Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

The summary

Three in the morning, a cold November, the upstairs bathroom of a big house in the New York suburbs. Elizabeth Gilbert is thirty-one, six years married, and sobbing on the tiles for the forty-seventh night running, because one sentence keeps forcing itself up: I don’t want to be married anymore. She has never prayed before. She starts anyway — “Hello, God. How are you? I’m Liz. It’s nice to meet you” — and what comes back, in her own voice but calmer than she’s ever heard it, is: Go back to bed, Liz.

She left seven months later, and the aftermath was worse than the marriage: a divorce her husband fought for nearly two years, a rebound she describes not as falling in love but as diving “out of my marriage and into David’s arms,” thirty pounds lost, a night talking herself out of a kitchen knife, then a rotation of Xanax, Zoloft, Wellbutrin and Busperin. What follows is a year split four months apiece between Italy, India and Indonesia, in 108 chapters strung like a japa mala. Not self-improvement. Triage.

Pleasure had to be studied like grammar

Rome had one assignment: find out what she enjoys. In four months she visits exactly one museum — the National Museum of Pasta. Her Puritan reflex keeps sounding; she catches herself wondering whether she ought to research the history of pleasure and write it up, double-spaced. The relief comes when she sees the only question is “How do I define pleasure?” The Italians hand her the vocabulary: bel far niente, the beauty of doing nothing, and l’arte d’arrangiarsi, making something out of nothing — a feast from a few ingredients, a festival from a few friends.

Depression and Loneliness still find her, showing up in the Villa Borghese at dusk “like Pinkerton Detectives,” and she answers them in a private notebook, writing herself the reassurance nobody else is there to say. She leaves twenty-three pounds heavier: “I have put on weight. I exist more now than I did four months ago.”

Devotion is diligence without assurance

India was meant to be six weeks at her Guru’s ashram, then a grand tour of temples and mountains. She stayed nearly four months, barely leaving the compound. Days begin at 3 a.m. She scrubs temple floors. Asked to sit still, her mind spends the hour redesigning an imaginary island. Her worst hour is the Gurugita, a 182-verse Sanskrit hymn she dreads physically — until the morning a roommate accidentally padlocks her in and she goes over the second-storey railing, drops to the concrete, and chants it bleeding, dedicating every verse to her eight-year-old nephew, who has trouble sleeping.

Her real teacher is Richard from Texas, a reformed junkie who nicknames her Groceries for how much she eats. He says the thing about David that she can’t: a soul mate isn’t a perfect fit but “a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back,” whose job is to crack you open and then leave.

The forgiveness she wants from her ex-husband never comes, so she manufactures it on a rooftop at sunset, holding a typed page headed INSTRUCTIONS FOR FREEDOM: she invites him up, watches the two souls settle it above her head, then does a handstand — because a body can do that and a disembodied soul can’t.

Balance is not the same as paradise

Bali is where the halves are meant to meet, and largely they do. Ketut Liyer, the ninth-generation medicine man who once drew her a headless, four-legged figure with a face over its heart — feet planted, world seen through the heart, not the head — teaches a meditation that is nothing but sitting still and smiling, “even in your liver.” He has been to heaven and to hell and reports they are the same place: “Same in end, so better to be happy on journey.”

Then Gilbert dismantles her own postcard. A few afternoons in the local library turn up a slave trade, centuries of internal war, and roughly 100,000 corpses in Bali’s rivers after the killings of 1965. She bribes an official to extend her visa. And she meets Wayan, a healer whose husband beat her with a motorcycle helmet until she miscarried, who sold her forks and shoes to pay the lawyer who won back her daughter, and who is weeks from eviction with three children. Instead of a thirty-fifth birthday party, she emails everyone she knows and raises nearly $18,000 in a week.

What makes it honest is what happens next. Wayan stalls for months — bad taksu, no auspicious dream, a corner lot only a fool would live on — then floats a story about a mystic, seven parcels of land and a future hotel. Felipe, the Brazilian who has become her lover, says plainly she is being worked, and not out of malice: “four months ago the poor woman didn’t have enough money to buy lunch for her child and now she wants a hotel?” Gilbert lies to her friend, threatens to claw the money back, and the deed is notarized within four hours.

The bottom line

“I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue” is the line the whole year is built to earn: contentment isn’t weather that arrives, it’s something you fight for and then maintain daily or it leaks away. The privilege objection is fair, and Gilbert raises it first: a book advance paid for the trip, and in Sicily she calls her troubles “of a personal and largely self-created nature, not epically oppressive,” worked out with resources “financial, artistic and emotional” that most people don’t have. Richard puts it flatter: “I got a pretty cushy incarnation in this lifetime, kiddo. So did you—never forget that.”

Read it if you’re in the wreckage of a marriage or a depression and want company rather than a method — there isn’t a method here, only one woman’s particular way out.