Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia engendered a lot of debate over on Amazon. I saw the book recommended somewhere, thought it sounded cool, read the negative reviews, decided I agreed with them (book unread), and didn’t buy it. Later a friend said she’d just finished reading it and offered to loan it to me. Well, free is different from buying, so why not.
The book is about a year spent living in three foreign countries–Italy, India, and Indonesia (Bali, specifically). The author’s intention in making this journey is to heal her broken heart and broken spirit and generally rediscover herself and her place in the cosmos. The criticisms on Amazon were threefold: that her distress over her current situation was disproportionately large, that her spiritual awakening was shallow and unbelievable, and that the whole seemingly spontaneous journey was pre-planned.
The author starts the book having come through an ugly divorce followed by a rocky rebound relationship. Is that the worst that’s ever happened to anyone? No. Does it suck? Yes. How many of us haven’t been there, felt that, and felt pretty miserable at the time? Besides which, it doesn’t really matter whether our misery is caused by something as equally horrific as the next person’s misery. It only matters that it’s our misery. I thought she did a great job of making her misery clear to the reader. I understood why she wanted to get away and start fresh.
Because the tone of the book is earnestly light-hearted and because the author makes some stunning breakthroughs, especially during the middle part of the book, it’s tempting to call her shallow and her spiritual awakening trivial. But her experiences really resonated with me. I also am not the deepest, most spiritual person on earth. But I also have found how quickly the soul can blossom given even minor attention. And she gave her soul a heck of a lot of attention during her four months spent on an ashram. You’d have to be pretty shallow to spend hours a day meditating for four months and not walk away changed. I’m happy for her that she experienced moments of connecting with God. I don’t discount them.
The fact that she wrote the book proposal and got an advance before she even started her journey does make the whole thing seem preposterously pre-planned. How do you propose to have a spiritual awakening? Is it not then automatically phony? The idea certainly raised my ire. But once I started reading, I relaxed. She’s upfront about the fact that the journey was planned. Obviously you don’t leave your country for a year without planning (and funding) the trip. She didn’t plan to connect to God; she planned to spend four months in an ashram in India. She didn’t plan to fall in love; she planned to spend four months learning to lead a balanced life in Bali. She did plan to learn Italian but that doesn’t seem to bother anyone.
In short (yeah, this is long), I liked the book. I liked it a lot. I liked that spirituality doesn’t come easily to her and that she admits it. It was easier for me to relate to someone who struggles in some of the ways I do. I say give the book a chance. I’m glad I did.