Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia is a memoir written by Elizabeth Gilbert, published in 2007 by Penguin Books. As a #1 New York Times Bestseller, it has been read by millions of people. Elizabeth Gilbert has worked as a journalist for GQ, New York Times Magazine, and Spin; she has published many different books and collections of stories; she has won many awards for writing. The movie Coyote Ugly was based on one of the articles she wrote for GQ about her experiences bartending on the Lower East side of Manhattan, and Eat Pray Love is the basis for the 'major motion picture' with the same name starring Julia Roberts. Eat Pray Love chronicles Gilbert's year of traveling and self-discovery following a harsh divorce. It is broken up into an introduction (called Introduction or How This Book Works or The 109th Bead), the main text, and a Final Recognition and Reassurance section. As the introduction explains, the main text of the memoir is divided into three books: Book One: Italy or “Say It Like You Eat It” or 36 Tales About the Pursuit of Pleasure; Book Two: India or “Congratulations to Meet You” or 36 Tales About the Pursuit of Devotion; and Book Three: Indonesia or “Even in My Underpants, I Feel Different” or 36 Tales About the Pursuit of Balance. The introduction also explains why there are three parts in the book (each with three names), and why there are 108 (109 including the introduction) tales in the memoir: “...the number 108 is held to be most auspicious, a perfect three-digit multiple of three, its components adding up to nine, which is three threes. And three, of course, is the number representing supreme balance, as anyone who has ever studied either the Holy Trinity or a simple barstool can plainly see. (1)”
Japa malas, she explains, are the traditional strings of beads worn by ancient yogis which have—you guessed it, 108 beads in the necklace, with one extra hanging off as a pendant (the 109th bead). Each bead represents one repetition of one's mantra, and according to Gilbert, when one's fingers reach this 'extra' bead, “...you are meant to pause from your absorption in meditation and thank your teachers. (2)” So, she starts here, with thanks, before she tells her story. She also includes a disclaimer in the introduction about which names have been changed and which ones have not, and why. Not mentioned in the text but ironic nonetheless is the fact that the entire book runs 334 pages long (333 plus one for thanks). Not unlike Gilbert’s prose, the organization of the text is meaningful. It is well-structured and symbolic of the themes of the story, while offering Gilbert's unique perspective of three distinctly different cultures' methods of survival in a linear, diary-esque, mixed tense format. Due to the book's extreme success, and the widespread exposure of its movie portrayal, there has been much controversy in the media about Eat Pray Love and by association, about Elizabeth Gilbert. Jan Moir of Daily Mail sums the criticism up well, claiming the book is an insult to women with real problems. According to Moir, “Elizabeth did not really take a year out to find herself following divorce and depression. She took a year out to write a book about finding herself, and there is an enormous emotional difference between those two experiences.” Moir's point is trifold: since Gilbert's publisher had assigned her to write the book and in fact Gilbert had already been paid for it before embarking on her journey, it should not be considered a brave, groundbreaking piece; Gilbert's life really wasn't that bad in the first place to warrant such a trek; and even though Gilbert's year of discovery is characterized by a vow of celibacy, the story is basically just a “long, smug, search for a boyfriend. (www.dailymail.co.uk)”
Though Gilbert may appear to be more 'lucky' or 'privileged' than the rest of us that suffer from problems similar to the ones she chronicles, her ‘luck’ in being paid to write this book (and in turn, embark on this spiritual quest) is only a result of the hard work she has done writing and the obvious talent she possesses. Her words are worthwhile, her insight profound, her fortune is fleeting (she loses everything she's worked her entire life for in divorce), and she is a good person who is genuinely trying to find peace in her heart. The story isn't meant to be a happily ever after, but rather a telling of her very personal discovery process along the road to her version of 'happy.'
