Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

By Kim L

I first heard about this book when Oprah was interviewing Elizabeth Gilbert on her show, and my initial thought was “yeah it would sure be great to have the time and money to just up and travel around the world for a year,” which is what Gilbert did when she was attempting to recover from a bitter divorce and her ensuing depression. I wrote this book off thinking that it sounded awfully frivolous. However, it ended up in my tbr pile thanks to my aunt loading me up with a pile of books, and I’m glad I read it. Gilbert is a terrific and very relatable writer and what sticks out during this memoir she wrote about her journey towards spiritual recovery is that she not only funny, but very very honest about herself, her struggles, and her passions in life.

Gilbert embarked on a year traveling to Italy, India, and Indonesia in order to find inner peace to recover from her demons. In each respective country she had a different focus, and they are (you’ll never guess this one): eating, prayer, and love.

I visited Italy for one short week while studying abroad, so I really enjoyed the section where she describes wandering the streets of Rome, eating gelato and pasta every day, making new friends with the Italians she meets, learning Italian and in essence studying pleasure. “Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here, I admit it. While I have come to Italy in order to experience pleasure, during the first few weeks I was here, I felt a bit of panic as to how one should do that…. When I realized that the only question at hand was, “How do I define pleasure?” and that I was truly in a country where people would permit me to explore that question freely, everything changed. Everything became… delicious. All I had to do was ask myself every day, for the first time in my life, “What would you enjoy doing today, Liz?”

To read the rest of my review, click here.