of self-imposed celibacy, she finds mature, truer love thanks to a charming older Brazilian businessman. Eat, Pray, Love as a whole actually is better than its 108 beads. By the time she and her lover sailed into a Bali sunset, Gilbert had won me over. She's a gutsy gal, this Liz, flaunting her psychic wounds and her search for faith in a pop-culture world, and her openness ultimately rises above its glib moments. Memo to Jen -- option this book. -- Grace Lichtenstein is a travel writer and author of six books who lives in New York and Santa Fe, N.M.

Reviewed by Grace Lichtenstein
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Customer Reviews

Personal Journey not Book Review: Read with an Open Heart
I, too, agree that the previous reviews of this book have been about just that: the book instead of the journey of Ms. Gilbert through the lenses of an open mind and open heart.

Elizabeth takes a risk and puts herself out there by exposing to us all her struggles with food, spirituality and love. This book has created a love / hate relationship - there is really no in between...each you love it or you hate it. I loved it. She spoke to me. I divorced my husband for reasons people didn't understand, I battled with food for reasons people didn't understand and I have traveled the world for reasons people didn't understand. Each experience has opened my heart for which I am grateful.

To get out of your head and in to your heart is a journey in and of itself. From what I can understand and read in her book, Elizabeth has similar struggles and manages to love from her heart and be true to herself. Judging her struggles, for me, is not accepting of where she was, her journey and where she is now. No one knows what goes on behind closed doors - nor is it anyone else's business. Again, the fact that Elizabeth opens up her world to us is a gift in itself.

I read this book from the advice of my therapist who said this is one of the best books about loving from the heart that is not written by a therapist. I underlined and re-read so many sections in the book. One that stands out for me is something along the lines of "some people are as passionate about having children as I am about traveling..." FINALLY! Someone I can relate to and who is honest about her feelings; that it's ok to be a woman, divorce your husband, not want children, travel the world, immerse yourself in different cultures and in the end, understand love.

Bottom line - either you'll love it or you'll hate it. If you've been through a divorce, an eating disorder, a spiritual journey or traveled the world my hunch is this is a book for you. If not, read it with an open mind and open heart and accept where Elizabeth has been and where she is going...without judging her journey.

A Triune Triumph... and Clever too!
You've got to love reading to read this through and enjoy it. You have to appreciate her search for the right word to describe her positioning, the right word to describe a city, and her feelings. And, it helps to love geography, spiritual-seeking and psychological understanding.

I liked it plenty kiver-to-kiver. Clever travelogue-seeker concept. Lots of good writing and research. Interesting topics. Just plain charming and quite intimate and feminine in tone. I thought that the author's nailing-down-of-her-feelings and love of words was exceptional. She was trying to work out and convey a lot with her story and it hit the mark. This is the kind of book that could have bogged down plenty of times in 330 pages but it never did. The engine of personal purpose and constant events and changing geographies pulled it forward. If 100 people took the same trip, there would be 100 very different books. She wrote her book and I'm the wiser for reading it. For me, this book was well worth it, a provocative and charming read over a couple of evenings.

If you didn't like it, you didn't get it.
Several people I know have shared with me that they saw Gilbert as self-centered when they read this book. To them and others who feel this way, I must make the following points. First of all, you are reading a book specifically about a woman finding herself - do you expect it to not be about her? Second, the circumstances leading up to her year-long trip around the world were very telling of why her focus in this particular book is so narrow: she was trying to discover who she was as she was trying to pull herself out of a debilitating depression. Now, for those of you who haven't experienced this kind of self-doubt and helplessness, I am very glad for you. It is awful and not to be wished on anyone. The fact that she even had the desire to climb out of the dark hole that is depression and try to be proactive about her life again is entirely commendable and thrilling for me to see. So, when she goes on this trip, she is hoping to learn something about herself in each of these countries. She isn't claiming to have solved the world's problems or to have completely understood each culture, but she is taking the really good things from each place and incorporating them into her life, and in doing so is learning who she is and what she wants for herself. That is something that we all are and should be constantly engaged in. She has no illusions that everything about each country is all roses, that there is no poverty, corruption, prejudice, but that is not the topic of this book. It's really not a topic that you can begin to swallow when you are just getting your legs back under you. I found this book entertaining, inspiring, and a credible and accurate portrait of what it feels like to lose yourself and have to find it again. We may not all be able to travel around the world to do it, but I think that's why we are able to read such beautiful writing. She takes us to the places we cannot go. And I love her for it.