Eat, Pray, Love is very explicitly a prepaid writer's journey for an entire year where she tries to heal from a painful divorce. She has no children, and her job IS to fly around the world writing about things. It is important to understand this up front. I find that people either love this book or hate it, and often their feelings revolve around this one fact. Detractors feel she is "spoiled" for going off to Italy, India and Indonesia to be on her own. That is what she does! Ths is her job. It is like complaining that Steve Irwin jetted around playing with animals, and did this on his vacations too. If someone has this as their normal lifestyle, and they are actively paid for this, then being jealous or upset that they live this way seems unreasonable. We are hearing notes from a person who DOES live this way. It would be the same as picking up Steve Irwin's book about going around and interacting with animals. To complain that he should have stayed at home makes no sense. It is not who he is. It is not who Elizabeth is.
So, that being said and understood, let's look into this year. It's always easy to throw stones at other peoples' lives. As has been said many times, those who live in glass houses should avoid stones - and he who has no sin should throw first. All of us have made mistakes. All of us have regrets. Elizabeth has ended up in a marriage with serious faults. She does not describe the issues - which I greatly respect! Many women would have turned this type of book into a vent-fest where they skewered their ex. If anything, Elizabeth makes much of her husband's patience and doesn't go into his faults. To complain about her tact in this area seems petty.
Elizabeth honestly doesn't want kids. That is fine! Only people who REALLY want kids should have them. A look at the child abuse statistics bears this out. So for whatever reasons - mostly unmentioned - she and her husband break up. As a result, she spirals into a deep depression and is at the point of suicide. She is seeing a therapist and it is not helping. She is on medication. It also does not help.
So finally she formulates a plan to get away. Remember, this is a woman who does travel writing *for a living*. It is not an abnormal thing for her. She loves the Italian language. She loves yoga. She had met a medicine man in Indonesia. So she gathers her things and heads out.
Italy - land of long, leisurely walks, of delicious comfort food, of a friendly openness. I know many people who ADORE Italy and return there frequently. Yes, it is a land of fiery emotions, and some people live in poverty. You can find similar conditions in most countries. She begins her stay here sickly and worn down. Slowly she begins to repair her physical health and starts to make connections with others. She begins to explore a little and find pleasures in the basics of life.
Next, India is where she explicitly goes to an Ashram (retreat) to study yoga and medication. People who are interested in yoga very often do this. Again, to complain that she doesn't "see outsiders" when she is at a yoga retreat seems baffling to me. The purpose of going to a retreat is to rebuild your own spirituality. It is only then that you can help others. When they tell you in an airplane to put on your own oxygen mask before you help a child, it's not because they're callous. It's because otherwise you both could die. She slowly learns how to deal with "monkey mind" - a VERY common issue with westerners who meditate, who cannot get their mind to let go of their worries. It is only after several months that she can meditate without strong negative, painful emotion.
Finally, Indonesia is where she learns about balance. She gets a sense of how people work in a community, how they support each other, how they heal the physical and mental and spiritual together.
Now, I have phrased this review a bit "defensively" because I really think some of the people who "hate" this book do so because they think it is wasteful for a person to spend a year "taking care of themselves". They feel a depressed writer should just ignore the depression and do ... what? Open a kindergarten? Elizabeth WAS a travel writer. If she had just "gone back to work" she would have been doing something very similar. A past job had been to go to Indonesia to write about yoga for several weeks. Is it really any "worse" that she went to India to write about yoga for several months? She was after all paid in both cases to do exactly what she did. The only real difference is that with this book part of the criteria of what she wrote was to include her personal feelings, which if anything is far more difficult (and risky).
Some people have an issue that she HAD serious depression. Is this going to turn into a Tom Cruise rant on how women should not be depressed or affected by changes in their lives? Many women DO get serious depression and are told to just "deal with it". Depression is an extremely serious medical issue and should never be dismissed or ignored. Elizabeth was on medication, she had a therapist. If a "change of scenery" was key to helping her recover, then that is fine - and quite normal. For people who say "well my life sucked worse and I dealt with it" - again, perhaps those people do not understand what depression is caused by or how it works. It is demeaning to people who do have serious depression to say "just get over it" or "I don't think your life warrants depression, so you don't have it."
