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Elizabeth Gilbert
“I've come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call "The Physics of The Quest" — a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: "If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself... then truth will not be withheld from you." Or so I've come to believe.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
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The Physics of the Quest: A Truth-Seeking Journey
The Physics of the Quest
https://www.wittenborg.eu/physics-quest-truth-seeking-journey.htm?fbclid=IwAR2yx8CcLzXRnAXpsctHAmncCpUEGmDziygTJIlcdjkS7h59ucgTw51DGH8
Have you ever felt a time when you found yourself lost, confused, and searching for what you really wanted in life? And have you ever felt that you just want to stop everything and rewind or fast-forward your life to something more desirable than what you have now? It is an undeniable fact that we often have something that resonates inside us - something we wish we could make go away or that we want to pursue. Work, study, relationships, sports, hobby or some other facet of life. But more often than not, we are unwilling to let go or loosen our grip on our present life and follow that wish inside us. We are reluctant to venture into the unknown, as we do not wish to risk everything we have or we are too fearful to step outside our present comfort zone.
In a memoir called "Eat, Pray, Love" (most of us remember the movie which starred Julia Roberts), the author, Elizabeth Gilbert, talked about the "physics of the quest", which goes something like this: "If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared - most of all - to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself … then the truth will not be withheld from you."
The Physics of the Quest: A Truth-Seeking Journey
Stepping out of our Comfort Zone
This Quest Physics concept could be the key to moving beyond whatever challenging or stalemate situations we are facing in our lives. What Gilbert wants to convey, basically, is that we need to loosen our grip on shaky situations and open ourselves to unknown possibilities, as these could reveal our true selves or provide answers to what we are seeking. She proposes that we release ourselves from things familiar and comfortable and instead stimulate our desire on a quest or truth-seeking journey. This is not in any way suggesting that we run away from our present problems, but rather move towards what we truly want to seek. Not only that, along the journey, we need to be aware of the things that are happening and consider them as clues towards the truth. Everything that happens and everyone that we meet is not mere coincidence. They touch our lives for a reason and are signs that bring something unique to teach us lessons or for us to teach others lessons. And even if those lessons are bad (in your opinion), we need to acknowledge them, forgive and move on. More often than not, we fail in our quest because we dwell too much on our disappointments or hurt and fail to use them to change or make ourselves better persons.
The Physics of the Quest: A Truth-Seeking Journey
Truth-Seeking Project or Journey
For example, right now, maybe you feel lost or unsure about what career you want to embark on after you graduate. No doubt, many people take the first job that comes along, while some deliberate for a little longer. Yet others may instead embark on a truth-seeking journey to try to find what exactly they want to do in life. Take for example Sean Aiken, who felt exactly the same way after graduating with a business degree. Unsure of what career to pursue, he started what he called "The One Week Job Project" and tried out a new job each week. His main idea was to search for a career that he is passionate about. Aiken tried out a variety of job roles including preschool teacher, bungee instructor, firefighter, cowboy, stock trader and baker across Canada and the United States. In lieu of salary, he asked his "employers" to donate to a charitable organisation called "Make Poverty History". From February 2007 to March 2008, Aiken worked 52 one-week jobs, raised $20,401.60 and found his ultimate calling.
Ponder also the true story of three young ladies in the book "The Lost Girls". Jen, Holly, and Amanda are at the crossroads of their lives. They are on the verge of big promotions, house ownership and marriages, but they share a similar fear: Is this what they want, or what they think they should want? Unable to find their perspectives in life, they quitted their high flying New York media jobs, left their friends and boyfriends and set about on a globe-trotting journey to re-evaluate their lives and search for inspiration and purpose. It was a transformative journey for the women, gaining valuable lessons travelling the world, facing hardships, meeting random people and experiencing life in developing countries. They came home fully refreshed and finally understood what they wanted to pursue in their lives.
The Physics of the Quest: A Truth-Seeking Journey
This is by no way suggesting that you must leave your family and country or drop your responsibilities to go on a journey to find yourself. What the Physics of the Quest really advises is that you find the courage to try new things if you do not find happiness or satisfaction with your present situation. It does not mean you have to travel far outside. Not everybody has the money or time to do so. You can always travel within: a different town or city, a different job, a different school, a different culture. There is no limit to what you can do. There is bound to be a lesson in every place you go and with every person you meet. The idea is that the more you experience life, the more wisdom you gain and the more meaningful your life becomes. Remember the saying, "Great things never came from comfort zones".
WUP 6/8/2021
by Hanna Abdelwahab
©WUAS Press
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Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert
3.61
1,666,685 ratings56,693 reviews
A celebrated writer's irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure, spiritual devotion, and what she really wanted out of life.
Around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned thirty, she went through an early-onslaught midlife crisis. She had everything an educated, ambitious American woman was supposed to want—a husband, a house, a successful career. But instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed with panic, grief, and confusion. She went through a divorce, a crushing depression, another failed love, and the eradication of everything she ever thought she was supposed to be.
To recover from all this, Gilbert took a radical step. In order to give herself the time and space to find out who she really was and what she really wanted, she got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world—all alone. Eat, Pray, Love is the absorbing chronicle of that year. Her aim was to visit three places where she could examine one aspect of her own nature set against the backdrop of a culture that has traditionally done that one thing very well. In Rome, she studied the art of pleasure, learning to speak Italian and gaining the twenty-three happiest pounds of her life. India was for the art of devotion, and with the help of a native guru and a surprisingly wise cowboy from Texas, she embarked on four uninterrupted months of spiritual exploration. In Bali, she studied the art of balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. She became the pupil of an elderly medicine man and also fell in love the best way—unexpectedly.
An intensely articulate and moving memoir of self-discovery, Eat, Pray, Love is about what can happen when you claim responsibility for your own contentment and stop trying to live in imitation of society’s ideals. It is certain to touch anyone who has ever woken up to the unrelenting need for change.
GenresNonfictionMemoirTravelBiographyRomanceChick LitSpirituality
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368 pages, Paperback
First published February 16, 2006
Literary awards
Puddly Award for Nonfiction (2008)
Original title
Eat Pray Love
Setting
Italy, India, Bali (Indonesia), Rome (Italy), Ubud, Bali (Indonesia), Indonesia, Southeast Asia, New York City, New York (United States)
Characters
Liz Gilbert, Felipe, Richard from Texas, Wayan
This edition
Format
368 pages, Paperback
Published
February 1, 2007 by Riverhead Books
ISBN
9780143038412 (ISBN10: 0143038419)
Language
English
More editionsItems 1 to 4 of 19
Kindle EditionRiverhead Books2007
Paperbackالدار العربية للعلوم ناشرون2008
HardcoverPenguin Viking2006
Paperback2010
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About the author
Elizabeth Gilbert72 books31.2k followers
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Elizabeth Gilbert is an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Her short story collection Pilgrims was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award, and her novel Stern Men was a New York Times notable book. Her 2002 book The Last American Man was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award.
Her memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, spent 57 weeks in the #1 spot on the New York Times paperback bestseller list. It has shipped over 6 million copies in the US and has been published in over thirty languages. A film adaptation of the book was released by Columbia Pictures with an all star cast: Julia Roberts as Gilbert, Javier Bardem as Felipe, James Franco as David, Billy Crudup as her ex-husband and Richard Jenkins as Richard from Texas.
Her latest novel, The Signature of All Things, will be available on October 1, 2013. The credit for her profile picture belongs to Jennifer Schatten.
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Michalyn
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January 27, 2008
Wow, this book took me on a roller-coaster ride. I couldn't decide if I loved it or hated it and it seemed like every few pages I'd go from thinking Gilbert was delightfully witty to thinking this was the most horribly self-absorbed person to ever set foot on the earth.
In the end the overall effect was rather like sitting at a party listening to someone tell a long involved story all about themselves, and you're alternately annoyed and fascinated and you want to get up and leave but she's just so entertaining that you keep telling yourself you'll leave in the next minute--and so you end up sticking through the whole thing.
<----- WARNING: LOOONG REVIEW AHEAD :) ------->
I didn't hate Eat, Pray, Love, but it left me really unsatisfied. When I first started reading the book, I couldn't help rolling my eyes and thinking "Here we go, another tale of a precious, privileged woman who is unsatisfied with her life." I stuck with it though and was charmed through the Italy section by Gilbert's humor and down-to-earth writing style. Still, for a woman who abandons everything in search of a true spiritual experience, she leaves most of the important questions unanswered. I felt that Gilbert projects herself so strongly onto every place and every person she encounters that I'm not sure what she really learnt along the way.
As delightful as the Italy section was to read, I felt like she never really stepped out of herself to understand the country on its own terms and to move beyond the stereotype. Despite it being a bit of a superficial assessment, I have no problem with Gilbert associating Italy with pleasure. There is enough beauty there to warrant it.It was more her interpretation of what it means to open oneself to pleasure that bothered me and seemed very narrow. For Gilbert this consisted mostly of overindulging in foods and allowing herself to put on weight. It seemed like she came to Italy thinking she already knew how to experience pleasure and proceeded to enact it based on her definition (even though there are indications that the Italian interpretation of pleasure is not merely restricted to this.) I would have liked to see her explore what it meant to devote herself to pleasure just as seriously and reverently as she seemed to take the meditative experiences in India.
Overall though, my biggest problem with this book was I had difficulty at times believing Gilbert achieved the enlightenment she talks about because she is so internally focused. Most importantly I still have not really grasped why it was necessary for her to travel to these 3 places.
I understand that her intention was not for this book to be a travelogue but it begs the question, "Why was it necessary to go to Italy, India and Indonesia if the purpose was to not to gain something from them that could not be found elsewhere?" In every country Gilbert created a little security blanket of expat friends who seemed to cushion her from really understanding the lessons the countries had to offer on their own terms. Why go to India to meet Richard the big Texan Guru, for example? Why not just go to Texas?
