Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert (Viking)
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To be fair, as the book opens, three years before her sabbatical, things aren’t going well. Married and miserable, she realizes she doesn’t want her husband, doesn’t want her comfortable suburban New York home, doesn’t want her high-flying career, and adamantly doesn’t want a baby. After months of emotional turmoil and many nights spent crying in the bathroom, she completely breaks down, sobbing on the floor one night, desperate and afraid, and she begins to pray. More precisely, she strikes up a chat with God: “Hello God. How are you? I’m Liz. It’s nice to meet you.”
It’s a less-than-inspirational moment, pleading for help alone in the middle of a “lake of tears and snot,” but it sets in motion a chain of life-changing events. She leaves her husband, falls in love again, gets way into yoga, struggles through an ugly divorce, has her heart broken by her new love, and loses 30 pounds from the stress. September 11 happens in there as well, and with both her emotional and physical landscapes thoroughly gutted, Gilbert sinks into a depression marked by several believably scary dark nights of the soul.
But Eat, Pray, Love threatens to fail completely when Gilbert tries to articulate her spiritual awakening. Because, face it, talking to God is corny. Most people who grapple with fundamentals of faith and identity don’t sound like Thomas Merton or the Dalai Lama or even Joseph Campbell, and Gilbert is no exception. Her wry descriptions of her ongoing battle with meditation are terrific. At one point she acknowledges, “What I’m alarmed to find in meditation is that my mind is actually not that interesting a place, after all.” Later, as she tries yet again, her mind wanders off: “If I lived somewhere cheaper than New York, maybe I could afford an extra bedroom and then I could have a special meditation room! That’d be nice. I could paint it gold. Or maybe a rich blue. No, gold. No, blue . . . ” But when she finally breaks through, finds her bliss, and for a few moments sits “upon God’s palm,” the reader doesn’t get the same payoff Gilbert does. At best, in moments of ecstasy, she sounds like she’s got hold of some good acid. Elsewhere, in her most anguished moments, crying for help on the bathroom floor, she’s more like an earnest eight-year-old saying her prayers at the side of the bed. In fact, when God answers her initial shout-out, it’s with a classic piece of parental advice: “Go back to bed, Liz.”
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