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

Giovanni lives in Italy with his mother. He posts fliers in an Internet café seeking a native speaker of English for language practice. Liz, mid-30s, with a failed marriage, a difficult divorce, and an unhealthy post-marriage affair, responds to the flier. She has taken a vow of celibacy for the year. So, no matter how much she wants Giovanni to kiss her, they only eat and talk. After a few weeks of conversation, he walks her home and gives her a hug instead of just shaking her hand. But he does not kiss her. She climbs the stairs to her fourth-floor apartment, alone, with nothing in bed with her but piles of books. She falls to her knees to pray.

Gilbert takes the reader back three years to the cold November night when she realized she didn’t want to be married anymore. Married for eight years, she and her husband anticipated that after she turned 30, she would “want to settle down and have children” (10). Thirty looms over her like a “death sentence.” She meets a friend ecstatic about being pregnant after two years of fertility treatments, and Liz realizes she hasn’t expressed as much joy since her magazine sent her to New Zealand to write an article about giant squid. She does not want a baby, a marriage, a house in the suburbs, and an apartment in Manhattan. She says that her husband is her lighthouse and her albatross. While it is unthinkable to leave, it is unthinkable to stay. She says that she doesn’t want to destroy anyone, only to slip away. She fell to the bathroom floor and began praying, she says, “You know—like to God” (13).

Gilbert says that she feels awkward using the term “God,” aware it may offend some people. God feels warm to her, and she refers to God as “Him.” She is a cultural Christian rather than a theological Christian, not swallowing, she says, the “fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path to God” (14). She responds to the “transcendent mystics” of all religions and is grateful to anyone who has entered the heart of God and returned to the world. She says that her belief about God is simple. She believes in a magnificent God.

That night on the bathroom floor, in a state of despair, she speaks directly to God and asks Him to tell her what to do. Quite abruptly, her sobbing stops. She hears a voice, not the Old Testament Hollywood Charlton Heston voice, but her own voice. She hears her voice telling her, “Go back to bed, Liz” (17). She says that rather than a typical Christian conversion experience, it is the beginning of a religious conversation.

Liz discovers a genial divorce from her husband is impossible. He makes it difficult for her to leave. She resists consulting lawyers. She says that, with her newfound spirituality, she “wanted to be all Gandhi about this” (19). That doesn’t work. They fight about assets, live separately, and stop paying bills. He blames her. Then she meets David, a writer and actor performing in a play based on short stories she wrote. She moves in with him. They are inseparable and fascinated with each other. She and her husband have a meeting on September 9, 2001. They fight. Then 9/11 happens. The relationship with David falls apart. She loses 30 pounds and says she feels lonely and suicidal.

Liz moves out of David’s apartment into a one-bedroom apartment, still paying for the house in the suburbs that her husband won’t let her sell. She says that her life is a “multi-vehicle accident on the New Jersey Turnpike during holiday traffic” (24). She asks herself what she wants. The answer: She wants to learn Italian. She signs up for a night class. She adopts Italian phrases and says “Ciao!” She thinks maybe she will move to Italy.

Liz finds a guru. David had a picture of a beautiful Indian woman on his dresser, his spiritual teacher. Her heart tells her, “I want a spiritual teacher” (26). David’s guru has an international following of tens of thousands. A group of local devotees meets Tuesday nights to meditate and chant God’s name in Sanskrit. She starts going to the chants and begins to meditate with the Sanskrit mantra Om Namah Shivaya, “I honor the divinity that resides in me” (27). She hears the guru speak in person, gets chills, and knows she must visit her ashram in India.

In the middle of these events, Liz gets an assignment for a women’s magazine to travel to Indonesia to write a story about yoga vacations in Bali. The teacher running the yoga retreat introduces her to a ninth-generation Balinese medicine man. She may bring one question. She says that she wants to learn how to enjoy the delights of the world while devoting herself to God. He draws her a picture of an androgynous figure with four legs and no head standing up praying, the head replaced by flowers and a smiling face over the heart. He explains the feet are grounded to stay in the world. She must stop looking at the world through her head instead of her heart.

She decides she must find a way to move to Bali and live with the medicine man for four months. But she also wants to go to the ashram in India and experience the pleasure and beauty of Italy. Rather than choose, she wants all three: the pleasure of Italy, the devotion of India, and the discovery of balance in Indonesia, all countries beginning with the letter I.

Her friends mock her choice. She can’t leave until she settles her divorce. Her husband continues to hold out for assets and a share of her future earnings. She wants a settlement. She breaks up with David. Her recent book comes out in paperback, and she goes on a publicity tour. Driving across Kansas with her friend Ivy, she says she wishes she could petition God for the divorce to end. Ivy encourages her to write it. Ivy drives and Liz writes. When Ivy reads her petition, she says she would sign it and asks who else would sign it. Liz lists family and friends, then celebrities, spiritual leaders, and even Michael J. Fox. Liz takes a nap. Her cell phone rings. Her lawyer announces, “He just signed it” (37).