Everyone's truth is different; and there is a quote from Sheryl Louise Moller before the introduction that serves as a testament to Gilbert's dedication to her personal version of truth: “Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.” The story's worth lies not in serving as a catchall 'how to' guide for happiness, but rather as a telling of an altogether common predicament ('I've worked hard to get everything I thought I wanted, and now I'm miserable.') dealt with in a very uncommon (and arguably unrealistic to most) fashion. Gilbert portrays her quest for pleasure, devotion, and balance between the two extremes through excellent creative nonfiction skills: constant mixing of information with ‘the mind at work’; a well-balanced mix of scene, summary, and reflection; storytelling (literally telling 108 stories); assayer; recursiveness; compelling and likable voice; and extremely vivid sensory details. And above all, as CNF’s ultimate goal is to convey emotional truth (which is by nature, extremely subjective) Gilbert's memoir is a consistently honest account of the emotional truth her unique set of circumstances has created in her.
On page 35, Gilbert clearly states that her publisher is funding her trip: “...I can actually afford to do this because of a staggering personal miracle: in advance, my publisher has purchased the book I shall write about my travels.” So, we see, she is not at all trying to hide this fact from her audience; this fact does not cheapen the story—it is a part of her story. Later, while in Italy, she emphasizes her 'luckiness', when considering all she has given up in this unconventional pursuit of contentment (the promise of children, a nuclear family): “I'm lucky that at least I have my writing...So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly. (95)”
In Italy, Gilbert's main agenda is to pleasure-seek. She does this largely through food and drink, and her descriptions of food are vivid and often surprising. Of Bologna (the city): “The mushrooms here are like big thick sexy tongues, and the prosciutto drapes over pizzas like a fine lace veil draping over a fancy lady's hat. (98)” While in Italy, she begins to tackle depression, a tender, abstract subject which she manages to illustrate almost as beautifully as the food:
When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered a few feet off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore. (48)
Gilbert mixes facts and information in throughout, saying of Syracuse: “Plato thought it would be the ideal location for a utopian experiment where perhaps 'by some divine fate' rulers might become philosophers, and philosophers might become rulers. Historians say that rhetoric was invented in Syracuse, and also (and this is just a minor thing) plot. (113)” It is clear she has educated herself on the places she travels to, and the facts don't come off in a mundane way, as her voice and sense of irony are so strong.
As her time in India comes to an end, Gilbert questions the boundaries of pleasure-seeking, displaying the ‘mind at work’ and assayer: “...is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? ...Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day? (113)” Gilbert is directly involving the reader by asking these open-ended questions, while at the same time adding depth to her humanity—like most people, she has many more questions than answers. She recursively comes to this same question over and over again throughout the last story in this section, and after detailing the war-fraught and corrupt Italian history, comes to this conclusion-resembling realization: “Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one's own senses, and this makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business...(114-115)” Trying to justify her relative existence through this constant evaluation of self in the context of learned facts about the world she finds herself in further emphasizes the fact that Gilbert is genuinely searching for truth.
Gilbert stays in her Guru's Ashram in India, setting out to explore truth from the opposite side of the spectrum than she did in pleasure-soaked Italy—the art of happiness via devotion from a Yogic standpoint: “The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. (122)” Gilbert's descriptions of the people she meets at the Ashram are especially memorable, of a teenage Indian boy: “He dressed the way the computer-interested boys in my junior high school used to dress for band concerts—dark trousers, and an ironed white button-down shirt that was far too big for him, his thin, stemlike neck sticking out of the opening like a single daisy popping out of a giant flowerpot. (127)”
Gilbert is also extremely skilled at portraying characters through dialogue, which she most notably does with Richard from Texas, the reformed junkie/alcoholic turned Yogi and best friend whom she meets in the Ashram. Of his initial skepticism toward the Guru, Richard says, “'I thought the Ashram was the weirdest thing I ever saw, and I was wondering where the room was where you have to give 'em all your money and turn over the deed to your house and car, but that never did happen...(139)”
Throughout all three books of the main text but most notably in India as she struggles with meditation, Gilbert transcribes conversations she has with herself, interweaving them into her stories as literal passages of her mind at work. For anyone who has tried to meditate with any sincerity or has just simply taken a moment to recognize the absolutely random path a thought can take, it is easy to relate to these often humorous interactions Gilbert has with herself. When introducing these segments, she is sure to use qualifying language (we obviously do not always remember exactly, word for word, what happens in the dialogue of our minds): “...the conversations between me and my mind during meditation generally go something like this: (134)”
With all this devotion and no worldly pleasure, Gilbert reveals her weakness in that she is continuing to dwell on the man she dated after separating from her husband: “It's all I can do not to jump out of this bed and call him from India in the middle of the night and just—I don't know what—just hang up on him, probably. Or beg him to love me again. Or read him such a ferocious indictment on all his character flaws. (147)” She is continuing to struggle; she certainly is not painting a picture of herself as a woman with all the answers, or of someone who is being rational (which of course, is very human). She is mad at herself for not being able to exorcise this from her thoughts, and thus it is ever the more consuming.
