Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love
Gilbert's Testimony on a Journey Across Italy, India, and Indonesia
Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat Pray Love is one woman’s search for fulfillment, love and balance. Told in 108 chapters, these tales are structured around the japa mula, a prayer bead with 108 beads to count prayers upon. And each tale is pretty much told like a prayer.
A Woman With a Past
Upon the discovery of her failing marriage, and the ensuing horrific affair of the divorce, desperate and fearful, Gilbert found herself on her knees one night crying and begging God for help. She could find no answer within herself, but a voice told her that night to go to bed and rest. And it will be that voice that will help her in her journey across the world from Italy to India and then to Indonesia.
In a voice that is filled with love and hope, Gilbert doesn’t pretend that she knows all the answers. It is more like she is trying to discover what it means to not have all the right answers.
Italy
In Italy, Gilbert fulfills her lust for food, ravaging the delis and small out of the way bistros. The food and the men are beautiful, but Gilbert with her vow of celibacy does not dare touch the latter.
While onsite in Rome, a friend commented that the word of the city has to be “Sex”. Gilbert is filled with temptation but food will have to be her only companion in the mean time. In her gut, she knows that love is possible here, but the old ache from her last loves had left her desolate. In order to heal, Gilbert knows she needs to relinquish her old ways and find new ones.
India
At her stop through India, Gilbert finds herself at her new found guru’s palace at the Ashram. There she goes through a grueling process of work, prayer and meditation. Juxtaposed among the poorest of India and possibly the richest spiritually, Gilbert reworks what has been plaguing her mind the last few months. Towards the end, her turmoil and the harsh working conditions at the Ashram pays off. Gilbert finally manages to find what some may call “spiritually healing” and the tempest in her heart has become the eye of the storm; no longer the storm itself.
Indonesia
Towards her final destination in Indonesia, we find a better Elizabeth Gilbert, a much more healed and fresher human being. What has foiled her in her inward journey is no longer a vexation. It has become minute and petty and the friend she had seen in herself in the glass of her reflection to a store front window finally becomes realized.
A Lasting Prayer
It is with this delicate touch that Elizabeth Gilbert gives us this insight upon her life. Like nimble fingers over a prayer bead and not one bead going by untouched, Gilbert’s memoir is like a prayer itself and a reflection upon our past and now better selves.
Gilbert, Elizabeth
Eat Pray Love
Penguin Group
2006
978-0-14-303821-2
Eat Pray Love
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