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: #17 in eBooks
• Published on: 2007-04-11
• Released on: 2007-04-11
• Format: Kindle Book
• Number of items: 1

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.

Customer Reviews

READ THIS BOOK!
I love this book. After a friend loaned it to me, I purchased one for myself, both of my sisters, and another friend.I have reread it twice,
It is funny, insightful and inspiring.

A Narcissist Travels the World and Sees Only Herself
If this book were fiction and entitled "A Narcissist Travels the World but Sees Only Herself" it might be interesting as irony. As is, however, the combination of self-absorption and spiritual pretensions is intolerable.

Just about any religion has at least two components, an ethical component emphasizing how one should treat others and a spiritual component concerning one's relation to the deity. Take the ethical component alone and you get secular humanism which some of us are actually quite fond of. Take the yearning for spiritual solace alone and you get New Age.

When her sister tells her about a family struck with a double tragedy of cancer her Gilbertism is "Dear God, that family needs grace." Her sister replies, "That family needs casseroles," and organizes the neighborhood to bring dinner to the family. Gilbert - I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this is grace. But one has to wonder about Gilbert's idea of a spiritual grace that doesn't seem to involve empathetic awareness of others -- I don't think we are about to see Gilbert making any casseroles.

Having recently read Mark Salzman's "Iron and Silk" Iron and Silkabout his year teaching in China and his long-time love of Chinese martial arts I couldn't help but contrast his self-deprecating tone and his awareness of another culture and of other people. Salzman sees other's generosity where Gilbert only sees her own magnetic personality. Salzman portrays both how attractive and how alien another culture can be. He sees other people where Gilbert sees only herself. Salzman remains aware and responsive to how taxing to themselves and their family the generousity of people living in poverty can be - Gilbert remains oblivious.

In one vignette, Salzman describes how he draws a picture of a fishing boat and gives the picture to the owners of the boat. The fisherman then wants to give the boat to Salzman. Salzman recognizes that he must accept something and says that in his country the proper gift for something artistic is something else artistic and asks for and gets each member of the family to sing him a folk song. It is not just that Gilbert lacks empathetic skill, but seems to be uninterested in feelings other than her own.

Give her a break...
My wife got this book (from the library) on a recommendation from someone who she can't remember. Just as well; after 150 pages, she threw it into the "return" pile saying the author was a spoiled, self-centered brat.

Out of curiousity, I picked it up and managed to get through it. I say cut the writer some slack.

The book does suffer from two things. The first is the author's refusal to discuss anything about her apparently very emotionally draining divorce which seemed to be the underpining for the whole thing. Some understanding of how she got to where she felt she needed to take this journey would have given the entire book more substance. Second, the book would have benefitted from some much sharper editing. There is some substance here but you have to read, sometimes for over 100 pages at a time, to find it. About 150 pages or so would have accomplished just as much for the reading public.

However, don't knock her personally. No one was / is financially dependent on her and she did self-fund the whole thing from her book advance which her publisher felt she had earned based on her previous writing successes. So, if she wants to go off for awhile (but a whole year....jeeezzz)to "find herself," cut her some slack and treat this as a form of self-therapy for the writer with some travel stuff thrown in to try to keep it interesting.