For those of us with "eyelids only half-caked with dirt" but who can't uproot our lives and travel to countries of our choosing is "enlightenment" still an option? I wanted Gilbert to talk more about how anyone with an ordinary life but who is searching for insight could still balance spiritual yearning with duty.
And that's my final peeve about this book. I wondered if Gilbert had any sense of duty or sense of obligation to anything beyond herself. Gilbert seems to recognize the bonds of duty that restrict the locals she encounters. Yet, she somehow paints them as pleasurable or inevitable yokes for the people who bear them. Her detached observations of life and death rituals in India and Indonesia as though they are restricted to those parts of the world made me want to shake her and say "but there are rituals everywhere; you have made a conscious decision to remove yourself from the ones you know."
I ask about duty not because I wanted Gilbert to stay in a loveless marriage but because the concept of duty is also linked to a concept of justice. What is it that we ought to do? What do we owe each other?
Part of me felt that Gilbert took comfort in the non-dual aspects of Eastern philisophies in a strange way. She seemed almost relieved that the non-duality of existence would ensure that one would not necessarily be punished by the universe for selfish deeds. I felt like Gilbert embraced that aspect of the philosophy without realizing the equal importance those cultures place on the balancing notions of reciprocity, duty, of being social beings in the truest sense (often taking it to the other negative extreme).
The lack of sense of obligation to anyone other than herself made Gilbert seem curiously dead to the contradictions around her. She didn't seem perturbed at the abject poverty of the Indian women around her, or to question if it was just. She never wondered how a spiritual person should grapple with the injustice of the world, nor did she seem to question the "rightness" of living in the midst of poverty in an artificial environment created to specifically cater to pampered Westerners. In Indonesia, she finally seems to see beyond herself to the suffering of others but when she does try to help someone it seems impulsive and done almost with carelessness so that the whole thing almost becomes a big mess.
After all of this, the end of the book just seemed to fall flat as Gilbert tried to wrap things up quickly, crowning it all of course with a romance with a doting and exotic lover.
This book had a lot of potential but ultimately it seemed like a story about one woman's sense of entitlement and her inability to ever quite move beyond that though she does make some valiant efforts to do so.
2008 non-fiction
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MelissaS
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ReadFebruary 9, 2008
WHY? I cringe to think why so many women want to feel that this was a true spiritual journey. It was a pre-paid journey. The woman starts off with telling us over and over about how painful her divorce was, however she dismisses how it ever came to be that way. Leaving her audience only to guess it was so horrible she had to leave and find herself.
When asked in an interview if dumping her husband and pushing off wasn’t selfish, here is what Ms. Gilbert had to say:
"What is it about the American obsession with productivity and responsibility that makes it so difficult for us to allow ourselves a little time to solve the puzzle of our own lives, before it's too late?"
This statement alone tells so much. A responsibility towards a marriage and spouse is considered an unwanted "obsession" and one's own pursuit of happiness supercedes everything else? If a man decided to dump his wife and family to flee to the Himalayas to meditate we wouldn’t be calling it a spiritual journey...we would call it irresponsibility.
India: This when she got just a little too proud of herself. I grew so tired of her boasting about how all her decisions led to a higher plan of consciousness and a new appreciation for life and a new understanding of the universe at large.
And Bali was even worse. I was hoping the little old guy didn't remember her. Didn't that whole episode just turn out a little too cutely? And then she fell off her bike! She met her doctor friend, and bought her a house. And met an old guy, and then she did things to herself! And then she slept with the old guy. And of course she's better at that than any of us because she is now enlightened. And then she made a little rhyming couplet of a life in Australia, America, Bali, and Brazil. Double cringe.
Italy: The author's angst and shallow self-discovery and pretend real people met with the express purpose of reflecting what she would like to 'learn' (lessons that most of us will have learned far earlier in life before more interesting lessons presented themselves.)
To quote a phrase from the "Italy" section of this book, "cross the street" if you dare to even glance in a bookstore window and entertain a thought of buying this book. Elizabeth Gilbert has no ideas about life. Not only does she have nothing to teach, she has nothing to say. This book is so vicarious that it reveals a profound and deeply disturbing ignorance about the complexities of real life.
The author's observations about life are simplistic and her insights so embarrassingly undeveloped and unsophisticated that she comes across as a detached observer. There are very few passages in this book that reveal any real sense of transformation in her life. She never really seems to glean anything authentic or deeply affecting from any of her experiences. And because she has gained nothing, she has nothing to offer. The reader is frustrated and unable to connect with her on any level. This memoir not only lacks readability, it lacks any real humanity.
She is right when she says that she is not a traveler; she does not have the heart or spirit of a true traveler because she somehow remains deeply unaffected. She is merely a tourist, a spectator, barely scratching the surface of the lands she traverses, the people she encounters, and the experiences of what it means to be human. She fails to see the poverty that surrounds her, or maybe she sees it? She definitely never writes about it, maybe because it is not part of the road to any enlightenment.
In spite of her year long journey she is still unable to gain true insight or wisdom from her pain and struggles. There is no profoundness in her journey, whether it is personal or physical. This book is just a simple walk through a simple mind. She is not even a good enough writer to be able to cleverly disguise her childlike observations in beautifully crafted language. I would rather read the trail journals of a young backpacker any day. At least they are 'real.'
After reading the book, I wondered how it found its way to the bestseller list. I was perplexed by its popularity. So I did some research. As it turns out "Eat, Pray, Love" is an ideal industry example of how a publishing company can "create" a best seller from the printing of a trade paperback. In hard cover, this book only generated mediocre book sales in the year in was published. However, someone at Penguin adopted it as a "darling" and created a hard core campaign to sell the trade paperback.
Well when they said “here’s $200, 000. dollars Elizabeth, now go travel and don’t forget to eat, pray, and love – when you come back I will get you the best editor and we will both feel enlightened.” So shallow, I cringe. I cringe even more for the women that buy into such shallowness.
If you really want to live with intention, live your journey here and now. YOUR here and now.
This book gets Zero stars.
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Feijoa
Author 2 books84 followers
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May 23, 2019
Eat Pray Love is the monologue of a Neurotic American Princess ("Liz") in her mid thirties. The first few chapters background the rest of the book, a confessional that tells how she came to find her 8 year marriage distasteful, realised she wasn't keen on the next 'logical' step which is apparently to fill her expansive apartment with children, and plunges into an impotent depression. Without even getting drunk.
One night, whilst bawling on the bathroom floor, a habit she has grown fond of, she is struck by a flakey attack of twattery. Being an American, this experience manifests itself as finding some kind of God or thereabouts*. Naturally, she resolves to leave her husband. Her husband isn't keen on this development, and, Liz finds that, strangely, he takes poorly to having his heart shattered into a million pieces.
Husband behaves badly, and our protagonist feels hurt and sad. But, no matter, because before long Liz hooks up with the sexy, exciting yoga chanting David, who takes a five minute break from his headlong charge toward floaty Thai fisherman's pants, a thin ponytail and male pattern baldness to rattle her well-bred bones. Liz drinks deeply from lust's stagnant well.
But divorce negotiations do drag on, leaving Liz, once again, bawling on the bathroom floor. This time however, it's David's bathroom floor. And David, it seems, is unimpressed by such displays. It seems men are interested in women for their unique and interesting qualities, and unless you are Bob Dylan, melancholy gets old, fast. (Incidentally, if you find a chap who does like this constant emo-drama, then run).
Here's what really bothers me about this book. Eat Pray Love is a New York Times bestseller. It was recommended to me by a friend, a woman, who is a successful publisher in her own right. According to her, this is the best book she has read this year. It's been a short year.
In short, she isn't given to fawning excesses that one might expect from anyone who doesn't think this book should have been printed on softer paper (I think 3 ply would about do it). So I was surprised by her ringing endorsement.
I am told, you see, that women 'get' this book. Which means they sympathise and understand it. I bet its on Oprah's Fucking Book List.
With this in mind, here's what I will say when I am invited to Oprah's Fucking Book club:
[feminist rant:]
Women! You will get to the end of this book and may still be under the illusion that it is not your responsibility to make yourself happy. Whereas, it is, in fact, your own responsibility to make yourself happy. Being happy without being with a man does not trivialise love. You should find challenges, entertainment, fun, excitement, passion, the thrill of mastery and satisfaction of achievement through your own doings, not who you are doing. Love might enhance this. It cannot substitute this.
Can you imagine if men felt so "incomplete" without women? When did is become acceptable for men to be our projects? When did it become acceptable for women to be defined by "their" men?, as if something less than this arrangement denigrates the sanctity of "a relationship". Fuck - until I read this book I thought I'd dealt feminism a crippling blow by jack-knifing the trailer this morning. I look like Susan Sontag in gumboots compared to this book.
In EPL, the author's only explanation for her pathetic simpering twattery is that she is "as affectionate as a cross between a Golden Retriever and a barnacle". This is supposed to tell us why her sex life resembles pollen in a strong breeze.
To her, and all other Oprah book clubbers who 'get' this book: get a Golden Retriever. Or barnacles. Or maybe a Golden Retriever with barnacles. But for sweet knit-one-purl-one-Christ, leave this book on the shelf.
*Post Script; I'm not anti American, I lived there and many of the best people I know are Americans. I have, however, noticed a peculiar enthusiasm for Godliness in the land of the free.
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Maria
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March 9, 2008
Don't bother with this book.
