Eat Pray Love
Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.
Why read it
In her early thirties, sobbing on her bathroom floor at the wreckage of a marriage and life she thought she wanted, a writer makes a radical decision: to spend a year abroad, four months each in Italy, India, and Indonesia, learning how to find pleasure, devotion, and balance again.
Gilbert's memoir chronicles her year of self-reconstruction after a devastating divorce and depression: eating her way through Italy to relearn joy, meditating in an Indian ashram to find peace, and settling in Bali to seek a sustainable equilibrium of the two. It is a candid, sometimes funny account of one woman rebuilding herself from scratch, and asking what a life of one's own design might look like.
Published in 2006, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote it after a real divorce and a book advance that funded the year of travel it describes. It became a massive word-of-mouth phenomenon, spending years on bestseller lists, selling over ten million copies, and being adapted into a 2010 film starring Julia Roberts.
- 01
The three I's
Italy for pleasure, India for devotion, Indonesia for balance gives the memoir its clean, satisfying structure.
- 02
Permission to want
Gilbert's relearning of simple pleasure in Italy is a study in giving oneself permission to enjoy life.
- 03
The work of stillness
Her struggles to meditate in the ashram show spiritual growth as effort, not easy epiphany.
- 04
Designing a life
The book's real subject is a woman consciously rebuilding an identity outside others' expectations.
In Rome, Gilbert and a friend debate the single word that best describes various cities, and decide her own word is not any of the grand ones but simply the pursuit of pleasure.
In the ashram, her breakthrough comes not in serene meditation but in a raw, exhausting night of finally forgiving herself for her failed marriage.
