Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Of course I have to blog about this wonderful book as I start this new blog! I just recently read it for the second time. The monthly book group that is hosted by the library where I work was reading it and I was so excited to be in on this discussion. So I read it and loved it even more the second time... marked up the pages of the book... underlined favorite passages... you get the idea. I showed up to book group clutching my beloved book and quickly discovered that I was the only one (in a group of about 12 people) that liked the book! ACK!

So here's my warning to you, oh rare reader who has not yet read Eat, Pray, Love (if you in fact fit into that category): people seem to either love it or hate it. I don't have an explanation, it just appears to be a fact. Go figure...

I was hesitant about reading this book when it first became a huge hit and everyone and their brother and their brother's dog were buying it and placing library holds on it. I read the title and the jacket description and thought "eh, whatever..." But then my mom told me that I HAD to read this book. She and I usually agree about books, so I put my name on the list. Then it came available for me and I checked it out and I brought it home... and still I was un-enthused. I think I chose to read a Harlan Coben mystery first. But then finally I picked it up... and I didn't want to put it down!

Here's the basic deal: Elizabeth Gilbert is a writer who has written fiction and non-fiction and has received some nice praise for her work, but before this book it wasn't anything spectacular. She was married to a man that she had married in her early 20's, serving as the primary breadwinner in the house, trying to convince herself that she wanted to have kids... and she suddenly realized (in her early 30's) that she was dreadfully unhappy. She has found herself in a marriage that doesn't seem to work with the person that she is growing to be... and she painfully admits that she doesn't want to be married anymore, let alone have children. So she finds herself crying on the floor of her bathroom and somehow, although never having much religion or spirituality in her life, starts to pray for the first time ever. For me, this is an amazing "hitting the absolute bottom of depression and reaching for help" moment... and I've been there. And maybe that's why I love this... because I feel like I've been there.

Ok, so after going through this painful divorce, she realizes that she needs to do something to put her life back together. She comes up with this idea to travel the world over the course of a year: to Italy, India and Indonesia. In Italy, she will explore pleasure; specifically, she will eat tons of wonderful food and learn to speak Italian simply because she loves how the language sounds. In India, she will explore spirituality as she has an extended stay in an ashram. And in Indonesia, she will explore how to have balance between pleasure and spirituality. By a stroke of luck, her publisher offers an advance on the book that she will write about this experience and that is how she pays for the trip. The book is organized into 108 fairly short chapters, 36 for each of the three sections of the book. Each of these chapters is almost like a blog post, chronicling a period of time or a particular occurrence during her trip.

Gilbert's style of writing is flowing, informed and sometimes laugh out loud funny. She has a very dry humor which matches my own quite well. She lays herself wide open in this memoir, in a way that I imagine might be uncomfortable for some. And she makes herself a target for people to say "oh poor thing, you got to travel around the world. Stop whining and buck up." And that is exactly what all of those women in my book group said. None of it came across as whining to me, though. It came across as a woman being brutally honest about having found herself in a situation that wasn't making her happy, realizing that she needed to figure out who she really is and then taking a journey to make that discovery. Yeah, she got to travel the world... but metaphorically, don't we all take journeys in our lives to discover important (and sometimes painful) lessons in life?

Gilbert's growth through the novel (and she is writing as she travels) is apparent to me. She does start out as a person who wants to take from the world (but she knows that she isn't a happy person), but she ends up as a person who really wants to give back. It is a wonderful journey... and I hope you turn out to be one of those people who thinks so too!