It took me nearly a year to finish it. I was so disgusted by the writer's apparent lack of awareness of her own privilege, her trite observations, and the unbelievably shallow way in which she represents a journey initiated by grief, that I initially couldn't bear to read beyond Italy. Like others who have written here, I made myself pick the book up again because so many people have raved about it, and I made myself finish it, hoping all the while there would be some redemptive insight or at least some small kernel of originality or wisdom. I was sorely disappointed. Liz is so obsessed with male attention throughout the book (in every section, she expounds in great detail on her flirtations with men, many of whom seem to "take care of her" or compliment her on her wit, beauty, or charm), that it makes her self-described quest to learn to be alone seem absurd and farcical. She does not have a feminist bone in her body; shocking for a woman who is purportedly on a quest for self-discovery after what she describes as a "devastaing divorce." She seems to have absolutely no capacity for self-awareness or reflection in this regard, and her superficial treatment of this and other aspects of her psyche bored me to tears. Basically, this memoir accounts her flirting her way across the globe into a new relationship, with little to no growth in self awareness that I can perceive. Even in India, her purported time of inward reflection, she attaches her herself to the likes of Richard from Texas, who seems a cross between a father figure and object of flirtation. Ultimately, she falls in love with a man much older than she, who seems to dote on her in quite a paternalistic way. When she spends pages talking about her bladder infection from too much sex, I have to question what her intentions are in writing about this? Why do we need to know about her bladder infection? What does it add to our understanding of her quest? To me, it says only, "Look! I'm desirable!" Not so interesting.
Additionally, her brand of spirituality certainly does not come close to transcending the fashionable Western obsession with all things Eastern, particularly Buddhism and the ashram culture. That a Westerner could go to India on her spiritual quest and have absolutely no awareness of 1) her gross appropriation of another culture's religion, and 2) the abject poverty that surrounds her, is inexusable. She oozes privilege at every turn, and that privilege remains unacknowledged and unexamined.
I was willing to look past my initial reaction that the end of a relationship is not, in the grand scheme of things, "that bad;" everyone's suffering certainly has its own validity. However, I was unable to muster much empathy for Elizabeth Gilbert despite my attempts to overcome my disgust at her shallow preoccupation.
Ultimately, this woman had nothing to teach me (other than that I should trust my own instincts to abandon a book when I have such a strong reaction of dislike from page one). I am sorry I spent the time and energy trying to finish it. I happened to read somewhere that she has recently bought a church in Manhattan which she is converting into her personal living space. And this is enlightenment? I am sickened that Paramount has bought the rights to the book for a motion picture, and that she stands to make even more money than she already has on this insipid memoir.
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Amy Kieffer
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May 1, 2008
This was one of those books I will read over and over again. All those cynics out there who criticize Gilbert for writing a "too cutesy" memoir that seems beyond belief and who claim that she is selfish for leaving her responsibility are clearly missing the point. First, she did not write the book to inspire you. She wrote it as her own memoir--you can agree or disagree with how she went about her "enlightenment," but you cannot judge her for how she found happiness. It is her memoir, not yours. You can achieve enlightement by whatever means you want. Second, to call her irresponsible for leaving responsibilities behind is absurd. She was in an unhappy marriage. You cannot force yourself to be happy. I applaud her for doing something that many people are afraid to do. She had no children and so the responsibilities she neglected were minimal.
I also suspect that those of you who didn't enjoy the book could not relate to it. You have never suffered a life-changing tragedy. You have never felt paralyzed by fear, anger, or disappointment. You have never had to go through a healing process that seems endless. You have never felt lost. That's great for you, but unfortunately that makes it hard for you to relate to this memoir.
Finally, those of you who found her story too unbelievable have probably never felt the joy of traveling the world. There is no better way to discover yourself than getting out of your comfort zone and immersing yourself in someone else's.
Traveling the world is not self-indulgent. If doing what we want to or enjoy doing is self-indulgent, then we are all guilty. If you are enjoying an ice-cream sundae, meeting your friends for a night out, or a good work out, you are being self indulgent.
My guess is that those of you who didn't find the value in this book are unhappy with your own life. Perhaps you should be a little more self-indulgent yourself.
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Cat
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May 4, 2008
I am embarrassed to read this book in public.
The title and the flowery, pasta-y cover screams, "I'm a book that contains the relentless rants of a neurotic 34 year-old-woman."
So, I'm afraid that the strangers on the Metro will think I identify with her.
But in the comfort of my own bed, I am totally falling for this memoir. Yes, Gilbert is emotionally self-indulgent (are we supposed to feel bad that she lost both houses in the divorce?), annoying (she's just tickled when she gains 23 pounds after eating her way through Italy) and often really immature (oh! The endless, endless crying).
Then again, this is a memoir and when the writing is just so clever, so hospitable, so damn funny, it's really hard to hold that against Gilbert in the end.
The plot goes something like this: A 30-year-old writer has everything she wants, including several successful books, a husband and two houses. When she realizes she doesn't want to have kids and that she's not happy after all, she has a breakdown and leaves her husband. In the process, she realizes she has no identity.
Boo-hoo.
But instead, Gilbert decides to pack up and visit Italy, India and Indonesia, three places she hopes will ultimately bring her the inner balance she's been longing for. (And on the surface, this book is a really entertaining travel essay. Gilbert has this wonderfully quirky way of describing everything: A piece of pizza, a gelato. And the people.)
It's on her travels that I start to identify with Gilbert. When I was 21, I spent four months traveling in Australia. Just like Gilbert during her first weeks in Italy, I was totally elated by my freedom.
But about two weeks in, the loneliness came around and so did the anxiety.
My typical day started with this inner monologue: "I have to get to the museum before noon, so I can fit in the sea kayaking trip at 2. And then I have to rush to the grocery store to get food to make dinner in the stinking hostel kitchen because god forbid I go out to eat causeIHAVETOMAKETHEMONEYLASTFORTHREEMOREMONTHS!!!!"
Yikes. How I envied the Eurotrash who could just sit by the hostel pool and read all day. But if I didn't do everything, then I would have failed at traveling.
In retrospect, Australia was a turning-point in my young life. I had no idea that this "go-go-go" attitude was how I had been living for years. No wonder people thought I was uptight. Relaxing had never come easy to me, and it never will, but I'm getting a lot better at letting go and not worrying about seeing every last museum... so-to-speak.
Gilbert ruminates on this topic quite a bit in her book. Her first moment of true, unfettered happiness comes when she poaches some eggs and eats some asparagus on the floor of her apartment. So simple, but so fulfilling.
In India, she writes that "life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death." Gilbert is living in an Ashram, a place where people come to meditate and experience divinity. She's not very good at it, and she wonders if all the energy she's spent chasing the next experience has kept her from enjoying anything. At this point in the book, I find myself wondering if Gilbert wants to be there at all. Perhaps going to an Ashram was the thing she thought she should do, not what she wanted to do. I sure as hell wouldn't.
What I really love about "Eat, Pray, Love" is that it's all about asking the simple question, "what do I want," a question that would have come in handy in Australia and numerous other times in my life. It's so hard for some people, including me, and it really shouldn't be. I think that when you can honestly answer that question ("No. I don't want to go to that discussion on post-modernism, even though I realize that I should be interested in it and it would make me a lot cooler in your eyes. Really, I just want to watch back-to-back episodes of "Scrubs") you're well on your way to realizing your own identity and being ok with whoever that person is.
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Nayra.Hassan
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December 1, 2022
امراة تترك كل شيء و ترحل ؛لماذا تحقق تلك الكتب و الافلام التي تتناول سفر"إمرأة"ما للمجهول كل هذه الشهرة و الشعبية؟مثل"النوم مع العدو / تحت شمس توسكان
و بالطبع على رأسهم : السيرة الذاتية /كتاب الرحلات: طعام.صلاة..حب
تنجح كتب رحيل النساء ببساطة : لان الأشجار لا تتحرك .
نحن من نذهب اليها ..
و المرأة =شجرة فطرها الله على ثبات جذورها في الارض مهما حدث لتستمر الحياة..قد تسافر وحدها قليلا جدا : أسابيع للعمل او للسياحة لكنها تعود سريعا جدا ..في الشرق و الغرب و الشمال و الجنوب ..ستصل المرأة دائما لوضع الشجرة مهما تأخرت..فهل رايت شجرة تنخلع و تجري الا في فيلم سيد الخواتم؟؟
و كل إمرأة في وقت ما تسأم الثبات و وضع الشجرة و تتمني و تحلم ان تفعل مثل اليزابيث / فرانسيس / سارة
تبدا من جديد في اي مكان بعيد..لا لن تكون طموحة جدا و تبحث عن كل شيء مثل اليزابيث ..بل فقط .. تهرب من خيبات امل و قهر و خذلان و علاقات ميتة و احلام مجهضة
باحت اليزابيث بالمسكوت عنه..و فعلت ما حلمت به كل نساء الارض مهما انكرن : ينطلقن بحثاً عن السلام النفسي و الحرية
عندما تقرا على لسان امراة ثلاثينية انها "لا تريد ان تكون متزوجة بعد اليوم!! و الادهي انها ترفض تماما ان تكون اما ..لانها تعلم ان الابناء ببساطة : " لكمات في الوجه " و هم جذور الشجرة ..اذن نحن هنا امام استثناء حقيقي لانها سيرة ذاتية
حتى لو لم اتفق معها مطلقا في فرديتها و انانيتها لكني لن احكم على مسيرتها الشخصية و اختياراتها . . بل فقط على كتابها
الصدق ثم الصدق و اخيرا قليل من التصنع هو ما يميز هذا الكتاب الثري المقسم ل3اجزاء
1. جزء :كله يدلع نفسه
انا افضل جزء ايطاليا بالطبع مثل الاغلبية " ....ايطاليا هي مهرب محطمي القلوب في العالم كله ..و عندما زرتها فهمت
جوها هو الافضل على الاطلاق ..اهلها "بايعين كل القضايا " بشكل لن تتخيله ما لم تراهم .. يمارسون اعمالهم بانشراح غريب ..يتعاملون مع ابشع الموضوعات بتبسط مريب..لذا هم افضل المتعاملين مع السياح و الهاربين و الناقميين
جزء : فوق بقى
بالنسبة لي جاء جزء الهند في مجمله مملا جدا ..فالتامل يمارس و لا يتم الكتابة عنه. .و قد نصلي شهورا و اعوام لنصل اخيرا للصلاة التي نرضى عنها ..فنحن من نحتاج للتواصل مع الله تعالى و هذا قد يحدث في غرفتك الخاصة ؛على البحر؛ في المسجد ..اي مكان و ليس من الضروري ابدا ان يكون في الهند
جزء 3 : انت معلم
الطبيب الحكيم الكيوت" كتوت" يفعل المستحيل ليسقي اليزابيث حكمة اهل الشرق و يشرح لها ان هناك اربعة أسرار للسعادة و الامان هي
الذكاء..الصداقة ..القوة ..و الشعر! !ا
to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength, and poetry
و لاني لا احب الشعر لن احصل على السعادة اذن 😢لا هنا و لا في بالي
اليزابيث شاركت اهل البلاد الثلاثة التي زارتها افراحهم و اتراحهم..طعامهم و بعض اوجاعهم..كل ذلك و هي تبحث عن ايمانها ..عن سلامها المنشود ..عن القليل من كل شيء ..