Gilbert grapples with the blurry boundary between free will and fate in the context of achieving a higher meditative state, and after much persistence, she does achieve a state of transcendental meditation. She demystifies it, saying it was not euphoric, but: “It was just obvious. Like when you've been looking at an optical illusion for a long time straining your eyes to decode the trick, and suddenly your cognizance shifts and there—now you can clearly see it!—the two vases are actually two faces.” Gilbert has a way, as seen here, of lassoing almost hopelessly abstract concepts and synthesizing them into words that allow her readers a basis of comparison.
The last leg of Gilbert's journey is spent in Bali, where she strives to take the things she's learned about pleasure and devotion and incorporate them into one solitary and balanced way of being. Bali itself is given distinct character traits through Gilbert's descriptions of its geography, history, and culture: “It has been estimated that a typical Balinese woman spends one-third of her waking hours either preparing for a ceremony, participating in a ceremony or cleaning up after a ceremony. (226)” It is obvious that the life of a Manhattan-based, accomplished journalist (and for that matter, many of Gilbert's readers) is very different than the life of a Balinese woman.
While in Bali, Gilbert meets a man named Felipe for whom she eventually breaks her vow of celibacy. She is not meditating anywhere near as much as she was in India, and after Felipe becomes her lover, she stops her daily ritual of spending her mornings with Ketut Liyer, her medicine man friend and the main reason she came to Bali. She tells us this not because she is proud of it, but because it is true: “I'm losing days here, disappearing under his sheets, under his hands. I like the feeling of not knowing what the date is. My nice organized schedule has been blown away by the breeze. (295)” She is unapologetic and honest about how fully she loses her time to this man, and it is clear to the reader by this point that she has gained much sense of self to allow herself enjoyment in love after a year and a half of celibacy. Gilbert's ever-expanding and extremely open mind allows for the possibility of breaking her own rules, and the book does end with her 'finding a boyfriend.' Because that is what truly happened to her at the end of her journey.
So, is Eat Pray Love a valid search for “Everything”, even though the book itself was an assignment; a job, essentially? Absolutely. Gilbert's impressive handle of language combined with her ability to relate to essentially human experiences is hugely valid. No, she hasn't been oppressed or held hostage like too many women have been across the globe, but everything is relative, and she speaks to the many women who do struggle with the same types of things she does. She is honest with her readers about the circumstances leading up to the creation of this memoir, and there is no doubt she deserved this opportunity to find herself through the one thing that did work for her while her personal life was in shambles: writing. Sure there are people worse off than her, but the “little” things (divorce, depression, imbalance) she is seeking solace from are huge obstacles for millions of people's lives. A refusal to conform to society in favor of soul-searching around the world—even if experimental, even if being compensated for it—when documented as Gilbert does, holds much worth for many people regardless of any other factors. She is telling a story; a true story. Maybe it's because Gilbert's life isn't terribly 'hard' in relation to many that she is able to dwell on trivial things such as 'divorce' and 'being truly happy in life'. It doesn't mean that her story is uninteresting or offensive. Maybe so many women relate because they, too, are that magical combination of 'privileged' and 'miserable'.
~Amanda Pratt~
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