If you completely ignore the content, I think Elizabeth's writing style was brilliant. I downloaded a sample 20 pages on my Kindle and was laughing out loud at several statements in the book. I promptly went and bought the entire thing. There were many, many sections in the book where her descriptions were vivid, her dialogue was crisp, her observations were right on. I love her writing style.
Now that all being said, I do not say that this book is flawless. In a way it is like reading Valerie Bertinelli's book. Both women are open about their mistakes. Neither woman is perfect. Elizabeth takes on a lover before her marriage is dissolved. Certainly this is something men AND women have been doing for centuries, but it is not a wonderful choice. Being a planner-type myself, I found Elizabeth's way of just randomly launching into travel without knowing what she's doing rather disconcerting. She gets to Indonesia with no idea of where she is going or how to get there. Also, some aspects about the ending of the story bother me, but I do not want to give anything away.
While others found her self introspection to be too much, I found it normal for a memoir. If you're writing a memoir, you are by definition writing about yourself. People read your story to learn how you felt and thought - and it SHOULD be different from how they would think! If we all just read about "our own thoughts" the world would be a boring place. It is important to learn and grow and understand how people different from ourselves interact with the world.
I think it is very difficult for Americans in particular to "let go" of a hectic pace. In Europe people routinely take vacations of a month or more. In the US, people race away for a weekend, and bring their laptops with them. They have kids and then pile their schedules full of karate lessons, soccer games and play dates - when more and more studies say that kids (and adults!!) need quiet time to just "be free". I honestly think we all COULD use an entire year off from our current life, to spend time on our own, away from our stress and schedule. Look at many cultures were people live a far more relaxed, easy way. Often they have far less rates of cancer, diabetes, heart attacks and other issues. Stress and cortisol are causing modern people huge health issues.
So to summarize, I think part of why this book is so popular is that it draws out such strong feelings in people. Readers feel jealous of Elizabeth's ability to travel. They feel upset that Elizabeth "wastes" a year traveling without feeling "guilty" about not volunteering at a nursing home instead. They feel annoyed that Elizabeth's personal memoir talks about her personal feelings rather than writing a social treatise on poverty in the slums of India (which she wasn't near). They feel morally upset that she left her marriage without laying out in explicit detail for public review why the marriage failed. They feel an ovarian outrage against any female would not actively leap at the chance to bear children. They feel religious fervor at anybody who would approach the worship of God without going specifically through a priest and Jesus Christ. Whatever was the trigger for someone, I think that trigger is an important idea to meditate on - because there are MANY people who feel the way that created that trigger. To be able to try to understand them in this no-holds-barred book is incredibly valuable. If your decision is to just close the book and turn your back, that is the attitude that causes cultures to still clash all over the world. How much better if we could really learn to understand each other, forgive each others' mistakes, accept that we all have different views and at least get some small sense of where people are coming from.
I am not saying we all have to approve of Elizabeth, or follow in her footsteps. However, I feel she makes many extremely important observations, and explains them clearly. She is speaking out for a large group of people. To at least understand her is to take steps towards understanding people you have to interact with in your daily life. To do this healthily and maturely can really be beneficial long term - for them, for you, for your social group, and for your community.
For that reason, well recommended.
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You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.Highlighted by 4,970 Kindle readers- You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.Highlighted by 4,543 Kindle readers
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Arrived too long but totally fine! Great book!
Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2018
Okay so this is supposed to be the first book I should ever read in my 2018, because I am too busy with my travel thing and when the rainy season came in, I dont have anything to do with my life but to find a book that will satisfy my wanderlust. So I waited. But since the standard shipping's really take too long, this book came in very late that it's already in the middle of my TBR list. It arrived just okay, not wrapped in plastic as like any other book. But not a single damage I found. And it's pretty fine. Anyway this is EAT PRAY LOVE, what else could I ask for. This is worth the wait. You should read it!
Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2018
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