لذا جاء كتابها في ثلثه الأول؛ ككتاب الاحلام بالنسبة لكل ��لمقيدات
كتاب الرحلات النموذجي الذي نحلم به جميعا
ولكن من الممكن ان نفعل ذلك جميعا في سفراتنا الداخلية و الخارجية : نتعامل ببساطة ؛ بابتسامة ؛ نسافر وحدنا احيانا لنترك فرصة للتقارب الانساني ..ليس من الضروري ان نمكث شهورا و أعوام ..و لا ان ننفق 200الف دولار و لا نحرق مراكبنا قبل السفر
احيانا اليوم الواحد يقربك ممن لا تعرفه أكثر من بعض اهلك
المهم ان تفتح قلبك
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Simone Ramone
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February 4, 2016
I found this book unbelievably phoney.
I hated this so much that I got up early this morning to finish it and gave my copy to the library and honestly, I'm not too proud of that.
To me it just felt so insincere that there's no chance I would have made it past the second chapter had it not been for book club obligations.
I enjoyed her writing style, but I absolutely could not warm to her at all. To be fair, I do think she would be an excellent travel writer.
The section on India was agony to read.
I have met enough people freshly returned from Indian ashrams to know that they often seem a tad self absorbed and I also suspect that they really only get up at 3am so that they have even more "me" time.
She didn't do much to alter my opinion.
Honestly, this woman meditated longer, harder and bluer than anyone else has, past or present. She won the meditation competition that no-one was actually having.
Possibly it was not enlightenment that she found, but simply that she finally became completely self absorbed.
Easy mistake to make.
book-club
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[Name Redacted]
782 reviews391 followers
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March 8, 2012
Shallow, self-indulgent and mired in the sort of liberal American obsession with "oriental" exoticism that is uniquely offensive because it is treated as enobling by its purveyors. She treats the rest of the world as though it exists for the consumption of jaded, rich, white Americans and this book is a monument to that sort of arrogance and ignorance.
essays-and-autobiographies tripe
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(0v0)
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September 23, 2007
What I'm about to say must be wrong, because I couldn't get through this book. I tried. And I failed. So: I have NO BUSINESS WRITING THIS. Don't read it.
A cousin recommended EPL and I thought it would teach me something about the book market. My secret boyfriend at the public library was horrified I checked it out, given his ACLU-offensive intimacy with my record and tastes; and yes, like others, I was embarrassed to have EPL in my possession.
Because:
What IS this MOVEMENT of lily-white bourgeois women with fancy educations working themselves into identity crises that they think can be solved by a new form of coloniasm? This hyper-feminized adventure travel?
Subaltern poaching for the 21st century. Taker mentality as spiritual quest.
These people need their own version of Outside magazine or some shit. Oh yeah, they already do. It's called the GAIAM catalog.
Yeah. We're talking some serious dilettante tourism: taking entire countries as theme spas. Italy for excess, India for asceticism, Indonesia for the middle path.
Ladies: Country I is not your personal terrain for self-discovery. You don't get to interiorize Country I as a metaphor for your personal potential. If your interior journey needs a bunch of leisure time and poor countries to be realized, maybe you're asking the wrong questions.
The consumerist mentality was so self-important and so priveleged that I just couldn't make myself give this book any more time.
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================
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia Paperback – January 30, 2007
by Elizabeth Gilbert (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars 11,320 ratings
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One of the most iconic, beloved, and bestselling books of our time from the bestselling author of City of Girls and Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love touched the world and changed countless lives, inspiring and empowering millions of readers to search for their own best selves. Now, this beloved and iconic book returns in a beautiful 10th anniversary edition, complete with an updated introduction from the author, to launch a whole new generation of fans.
In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern American woman was supposed to want—husband, country home, successful career—but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed by panic and confusion. This wise and rapturous book is the story of how she left behind all these outward marks of success, and set out to explore three different aspects of her nature, against the backdrop of three different cultures: pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence.
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Riverhead Books
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Gilbert (The Last American Man) grafts the structure of romantic fiction upon the inquiries of reporting in this sprawling yet methodical travelogue of soul-searching and self-discovery. Plagued with despair after a nasty divorce, the author, in her early 30s, divides a year equally among three dissimilar countries, exploring her competing urges for earthly delights and divine transcendence. First, pleasure: savoring Italy's buffet of delights--the world's best pizza, free-flowing wine and dashing conversation partners--Gilbert consumes la dolce vita as spiritual succor. "I came to Italy pinched and thin," she writes, but soon fills out in waist and soul. Then, prayer and ascetic rigor: seeking communion with the divine at a sacred ashram in India, Gilbert emulates the ways of yogis in grueling hours of meditation, struggling to still her churning mind. Finally, a balancing act in Bali, where Gilbert tries for equipoise "betwixt and between" realms, studies with a merry medicine man and plunges into a charged love affair. Sustaining a chatty, conspiratorial tone, Gilbert fully engages readers in the year's cultural and emotional tapestry--conveying rapture with infectious brio, recalling anguish with touching candor--as she details her exotic tableau with history, anecdote and impression.
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"If a more wonderful writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven't found him or her... Gilbert's prose is fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit, and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible, and makes the reader only too glad to join the posse of friends and devotees who have the pleasure of listening in." —Jennifer Egan, The New York Times Book Review
"An engaging, intelligent, and highly entertaining memoir... [Her] account of her time in India is beautiful and honest and free of patchouli-scented obscurities." —Lev Grossman, Time
"A meditation on love in many forms... Gilbert's wry, unfettered account of her extraordinary journey makes even the most cynical reader dare to dream of someday finding God deep within a meditation cave in India, or perhaps over a transcendent slice of pizza." —Los Angeles Times
"Gilbert's memoir reads like the journal of your most insightful, funny friend as she describes encounters with healers, ex-junkies, and (yes!) kind, handsome men." —Glamour
"Readable [and] funny... By the time she and her lover sailed into a Bali sunset, Gilbert had won me over. She's a gutsy gal, this Liz, flaunting her psychic wounds and her search for faith in a pop-culture world." —The Washington Post
"This insightful, funny account of her travels reads like a mix of Susan Orlean and Frances Mayes... Gilbert's journey is well worth taking." —Entertainment Weekly ("A" rating)
"Be advised that the supremely entertaining Eat Pray Love—a mid-thirties memoir by the endlessly talented Elizabeth Gilbert—is not just for the ladies, fellas." —GQ
"Compulsively readable... Think Carrie Bradshaw cut loose from her weekly column, her beloved New York City, and her trio of friends, riffing her way across the globe on an assortment of subjects ranging from the 'hands-down most amazing' Sicilian pasta she's ever tasted to her reason for buying sexy lingerie to our collective, species-driven instinct for being on the planet." —Elle
"Gilbert's exuberance and her self-deprecating humor enliven the proceedings: recalling the first time she attempted to speak directly to God, she says, 'It was all I could do to stop myself from saying, "I've always been a big fan of your work." ' " —The New Yorker
"An intriguing and substantive journey recounted with verve, humor, and insight. Others have preceded Gilbert in writing this sort of memoir, but few indeed have done it better." —Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"In this engrossing and captivating travel memoir, journalist Liz Gilbert globe-trots for a year to Italy, India, and Indonesia... Lucky for us, the lessons she learns are entirely importable." —Marie Claire
"Gilbert's writing is chatty and deep, confident and self-deprecating... that makes her work engaging and accessible." —San Francisco Chronicle
"As a friend--and as a writer--Gilbert is innocently trusting, generous, loving, and expressive." —The Boston Globe
"Gilbert is an irresistible narrator—funny, self-deprecating, fiercely intelligent... [She's] such a sincere seeker... [It's] impossible not to applaud her breakthrough." —Salon.com
"An intimate account of a spiritual journey. But it's also a zippy travelogue with rich, likeable characters...You will laugh, cry, and love with a more open heart." —Rocky Mountain News
"Gilbert is a witty, funny, and likeable pilgrim on a hero's journey." —The Oregonian
"Run-of-the-mill envy doesn't begin to describe what many readers must feel when devouring Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love." —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"A captivating storyteller with a gift for enlivening metaphors, Gilbert is Anne Lamott's hip, yoga-practicing, footloose younger sister, and readers will laugh and cry as she recounts her nervy and outlandish experiences and profiles the extraordinary people she meets... [Her] sensuous and audacious spiritual journey is as deeply pleasurable as it is enlightening." -Booklist (starred review)
"Sustaining a chatty, conspiratorial tone, Gilbert fully engages readers in the year's cultural and emotional tapestry—conveying rapture with infectious brio, recalling anguish with touching candor—as she details her exotic tableau with history, anecdote, and impression." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Gilbert takes us on a pilgrimage, with the humor, insight, and charm that only come with honest self-revelation and good writing." —Jack Kornfield, The Omega Institute
"Spilling out of this funny (and profound) circus car of a book are dozens of mesmerizing characters; people you'll envy Liz Gilbert for finding, valuing, loving, and, I couldn't help noticing, joining for irresistible meals. I've never read an adventure quite like this one, where a writer packs up her entire life and takes it on the road." —Alan Richman
"This is a wonderful book, brilliant and personal, rich in spiritual insight... Gilbert is everything you would love in a tour guide of magical places she has traveled to both deep inside and across the oceans: she's wise, jaunty, human, ethereal, hilarious, heartbreaking, and, God, does she pay great attention to the things that really matter." —Anne Lamott
About the Author
Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Magic, Eat Pray Love, and The Signature of All Things, as well as several other internationally bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her latest novel, City of Girls, comes out in June, 2019.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
I wish Giovanni would kiss me.
