A few months back I had a sudden urge to read Eat, Pray,
Love. I found a used copy on BetterWorldBooks.com and after I finished Goodbye To All That (the catalyst for
this otherwise inexplicable urge; Elizabeth Gilbert had an essay in Never Can Say Goodbye, the companion
compilation), I dug in slowly.
We meet Gilbert going through a harrowing divorce and the
painful deterioration of her post-divorce love affair. I was wary, not prepared
to read 300+ pages of a woman complaining, but instead I was pleasantly
surprised with how much I enjoyed her story. The first section is disproportionately weighed down with grief in comparison with the rest of the memoir, but once
Gilbert arrived in Italy, I found myself occasionally laughing out loud, and,
shock of shocks, relating to her.
My relation was not to her grief or her misery, no, it
was with the absolute bliss she was looking for and managed to find in Italy.
Having traveled there last year, I remembered my own bliss, and could visualize
some of the places she visited and the winding, cobblestoned streets she
wandered. And the food, oh the food. Salivating while reading was another new
sensation for me. My favorite part from this section (in the entire story,
actually) was from Gilbert and her Swedish friend’s trip to Naples:
“So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria
da Michele, and these pies we have just ordered – one for each of us – are making
us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to
believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am
having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie is
practically in tears over hers, she’s having a metaphysical crisis about it,
she’s begging me, “Why do they even bother
trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm?”
When she arrived in India, I was again hesitant because I
typically avoid talk of religion, and here was Gilbert about to live in a
remote ashram for four months, praying, meditating, and chanting daily in an
effort to become closer to God. That said, I was again surprised how much I was
enjoying her journey. This particular section, while heavy in spirituality, is
also heavy in character development. There was notable growth in both maturity and
consciousness. Gilbert effectively broke herself down, all the way to her core,
waded through her grief, and was finally in possession of the tools to build
herself back up.
“Whenever something happens, I
always react. But here I was – disregarding the reflex. I was doing something I’d
never done before. A small thing, granted, but how often do I get to say that?
And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?”
When Gilbert arrives in Bali, she, for the first time during
her journey, has no set plans but to find the medicine man – Ketut Liyer – whom
she met two years prior during an assignment, and to learn everything she can
from him. She has nowhere to live, she’s not allowed to stay in Bali for more
than a month, she does not remember where to find her medicine man other than
he lives somewhere in Ubud, but somehow everything serendipitously falls into
place. I won’t give away the ending, but so much happens during her four months
in Bali, including even more personal growth.
I have not seen the movie adaptation starring Julia
Roberts, but I now understand why so many women clamored to see the film and what
inspired many to embark on their own journeys of enlightenment.
- Chelsea
More But I'd Rather Be Reading! here.
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