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

She has her first meal in Rome—spaghetti, spinach, artichokes, zucchini blossoms, veal, and tiramisu, accompanied by warm bread and a bottle of wine. She walks home at eleven o’clock at night, lies down in bed, turns off the light, and waits for the crying or worry to set in. Instead, she falls asleep.

On Liz’s fourth day in Rome, in early September 2003, she tours the city—a clerk calls her bella, couples make out in public, and she visits her favorite fountain at the Villa Borghese: The father is a faun and the mother is a human; a baby with cloven hoofs sits between them, eating grapes. She finds “The Best Gelato” in Rome, and stops by three times that day, consuming four different flavors.

She forces herself to read one newspaper article in Italian every day, even if she looks up every third word in the dictionary. One article declares that Italian babies are the heaviest in Europe. While eating a pizza, she reads that the Italian government may implement a tax on the overweight, and she wonders if they will come for her for eating like this. The Italian language surrounds her— newspapers, books, taxi drivers, and commercials on TV. She buys volumes of poetry by Robert Lowell and Louise Gluck, the original English version on one side of the page and the Italian translation on the other.

In a chance encounter on a park bench, an old lady listens to her rhapsody about Rome but gets up and leaves when Liz tells her she divorced her husband. Liz finds a library with a courtyard garden and a fountain. It reminds her of the wild foliage growing out of the head of the figure the medicine man in Indonesia drew for her. She sits down under an orange tree, opens the Louise Gluck poetry book, and reads: “Dal centro della mia vita venne una grande fontana […] From the center of my life there came a great fountain.” (43). Shaking, she sets the book down.

Liz lists the qualities that make her not a great traveler. She is tall, blond, and fair, so she doesn’t blend in. She doesn’t research places before she travels. She gets confused in train stations and pays too much for hotels. She lacks an “in charge” facial expression. She says her face is “a transparent transmitter of my every thought” (45). She is subject to digestive emergencies; her body succumbs to back problems, spider bites, and sunburn.

Yet, she loves to travel. She says that she is patient, packs light, eats fearlessly, and best of all, makes friends with anybody anywhere. She knows she will make friends in Rome. While this can happen by accident, she does not want to rely on chance. Hence, before she left New York, she asked everyone she knew if they had friends in Rome. She arrived with a list of Italian contacts, among them Luca Spaghetti. She plans to get in touch with him as soon as possible.

Before contacting Luca Spaghetti, Liz begins classes at the Leonardo da Vinci Academy of Language Studies, five days a week, four hours a day. Students are divided into levels, and she wishes to be placed at Level Two. She arrives early and takes the written test. It doesn’t include any words she knows. In the oral exam, the teacher speaks too fast. The teacher places her in Level Two anyway. She eats lunch and returns to the school to begin class with her peers, walking smugly past the Level One students. The Level Two teacher, however, speaks too fast. Liz runs out of the room at the break, goes to the administrative office, and begs to be moved down to Level One.

Liz says one thing unites the 12 people in her class: nobody needs to be there. They all want to speak Italian because of the way it makes them feel: the Russian woman who thinks she deserves something beautiful, the German engineer who seeks the dolce vita—the sweet life.

How, she asks, did Italian get to be “the most seductively beautiful language in the world?” (49). Other European countries took on the language of their prominent cities—Parisian for France, Lisboan for Portugal, and Madrileno for Spain. Italy didn’t become a country until 1861. It was divided into warring city-states dominated by local princes or European powers who determined the dialect. In the 16th century, intellectuals decided the peninsula needed a language to unite it and chose the Florentine of Dante in which the Divine Comedy is written. The poetic language lives in the Italian spoken by cab drivers, butchers, and government officials.

Ten days into her visit to Rome, Liz begins to experience depression and loneliness, which describes as characters in her story. She says that Loneliness talks to her, asking why she can’t hold a relationship together. Why does she mess everything up—her marriage and her affair with David? She says that Loneliness accuses her of running away to Italy like a college kid when she’s made a disaster of her life. She says that Depression follows, stalking her. She says he sits down, puts his feet up on the table in her apartment, and lights a cigar. Loneliness watches him and then climbs into her bed, fully dressed, forcing her to sleep with him again that night.

She stops taking antidepressants, thinking she doesn’t need them in Italy. She laments that Americans treat the symptoms of mental health, not the causes; and she recalls her attempts to discern the cause of her suffering: psychological, genetic, cultural, astrological, artistic, evolutionary, karmic, hormonal, environmental, or biological. She recalls her efforts to fight depression with self-help books, a therapist, prayer, massage, Saint-John’s-wort, teachers, exercise, and avoidance of sad books and movies. Nothing worked.

She says that she used to contemplate various forms of suicide, including stabbing her arm with a knife. Finally, a friend assisted her in getting psychiatric help. The psychiatrist asked why she waited so long to ask for help. She explained that she is a writer and doesn’t want anti-depressants to harm her brain. She said that she comes from the Gilbert family who regards any sickness as “a sign of personal, ethical, moral failure” (56).

They tried various combinations of drugs until they found the right combination. It helped immediately, but she never felt comfortable taking them. The doctor told her she may be on and off anti-depressants her entire life. She knows they saved her life but continues to be ambivalent about them.

The narrative returns to Italy. Loneliness and Depression have returned, and she is in trouble. She has drugs but doesn’t want to take them. She reaches for her notebook and tells it she needs help. A voice begins a conversation with her. She wonders whether she’s schizophrenic or speaking to God or the higher self in what Mother Teresa called “locutions.” She tells the notebook she is weak and fearful, but that she doesn’t want to take drugs anymore. It responds that it loves her, will always love her, and will always protect her because it is stronger than Depression, that nothing will exhaust it.

She remembers an incident in New York when she entered an elevator, saw herself in a security mirror, and felt that the person in the reflection was a friend. She writes the reminder in her notebook: “Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend” (60). She falls asleep. She says that when she wakes up, she can still smell a trace of Depression’s cigar smoke, but he left. Loneliness left, too.