Oh, but there are so many reasons why this would be a terrible idea. To begin with, Giovanni is ten years younger than I am, and, like most Italian guys in their twenties, he still lives with his mother. These facts alone make him an unlikely romantic partner for me, given that I am a professional American woman in my mid-thirties, who has just come through a failed marriage and a devastating, interminable divorce, followed immediately by a passionate love affair that ended in sickening heartbreak. This loss upon loss has left me feeling sad and brittle and about seven thousand years old. Purely as a matter of principle I wouldn't inflict my sorry, busted-up old self on the lovely, unsullied Giovanni. Not to mention that I have finally arrived at that age where a woman starts to question whether the wisest way to get over the loss of one beautiful brown-eyed young man is indeed to promptly invite another one into her bed. This is why I have been alone for many months now. This is why, in fact, I have decided to spend this entire year in celibacy.
To which the savvy observer might inquire: 'Then why did you come to Italy?'
To which I can only reply—especially when looking across the table at handsome Giovanni— 'Excellent question.'
Giovanni is my Tandem Exchange Partner. That sounds like an innuendo, but unfortunately it's not. All it really means is that we meet a few evenings a week here in Rome to practice each other's languages. We speak first in Italian, and he is patient with me; then we speak in English, and I am patient with him. I discovered Giovanni a few weeks after I'd arrived in Rome, thanks to that big Internet cafÈ at the Piazza Barbarini, across the street from that fountain with the sculpture of that sexy merman blowing into his conch shell. He (Giovanni, that is—not the merman) had posted a flier on the bulletin board explaining that a native Italian speaker was seeking a native English speaker for conversational language practice. Right beside his appeal was another flier with the same request, word-for-word identical in every way, right down to the typeface. The only difference was the contact information. One flier listed an e-mail address for somebody named Giovanni; the other introduced somebody named Dario. But even the home phone number was the same.
Using my keen intuitive powers, I e-mailed both men at the same time, asking in Italian, "Are you perhaps brothers?"
It was Giovanni who wrote back this very provocativo message: "Even better. Twins!"
Yes—much better. Tall, dark and handsome identical twenty-five-year-old twins, as it turned out, with those giant brown liquid-center Italian eyes that just unstitch me. After meeting the boys in person, I began to wonder if perhaps I should adjust my rule somewhat about remaining celibate this year. For instance, perhaps I could remain totally celibate except for keeping a pair of handsome twenty-five-year-old Italian twin brothers as lovers. Which was slightly reminiscent of a friend of mine who is vegetarian except for bacon, but nonetheless ... I was already composing my letter to Penthouse:
In the flickering, candlelit shadows of the Roman café, it was impossible to tell whose hands were caress—
But, no.
No and no.
I chopped tvhe fantasy off in mid-word. This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.
Anyway, by now, by the middle of November, the shy, studious Giovanni and I have become dear buddies. As for Dario—the more razzle-dazzle swinger brother of the two—I have introduced him to my adorable little Swedish friend Sofie, and how they've been sharing their evenings in Rome is another kind of Tandem Exchange altogether. But Giovanni and I, we only talk. Well, we eat and we talk. We have been eating and talking for many pleasant weeks now, sharing pizzas and gentle grammatical corrections, and tonight has been no exception. A lovely evening of new idioms and fresh mozzarella.
Now it is midnight and foggy, and Giovanni is walking me home to my apartment through these back streets of Rome, which meander organically around the ancient buildings like bayou streams snaking around shadowy clumps of cypress groves. Now we are at my door. We face each other. He gives me a warm hug. This is an improvement; for the first few weeks, he would only shake my hand. I think if I were to stay in Italy for another three years, he might actually get up the juice to kiss me. On the other hand, he might just kiss me right now, tonight, right here by my door ... there's still a chance ... I mean we're pressed up against each other's bodies beneath this moonlight ... and of course it would be a terrible mistake ... but it's still such a wonderful possibility that he might actually do it right now ... that he might just bend down ... and ... and ... Nope.
He separates himself from the embrace.
"Good night, my dear Liz," he says.
"Buona notte, caro mio," I reply.
I walk up the stairs to my fourth-floor apartment, all alone. I let myself into my tiny little studio, all alone. I shut the door behind me. Another solitary bedtime in Rome. Another long night's sleep ahead of me, with nobody and nothing in my bed except a pile of Italian phrasebooks and dictionaries.
I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone.
Grasping this reality, I let go of my bag, drop to my knees and press my forehead against the floor. There, I offer up to the universe a fervent prayer of thanks.
First in English.
Then in Italian.
And then—just to get the point across—in Sanskrit.
2
And since I am already down there in supplication on the floor, let me hold that position as I reach back in time three years earlier to the moment when this entire story began—a moment which also found me in this exact same posture: on my knees, on a floor, praying.
Everything else about the three-years-ago scene was different, though. That time, I was not in Rome but in the upstairs bathroom of the big house in the suburbs of New York which I'd recently purchased with my husband. It was a cold November, around three o'clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and—just as during all those nights before—I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.
I don't want to be married anymore.
I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me.
I don't want to be married anymore. I don't want to live in this big house. I don't want to have a baby.
But I was supposed to want to have a baby. I was thirty-one years old. My husband and I—who had been together for eight years, married for six—had built our entire life around the common expectation that, after passing the doddering old age of thirty, I would want to settle down and have children. By then, we mutually anticipated, I would have grown weary of traveling and would be happy to live in a big, busy household full of children and homemade quilts, with a garden in the backyard and a cozy stew bubbling on the stovetop. (The fact that this was a fairly accurate portrait of my own mother is a quick indicator of how difficult it once was for me to tell the difference between myself and the powerful woman who had raised me.) But I didn't—as I was appalled to be finding out—want any of these things. Instead, as my twenties had come to a close, that deadline of THIRTY had loomed over me like a death sentence, and I discovered that I did not want to be pregnant. I kept waiting to want to have a baby, but it didnt happen. And I know what it feels like to want something, believe me. I well know what desire feels like. But it wasn't there. Moreover, I couldn't stop thinking about what my sister had said to me once, as she was breast-feeding her firstborn: 'Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it's what you want before you commit.'
How could I turn back now, though? Everything was in place. This was supposed to be the year. In fact, we'd been trying to get pregnant for a few months already. But nothing had happened (aside from the fact that—in an almost sarcastic mockery of pregnancy—I was experiencing psychosomatic morning sickness, nervously throwing up my breakfast every day). And every month when I got my period I would find myself whispering furtively in the bathroom: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for giving me one more month to live ...
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Product details
Publisher : Riverhead Books (January 30, 2007)
Language : English
Paperback : 400 pages
ISBN-10 : 0143038419
ISBN-13 : 978-0143038412
Lexile measure : 1080L
Item Weight : 12 ounces
Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.86 x 8.42 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #4,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#10 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
#69 in Women's Biographies
#259 in Memoirs (Books)
Customer Reviews: 4.4 out of 5 stars 11,320 ratings
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Elizabeth Gilbert
Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, as well as the short story collection, Pilgrims—a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the 1999 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. A Pushcart Prize winner and National Magazine Award-nominated journalist, she works as writer-at-large for GQ. Her journalism has been published in Harper's Bazaar, Spin, and The New York Times Magazine, and her stories have appeared in Esquire, Story, and the Paris Review.
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eat pray elizabeth gilbert italy and india india and indonesia julia roberts well written spiritual journey around the world writing style medicine man highly recommend self absorbed lizabeth gilbert many people bathroom floor self discovery really enjoyed sense of humor must read new york
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Lisa Shea
4.0 out of 5 stars If you Hate Elizabeth's Choices - Ponder about Why
Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2008
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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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Jacqueline Zeila Olsen
4.0 out of 5 stars A fun escape
Reviewed in the United States on December 21, 2022
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This was a fun read to escape into a good story except the author had strong political opinions she put in this book… she seemed to say it like she assumed everybody had the same views. I thought it was arrogant on her part and it took some of the magic away from the story which sucked. If you can get past that then it’s a good read.
