Eat, Pray, Love By Elizabeth Gilbert

It's 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She's in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they're trying for a baby - and she doesn't want any of it. A divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises its time to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing; pleasure, devotion and balance. So she travels to Rome, where she learns Italian from handsome, brown-eyed identical twins and gains twenty-five pounds, an ashram in India, where she finds that enlightenment entails getting up in the middle of the night to scrub the temple floor, and Bali where a toothless medicine man of indeterminate age offers her a new path to peace; simply sit still and smile. And slowly happiness begins to creep up on her.
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Who hasn't dreamed about being able to drop everything for a year and travel to three different countries and immerse yourself in their culture. Well, that's exactly what Elizabeth Gilbert did! First off she travelled to Italy where she ate like crazy, then to India where she learned the fine art of prayer, and finally Indonesia, where she learned to love again.
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I loved the descriptions of the three places she went to and how she tried to become a part of the different cultures. Italy, for Elizabeth Gilbert, was all about pleasure, whereas India was all about simplicity and contemplation, and Indonesia was about finding a balnce between the two. I loved the one part in Italy where she shows how simple things can make you happy and fulfilled, where she is sitting down eating a meal slowly that she has cooked. She explains how sometimes we should be more deliberate about our actions instead of running around like headless chickens always on the go. That sometimes we should be able to sit and relax and experience our surroundings instead of just rushing past them like we are in a continuous race. The part in India felt a bit slow at times compared with the pace in Italy but I suppose that signifies the change in pace of her life where she had to sit for hours in prayer.

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She has a quite a witty humour but sometimes it felt as if she was trying too hard to be liked due to how self-indulgent her journey is. I suppose if you expect to read a memoir that isn't all 'me me me' you are probably a bit naive, yet, she doesn't seem to have any thought about the people around her in these countries that are living in poverty. When she did help somebody in Indonesia it seemd like more of an impulse that an actual need to improve somebody's life. She doesn't question the rightness of the fact that she is able to take this journey whilst others will never be able to do this because of their situation.

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Some of the people she met in these different places are really interesting characters yet sometimes they felt too convienient, like they all arrived at exactly the right time to allow the story to flow and for Elizabeth Gilbert to recieve some sort of enlightenment from their words so she can move on. So I'm not sure how much of the story I actually believed in and whether she just added more stuff to make it more exciting and interesting. However, whether they were real or not I really enjoyed reading and learning about them all, especially her healer friend from Bali.

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One of the reason's I thought I would be fascinated by Gilbert's journey is how she was able to give up the security of her life to do what she felt was right in her heart. I would have admired her more though if she wasn't pre-paid to write a memoir about it all. It seems a bit like she's cheating in a way since she still has the safety net back home and it begs the question 'How can she truly discover herself if she is still trapped within a comfort zone?'

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Overall, I did enjoy reading about her experiences and life but I'm still not completely sure what she got out of it and whether she actually learnt more about the real world or even cared whether she did or not, but I suppose the only thing she was searching for was happiness and what truly mattered to her and she did seem to find it in the end.

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Random Passage: When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for you own unfulfilled yearnings.