Review: Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

By Katie McWane

Is it 2009 yet? Better yet, has Elizabeth Gilbert finished her upcoming book early? As soon as you set this book down, you’ll be craving not only a slice of Naples, Italy pizza and foreign romance, but her next book, too.

Eat, Pray, Love brings to life the author’s most personal experiences in the most charming ways. Essentially, this book is a tale of one woman’s travels on her way to self-discovery. However, as Elizabeth Gilbert lays it all out there these simple travels take on a life of their own through dry hilarity, unabashed personality and complete explanation.

Not many have the ability to pick up and travel for an entire year split three ways— eating in Italy, praying in India and loving in Indonesia — when hard times bear down. Gilbert gives you the opportunity to experience this when she leaves suffering behind after a nasty divorce to find out who she really is and get her life back on track. Somewhere in this book there will be a situation, a moment, if not many, that will speak to you personally. Nearly every aspect of life is covered in 331 short pages.

This intimate adventure is like reading a diary. Like when she shares the moments of her sitting alone at the highest point of the Ashram in Indonesia, Gilbert holds nothing back. She reveals her most profound thoughts and experiences, even those ludicrous situations any normal person would keep to themselves (making out with a tree, for example). The book wouldn’t be any good if she didn’t.

Each thought is explained fully and deeply. Gilbert describes her experiences and ideas in the same totality in which she devoted herself to this quest for self. Nothing is left out.

Metaphors are used to convey images that you couldn’t imagine any other way. A reference to a lion surveying “his newly quiet kingdom with satisfaction” explains her calmness in mediation after she wins a battle over her own mind. When she finally grasps her love for self and reaches a state of mediation, her inner lion “licked his great chops once, closed his yellow eyes and went back to sleep.”

Much of the beauty in Gilbert’s writing is found in the fact that one sentence is sarcastic, hateful and hilarious and in the next she has shifted to a mindset of deep and important. As she broods over an ex-boyfriend she asks herself, “What am I, in eighth grade?” Immediately after she is explaining the psychology of the matter in scientific yet understandable and humorous language.

Her words are brought to life throughout by the personalities that rise from the pages. The medicine man in Indonesia who jump-started the whole idea of this journey feels like an old friend by the end. The way she relays his way of speaking English in short, misguided phrases makes you feel as if you’re sitting on the porch with them. And the three questions the Balinese ask (“Where are you going?” “Where are you coming from?” And “Are you married?”) brings a new and surprisingly complete understanding to this interesting culture.

Speaking of culture, the entire book is infused with little pieces of American lifestyle. With phrases like “will you kindly dig this” and R.E.M. “Losing My Religion” lyrics sprinkled in the story remains grounded in the author’s native country. This reminds you at just the right moments that this is the story of a transplant American. It keeps you from losing the whole point of the book in the three foreign lands.

If Gilbert’s 2009 release is half as witty and endearing as Eat, Pray, Love, she’ll have another bestseller on her hands and we’ll be in for another treat. It will have been worth the wait.