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TheAmazonWoman
5.0 out of 5 stars my all time favorite book. It meant
Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2017
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This is, by far, my all time favorite book. It meant, and still means, so much to me, especially as a woman. I was a single mother for most of my now adult daughter's life, and I was so desperately sad and lonely after my divorce with my husband/her stepdad (Our wedding, which was obviously well pre-planned, ended up being on the day of Princess Diana's funeral (9/6/1997) and our divorce was finalized on 9/11/2001 (yep, THE day)...There's my "sign"... Anyway, several years passed and I still just couldn't see a future....of anything, happiness, travel, love, ???...(other than going through the motions and working on being the best mother I could be)...I too, was 36 years old at this time. When my daughter was old enough to have a stable relationship with her biological father, I would have every other weekend alone. I used to go to the bookstore "Borders" every Friday night and I would walk aimlessly around the entire store, just looking for any sign, the next sign for the next move, for me... I prayed and prayed constantly, just not knowing what or where I needed to be... with my physical life, my spiritual life, my love life, my motherhood... and then I looked up. On the top shelf of the "newest releases" I saw the cover of "Eat, Pray, Love"... I INSTANTLY felt a "pull" if you will... Now normally, I would wander, grab a few books, & find a chair hidden in some lonely, quiet little alcove in the store, and sort through the items I'd selected to see if anything could help or just give me SOMETHING, ANYTHING for HOPE...but I grabbed this book from the shelf, read the back cover, ran to the checkout line and left the store to go home. Within reading the first chapter, I immediately found it gravitational, humorous, very easy to follow and read.... very spiritual, and somehow, someway, emotionally compatible and conducive to exactly what I was needing at the time. You instantly understand where Elizabeth Gilbert is coming from, what she's going through, and even her "fantasies", all with humor, compassion and a desire to continue "the journey with her". I was hooked. Every chapter, I was laughing, crying, dreaming, planning, petitioning, praying, and laughing again. Every chapter held me captive in all of my senses. You can feel everything she feels, you can taste everything she tastes (even her tears), you can see what she sees, you pray what she prays, her friends (and enemies) become yours, and you get to the end, and you're a different person. It's like the book emanates and "energy" right to you and through you, and you are left feeling HOPEFUL, alive, ready, stronger, wiser, more forgiving of others, and most importantly, yourself. You learn that they way you lean into and love God is between the two of you and no one else....that what you can't necessarily see, hear or touch, doesn't mean it isn't FULLY there, fully present with you, in all It's Glory. I've read it 7 times, all on different occasions and throughout different phases in my life...After months of reading it, when the next Christmas Season rolled around, I bought 13 copies and gave them to all of the closest women in my life. I'm now only a few months shy of age 48 (years young) and I'll read this book again and again...every time I read it I learn something new about the world, others, and myself...all through this amazing woman's courage to take a chance on simply sharing all of herself for one, amazing, adventurous, incredible year... what a gift. You'll never look at Italy, India, and Indonesia, with all of it's bounty, glory, and gods, the same again. I'm forever grateful and HIGHLY recommend this book. Oh! And 1 year ago (after 2 years of dating) I got the courage to say "Yes!" to the man of my dreams. :)
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Amanda
5.0 out of 5 stars Nourishment for the Soul
Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2022
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Things and people come into your life as you need them. Never too soon or too late, but precisely when they are meant to.
Liz and her willingness to bare her soul and her beautiful creation of " Eat, Love, Pray" for years, have patiently waited to come into my life at the exact moment when my heart was open and ready to receive words and concepts that not only reinforce the path I am on, but also a practical guide.
It's as if I have discovered a treasure map and it's creator who not only gives the map to me freely, but who explains in detail how to read it.
My goodness....blessings abound.
Grateful and deepest thanks Liz. Truly a beautiful gift to humanity
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S N
1.0 out of 5 stars 99 chapters too many
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 1, 2020
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Off the back of SO MANY recommendations, I bought this book.
Its a "chick-flick" type story, not my kind of genre so I've not enjoyed it.
The book is split into 3 segments each consisting of 33 chapters. Each chapter is very short, some not even a page, so it's not a huge book.
Part 1 talks mainly about how much the protagonist loves learning and speaking Italian, and how much she wants to get off with her Italian language tutor, and how much weight she has put on.
Part 2 gets a bit better only because of another guy giving her a reality check, otherwise it covers mostly how she can't get out of her own head.
Part 3, haven't made it to this part yet. Haven't finished Part 2 yet. Book is still sitting unloved on my shelf waiting for the end of the world to come and destroy it so I don't have to continue reading it.
Or I could put it in the compost bin...
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Janie U
3.0 out of 5 stars Lots to interest and even love but this book was surprisingly unsatisfying
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 6, 2018
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I recently read "The Signature of all Things" by this author and, having adored that novel, I decided to seek out more of her works. I had heard of this book but know nothing about it - guessing it might be a novel or a self help book. Before I started reading I did some research about the background and was particularly interesting in the funding story (turned out to be a great investment!)
The idea of travelling in order to "find yourself" always seems attractive, particularly to middle aged women.
Initially I found the memoir difficult to engage with. The author is in her thirties and I though she was trying to use this as a barrier to readers. I also found her chaotic thought processes quite complex to work through. What kept me reading through this was the gorgeous descriptions of sights and emotions. I'm not a religious person but strongly acknowledge a spiritual side of the world which seems to escape understanding - this book made me confront that and think a lot.
At one point, the author describes that her spirituality interests her sister from a point of "intellectual curiosity" which I can understand and think this is how I approached this whole book.
During the year, Elizabeth Gilbert visits Italy, India and Indonesia. In each place she looks for different experiences, all working towards giving her some contentment with her life. I struggled with the transitions between countries as they seemed to happen very swiftly. Overall, I found that I was never really given the chance to properly understand the author and gain any deep understanding of her motives - I think I~ would have preferred this book to be three separate volumes.
What I did love was the open minded way that the author approached everything that came her way and the accessible way in which she described her experiences. I partly envy her religion as it does seem the means to a wonderful way to approach the world and everything that is thrown at you.
Throughout the book there are all sorts of little gems which I am trying to remember to make me a better person.
I may recommend this to some friends but will be very careful who I select. It took me a long time to read this book which is an indicator of my enjoyment.
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AvidReader
5.0 out of 5 stars Salt and Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 18, 2015
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Like many others I had my reservations about this book - a pretty, blonde white girl is given a free pass to chuck her first world issues. She gets to travel for a year - all expenses paid - by her editor in exchange for a book about her said travel year. I quote Scrooge from A Christmas Carol (or Scrooge McDuck from Ducktales depending on your taste) "Bah, Humbug!"
But as It turns out, this book is pretty awesome!
Gilbert is disillusioned with life and disappointed in love, she travels to the three I's:
Italy - where she eats, India - where she prays and Indonesia (Bali) where she finds love.
It's as simple and yet as momentous as that. You'll either read it and chuck it across the room or read it and come away with something profound for yourself. Liz is a gifted writer, I have ear marked, highlighted and underlined the heck outta this book.
I suspect many would secretly love to do exactly what Liz did (I would), but cannot due to commitments, responsibilities and budget constraints.
That's perhaps why there are so many bad reviews, I get that, I understand. But maybe instead of reading it with your defences already up, try reading it like it's fiction. Be open minded and give it a go.
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Sair Sair
2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 11, 2022
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I bought this after listening to Chris Evans on Virgin Radio rave about this book. It sounded like the type of genre I like to read (and I generally have liked other things Chris Evans recommends). However, I had to give up about a third of the way through after trying to persevere. I found it quite dull after a while and drawn out. I have read much better life changing adventure stories. Sorry Chris....I have to disagree with you on this one unfortunately.
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Amazon Customer
1.0 out of 5 stars Not my cup of tea
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 18, 2019
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Saw Elizabeth Gilbert on “Loose Women”, ordered the book and looked forward to reading it. I’m really sorry, I just don’t get it.. I hate not finishing a book but having got through her Rome months, mostly spent eating pizza, I started on the India section and put it aside...no point if Im not enjoying it. It’s not a travel book, it’s not a story, it’s more of a diary. Rather self indulgent and if I’m honest, utterly boring.
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Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert
3.61
1,666,685 ratings56,693 reviews
A celebrated writer's irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure, spiritual devotion, and what she really wanted out of life.
Around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned thirty, she went through an early-onslaught midlife crisis. She had everything an educated, ambitious American woman was supposed to want—a husband, a house, a successful career. But instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed with panic, grief, and confusion. She went through a divorce, a crushing depression, another failed love, and the eradication of everything she ever thought she was supposed to be.
To recover from all this, Gilbert took a radical step. In order to give herself the time and space to find out who she really was and what she really wanted, she got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world—all alone. Eat, Pray, Love is the absorbing chronicle of that year. Her aim was to visit three places where she could examine one aspect of her own nature set against the backdrop of a culture that has traditionally done that one thing very well. In Rome, she studied the art of pleasure, learning to speak Italian and gaining the twenty-three happiest pounds of her life. India was for the art of devotion, and with the help of a native guru and a surprisingly wise cowboy from Texas, she embarked on four uninterrupted months of spiritual exploration. In Bali, she studied the art of balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. She became the pupil of an elderly medicine man and also fell in love the best way—unexpectedly.
An intensely articulate and moving memoir of self-discovery, Eat, Pray, Love is about what can happen when you claim responsibility for your own contentment and stop trying to live in imitation of society’s ideals. It is certain to touch anyone who has ever woken up to the unrelenting need for change.
GenresNonfictionMemoirTravelBiographyRomanceChick LitSpirituality
...more
368 pages, Paperback
First published February 16, 2006
Literary awards
Puddly Award for Nonfiction (2008)
Original title
Eat Pray Love
Setting
Italy, India, Bali (Indonesia), Rome (Italy), Ubud, Bali (Indonesia), Indonesia, Southeast Asia, New York City, New York (United States)
Characters
Liz Gilbert, Felipe, Richard from Texas, Wayan
This edition
Format
368 pages, Paperback
Published
February 1, 2007 by Riverhead Books
ISBN
9780143038412 (ISBN10: 0143038419)
Language
English
More editionsItems 1 to 4 of 19
Kindle EditionRiverhead Books2007
Paperbackالدار العربية للعلوم ناشرون2008
HardcoverPenguin Viking2006
Paperback2010
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About the author
Elizabeth Gilbert72 books31.2k followers
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Elizabeth Gilbert is an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Her short story collection Pilgrims was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award, and her novel Stern Men was a New York Times notable book. Her 2002 book The Last American Man was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award.
Her memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, spent 57 weeks in the #1 spot on the New York Times paperback bestseller list. It has shipped over 6 million copies in the US and has been published in over thirty languages. A film adaptation of the book was released by Columbia Pictures with an all star cast: Julia Roberts as Gilbert, Javier Bardem as Felipe, James Franco as David, Billy Crudup as her ex-husband and Richard Jenkins as Richard from Texas.
Her latest novel, The Signature of All Things, will be available on October 1, 2013. The credit for her profile picture belongs to Jennifer Schatten.
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Michalyn
134 reviews111 followers
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January 27, 2008
Wow, this book took me on a roller-coaster ride. I couldn't decide if I loved it or hated it and it seemed like every few pages I'd go from thinking Gilbert was delightfully witty to thinking this was the most horribly self-absorbed person to ever set foot on the earth.
In the end the overall effect was rather like sitting at a party listening to someone tell a long involved story all about themselves, and you're alternately annoyed and fascinated and you want to get up and leave but she's just so entertaining that you keep telling yourself you'll leave in the next minute--and so you end up sticking through the whole thing.
<----- WARNING: LOOONG REVIEW AHEAD :) ------->
I didn't hate Eat, Pray, Love, but it left me really unsatisfied. When I first started reading the book, I couldn't help rolling my eyes and thinking "Here we go, another tale of a precious, privileged woman who is unsatisfied with her life." I stuck with it though and was charmed through the Italy section by Gilbert's humor and down-to-earth writing style. Still, for a woman who abandons everything in search of a true spiritual experience, she leaves most of the important questions unanswered. I felt that Gilbert projects herself so strongly onto every place and every person she encounters that I'm not sure what she really learnt along the way.
As delightful as the Italy section was to read, I felt like she never really stepped out of herself to understand the country on its own terms and to move beyond the stereotype. Despite it being a bit of a superficial assessment, I have no problem with Gilbert associating Italy with pleasure. There is enough beauty there to warrant it.It was more her interpretation of what it means to open oneself to pleasure that bothered me and seemed very narrow. For Gilbert this consisted mostly of overindulging in foods and allowing herself to put on weight. It seemed like she came to Italy thinking she already knew how to experience pleasure and proceeded to enact it based on her definition (even though there are indications that the Italian interpretation of pleasure is not merely restricted to this.) I would have liked to see her explore what it meant to devote herself to pleasure just as seriously and reverently as she seemed to take the meditative experiences in India.
Overall though, my biggest problem with this book was I had difficulty at times believing Gilbert achieved the enlightenment she talks about because she is so internally focused. Most importantly I still have not really grasped why it was necessary for her to travel to these 3 places.
I understand that her intention was not for this book to be a travelogue but it begs the question, "Why was it necessary to go to Italy, India and Indonesia if the purpose was to not to gain something from them that could not be found elsewhere?" In every country Gilbert created a little security blanket of expat friends who seemed to cushion her from really understanding the lessons the countries had to offer on their own terms. Why go to India to meet Richard the big Texan Guru, for example? Why not just go to Texas?
For those of us with "eyelids only half-caked with dirt" but who can't uproot our lives and travel to countries of our choosing is "enlightenment" still an option? I wanted Gilbert to talk more about how anyone with an ordinary life but who is searching for insight could still balance spiritual yearning with duty.
And that's my final peeve about this book. I wondered if Gilbert had any sense of duty or sense of obligation to anything beyond herself. Gilbert seems to recognize the bonds of duty that restrict the locals she encounters. Yet, she somehow paints them as pleasurable or inevitable yokes for the people who bear them. Her detached observations of life and death rituals in India and Indonesia as though they are restricted to those parts of the world made me want to shake her and say "but there are rituals everywhere; you have made a conscious decision to remove yourself from the ones you know."
I ask about duty not because I wanted Gilbert to stay in a loveless marriage but because the concept of duty is also linked to a concept of justice. What is it that we ought to do? What do we owe each other?
Part of me felt that Gilbert took comfort in the non-dual aspects of Eastern philisophies in a strange way. She seemed almost relieved that the non-duality of existence would ensure that one would not necessarily be punished by the universe for selfish deeds. I felt like Gilbert embraced that aspect of the philosophy without realizing the equal importance those cultures place on the balancing notions of reciprocity, duty, of being social beings in the truest sense (often taking it to the other negative extreme).
The lack of sense of obligation to anyone other than herself made Gilbert seem curiously dead to the contradictions around her. She didn't seem perturbed at the abject poverty of the Indian women around her, or to question if it was just. She never wondered how a spiritual person should grapple with the injustice of the world, nor did she seem to question the "rightness" of living in the midst of poverty in an artificial environment created to specifically cater to pampered Westerners. In Indonesia, she finally seems to see beyond herself to the suffering of others but when she does try to help someone it seems impulsive and done almost with carelessness so that the whole thing almost becomes a big mess.
After all of this, the end of the book just seemed to fall flat as Gilbert tried to wrap things up quickly, crowning it all of course with a romance with a doting and exotic lover.
This book had a lot of potential but ultimately it seemed like a story about one woman's sense of entitlement and her inability to ever quite move beyond that though she does make some valiant efforts to do so.
2008 non-fiction
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MelissaS
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ReadFebruary 9, 2008
WHY? I cringe to think why so many women want to feel that this was a true spiritual journey. It was a pre-paid journey. The woman starts off with telling us over and over about how painful her divorce was, however she dismisses how it ever came to be that way. Leaving her audience only to guess it was so horrible she had to leave and find herself.
When asked in an interview if dumping her husband and pushing off wasn’t selfish, here is what Ms. Gilbert had to say:
"What is it about the American obsession with productivity and responsibility that makes it so difficult for us to allow ourselves a little time to solve the puzzle of our own lives, before it's too late?"
This statement alone tells so much. A responsibility towards a marriage and spouse is considered an unwanted "obsession" and one's own pursuit of happiness supercedes everything else? If a man decided to dump his wife and family to flee to the Himalayas to meditate we wouldn’t be calling it a spiritual journey...we would call it irresponsibility.
India: This when she got just a little too proud of herself. I grew so tired of her boasting about how all her decisions led to a higher plan of consciousness and a new appreciation for life and a new understanding of the universe at large.
And Bali was even worse. I was hoping the little old guy didn't remember her. Didn't that whole episode just turn out a little too cutely? And then she fell off her bike! She met her doctor friend, and bought her a house. And met an old guy, and then she did things to herself! And then she slept with the old guy. And of course she's better at that than any of us because she is now enlightened. And then she made a little rhyming couplet of a life in Australia, America, Bali, and Brazil. Double cringe.
Italy: The author's angst and shallow self-discovery and pretend real people met with the express purpose of reflecting what she would like to 'learn' (lessons that most of us will have learned far earlier in life before more interesting lessons presented themselves.)
To quote a phrase from the "Italy" section of this book, "cross the street" if you dare to even glance in a bookstore window and entertain a thought of buying this book. Elizabeth Gilbert has no ideas about life. Not only does she have nothing to teach, she has nothing to say. This book is so vicarious that it reveals a profound and deeply disturbing ignorance about the complexities of real life.
The author's observations about life are simplistic and her insights so embarrassingly undeveloped and unsophisticated that she comes across as a detached observer. There are very few passages in this book that reveal any real sense of transformation in her life. She never really seems to glean anything authentic or deeply affecting from any of her experiences. And because she has gained nothing, she has nothing to offer. The reader is frustrated and unable to connect with her on any level. This memoir not only lacks readability, it lacks any real humanity.
She is right when she says that she is not a traveler; she does not have the heart or spirit of a true traveler because she somehow remains deeply unaffected. She is merely a tourist, a spectator, barely scratching the surface of the lands she traverses, the people she encounters, and the experiences of what it means to be human. She fails to see the poverty that surrounds her, or maybe she sees it? She definitely never writes about it, maybe because it is not part of the road to any enlightenment.
In spite of her year long journey she is still unable to gain true insight or wisdom from her pain and struggles. There is no profoundness in her journey, whether it is personal or physical. This book is just a simple walk through a simple mind. She is not even a good enough writer to be able to cleverly disguise her childlike observations in beautifully crafted language. I would rather read the trail journals of a young backpacker any day. At least they are 'real.'
After reading the book, I wondered how it found its way to the bestseller list. I was perplexed by its popularity. So I did some research. As it turns out "Eat, Pray, Love" is an ideal industry example of how a publishing company can "create" a best seller from the printing of a trade paperback. In hard cover, this book only generated mediocre book sales in the year in was published. However, someone at Penguin adopted it as a "darling" and created a hard core campaign to sell the trade paperback.
Well when they said “here’s $200, 000. dollars Elizabeth, now go travel and don’t forget to eat, pray, and love – when you come back I will get you the best editor and we will both feel enlightened.” So shallow, I cringe. I cringe even more for the women that buy into such shallowness.
If you really want to live with intention, live your journey here and now. YOUR here and now.
This book gets Zero stars.
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Feijoa
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May 23, 2019
Eat Pray Love is the monologue of a Neurotic American Princess ("Liz") in her mid thirties. The first few chapters background the rest of the book, a confessional that tells how she came to find her 8 year marriage distasteful, realised she wasn't keen on the next 'logical' step which is apparently to fill her expansive apartment with children, and plunges into an impotent depression. Without even getting drunk.
One night, whilst bawling on the bathroom floor, a habit she has grown fond of, she is struck by a flakey attack of twattery. Being an American, this experience manifests itself as finding some kind of God or thereabouts*. Naturally, she resolves to leave her husband. Her husband isn't keen on this development, and, Liz finds that, strangely, he takes poorly to having his heart shattered into a million pieces.
Husband behaves badly, and our protagonist feels hurt and sad. But, no matter, because before long Liz hooks up with the sexy, exciting yoga chanting David, who takes a five minute break from his headlong charge toward floaty Thai fisherman's pants, a thin ponytail and male pattern baldness to rattle her well-bred bones. Liz drinks deeply from lust's stagnant well.
But divorce negotiations do drag on, leaving Liz, once again, bawling on the bathroom floor. This time however, it's David's bathroom floor. And David, it seems, is unimpressed by such displays. It seems men are interested in women for their unique and interesting qualities, and unless you are Bob Dylan, melancholy gets old, fast. (Incidentally, if you find a chap who does like this constant emo-drama, then run).
Here's what really bothers me about this book. Eat Pray Love is a New York Times bestseller. It was recommended to me by a friend, a woman, who is a successful publisher in her own right. According to her, this is the best book she has read this year. It's been a short year.
In short, she isn't given to fawning excesses that one might expect from anyone who doesn't think this book should have been printed on softer paper (I think 3 ply would about do it). So I was surprised by her ringing endorsement.
I am told, you see, that women 'get' this book. Which means they sympathise and understand it. I bet its on Oprah's Fucking Book List.
With this in mind, here's what I will say when I am invited to Oprah's Fucking Book club:
[feminist rant:]
Women! You will get to the end of this book and may still be under the illusion that it is not your responsibility to make yourself happy. Whereas, it is, in fact, your own responsibility to make yourself happy. Being happy without being with a man does not trivialise love. You should find challenges, entertainment, fun, excitement, passion, the thrill of mastery and satisfaction of achievement through your own doings, not who you are doing. Love might enhance this. It cannot substitute this.
Can you imagine if men felt so "incomplete" without women? When did is become acceptable for men to be our projects? When did it become acceptable for women to be defined by "their" men?, as if something less than this arrangement denigrates the sanctity of "a relationship". Fuck - until I read this book I thought I'd dealt feminism a crippling blow by jack-knifing the trailer this morning. I look like Susan Sontag in gumboots compared to this book.
In EPL, the author's only explanation for her pathetic simpering twattery is that she is "as affectionate as a cross between a Golden Retriever and a barnacle". This is supposed to tell us why her sex life resembles pollen in a strong breeze.
To her, and all other Oprah book clubbers who 'get' this book: get a Golden Retriever. Or barnacles. Or maybe a Golden Retriever with barnacles. But for sweet knit-one-purl-one-Christ, leave this book on the shelf.
*Post Script; I'm not anti American, I lived there and many of the best people I know are Americans. I have, however, noticed a peculiar enthusiasm for Godliness in the land of the free.
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Maria
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March 9, 2008
Don't bother with this book.
It took me nearly a year to finish it. I was so disgusted by the writer's apparent lack of awareness of her own privilege, her trite observations, and the unbelievably shallow way in which she represents a journey initiated by grief, that I initially couldn't bear to read beyond Italy. Like others who have written here, I made myself pick the book up again because so many people have raved about it, and I made myself finish it, hoping all the while there would be some redemptive insight or at least some small kernel of originality or wisdom. I was sorely disappointed. Liz is so obsessed with male attention throughout the book (in every section, she expounds in great detail on her flirtations with men, many of whom seem to "take care of her" or compliment her on her wit, beauty, or charm), that it makes her self-described quest to learn to be alone seem absurd and farcical. She does not have a feminist bone in her body; shocking for a woman who is purportedly on a quest for self-discovery after what she describes as a "devastaing divorce." She seems to have absolutely no capacity for self-awareness or reflection in this regard, and her superficial treatment of this and other aspects of her psyche bored me to tears. Basically, this memoir accounts her flirting her way across the globe into a new relationship, with little to no growth in self awareness that I can perceive. Even in India, her purported time of inward reflection, she attaches her herself to the likes of Richard from Texas, who seems a cross between a father figure and object of flirtation. Ultimately, she falls in love with a man much older than she, who seems to dote on her in quite a paternalistic way. When she spends pages talking about her bladder infection from too much sex, I have to question what her intentions are in writing about this? Why do we need to know about her bladder infection? What does it add to our understanding of her quest? To me, it says only, "Look! I'm desirable!" Not so interesting.
Additionally, her brand of spirituality certainly does not come close to transcending the fashionable Western obsession with all things Eastern, particularly Buddhism and the ashram culture. That a Westerner could go to India on her spiritual quest and have absolutely no awareness of 1) her gross appropriation of another culture's religion, and 2) the abject poverty that surrounds her, is inexusable. She oozes privilege at every turn, and that privilege remains unacknowledged and unexamined.
I was willing to look past my initial reaction that the end of a relationship is not, in the grand scheme of things, "that bad;" everyone's suffering certainly has its own validity. However, I was unable to muster much empathy for Elizabeth Gilbert despite my attempts to overcome my disgust at her shallow preoccupation.
Ultimately, this woman had nothing to teach me (other than that I should trust my own instincts to abandon a book when I have such a strong reaction of dislike from page one). I am sorry I spent the time and energy trying to finish it. I happened to read somewhere that she has recently bought a church in Manhattan which she is converting into her personal living space. And this is enlightenment? I am sickened that Paramount has bought the rights to the book for a motion picture, and that she stands to make even more money than she already has on this insipid memoir.
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Amy Kieffer
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May 1, 2008
This was one of those books I will read over and over again. All those cynics out there who criticize Gilbert for writing a "too cutesy" memoir that seems beyond belief and who claim that she is selfish for leaving her responsibility are clearly missing the point. First, she did not write the book to inspire you. She wrote it as her own memoir--you can agree or disagree with how she went about her "enlightenment," but you cannot judge her for how she found happiness. It is her memoir, not yours. You can achieve enlightement by whatever means you want. Second, to call her irresponsible for leaving responsibilities behind is absurd. She was in an unhappy marriage. You cannot force yourself to be happy. I applaud her for doing something that many people are afraid to do. She had no children and so the responsibilities she neglected were minimal.
I also suspect that those of you who didn't enjoy the book could not relate to it. You have never suffered a life-changing tragedy. You have never felt paralyzed by fear, anger, or disappointment. You have never had to go through a healing process that seems endless. You have never felt lost. That's great for you, but unfortunately that makes it hard for you to relate to this memoir.
Finally, those of you who found her story too unbelievable have probably never felt the joy of traveling the world. There is no better way to discover yourself than getting out of your comfort zone and immersing yourself in someone else's.
Traveling the world is not self-indulgent. If doing what we want to or enjoy doing is self-indulgent, then we are all guilty. If you are enjoying an ice-cream sundae, meeting your friends for a night out, or a good work out, you are being self indulgent.
My guess is that those of you who didn't find the value in this book are unhappy with your own life. Perhaps you should be a little more self-indulgent yourself.
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Cat
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May 4, 2008
I am embarrassed to read this book in public.
The title and the flowery, pasta-y cover screams, "I'm a book that contains the relentless rants of a neurotic 34 year-old-woman."
So, I'm afraid that the strangers on the Metro will think I identify with her.
But in the comfort of my own bed, I am totally falling for this memoir. Yes, Gilbert is emotionally self-indulgent (are we supposed to feel bad that she lost both houses in the divorce?), annoying (she's just tickled when she gains 23 pounds after eating her way through Italy) and often really immature (oh! The endless, endless crying).
Then again, this is a memoir and when the writing is just so clever, so hospitable, so damn funny, it's really hard to hold that against Gilbert in the end.
The plot goes something like this: A 30-year-old writer has everything she wants, including several successful books, a husband and two houses. When she realizes she doesn't want to have kids and that she's not happy after all, she has a breakdown and leaves her husband. In the process, she realizes she has no identity.
Boo-hoo.
But instead, Gilbert decides to pack up and visit Italy, India and Indonesia, three places she hopes will ultimately bring her the inner balance she's been longing for. (And on the surface, this book is a really entertaining travel essay. Gilbert has this wonderfully quirky way of describing everything: A piece of pizza, a gelato. And the people.)
It's on her travels that I start to identify with Gilbert. When I was 21, I spent four months traveling in Australia. Just like Gilbert during her first weeks in Italy, I was totally elated by my freedom.
But about two weeks in, the loneliness came around and so did the anxiety.
My typical day started with this inner monologue: "I have to get to the museum before noon, so I can fit in the sea kayaking trip at 2. And then I have to rush to the grocery store to get food to make dinner in the stinking hostel kitchen because god forbid I go out to eat causeIHAVETOMAKETHEMONEYLASTFORTHREEMOREMONTHS!!!!"
Yikes. How I envied the Eurotrash who could just sit by the hostel pool and read all day. But if I didn't do everything, then I would have failed at traveling.
In retrospect, Australia was a turning-point in my young life. I had no idea that this "go-go-go" attitude was how I had been living for years. No wonder people thought I was uptight. Relaxing had never come easy to me, and it never will, but I'm getting a lot better at letting go and not worrying about seeing every last museum... so-to-speak.
Gilbert ruminates on this topic quite a bit in her book. Her first moment of true, unfettered happiness comes when she poaches some eggs and eats some asparagus on the floor of her apartment. So simple, but so fulfilling.
In India, she writes that "life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death." Gilbert is living in an Ashram, a place where people come to meditate and experience divinity. She's not very good at it, and she wonders if all the energy she's spent chasing the next experience has kept her from enjoying anything. At this point in the book, I find myself wondering if Gilbert wants to be there at all. Perhaps going to an Ashram was the thing she thought she should do, not what she wanted to do. I sure as hell wouldn't.
What I really love about "Eat, Pray, Love" is that it's all about asking the simple question, "what do I want," a question that would have come in handy in Australia and numerous other times in my life. It's so hard for some people, including me, and it really shouldn't be. I think that when you can honestly answer that question ("No. I don't want to go to that discussion on post-modernism, even though I realize that I should be interested in it and it would make me a lot cooler in your eyes. Really, I just want to watch back-to-back episodes of "Scrubs") you're well on your way to realizing your own identity and being ok with whoever that person is.
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Nayra.Hassan
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December 1, 2022
امراة تترك كل شيء و ترحل ؛لماذا تحقق تلك الكتب و الافلام التي تتناول سفر"إمرأة"ما للمجهول كل هذه الشهرة و الشعبية؟مثل"النوم مع العدو / تحت شمس توسكان
و بالطبع على رأسهم : السيرة الذاتية /كتاب الرحلات: طعام.صلاة..حب
تنجح كتب رحيل النساء ببساطة : لان الأشجار لا تتحرك .
نحن من نذهب اليها ..
و المرأة =شجرة فطرها الله على ثبات جذورها في الارض مهما حدث لتستمر الحياة..قد تسافر وحدها قليلا جدا : أسابيع للعمل او للسياحة لكنها تعود سريعا جدا ..في الشرق و الغرب و الشمال و الجنوب ..ستصل المرأة دائما لوضع الشجرة مهما تأخرت..فهل رايت شجرة تنخلع و تجري الا في فيلم سيد الخواتم؟؟
و كل إمرأة في وقت ما تسأم الثبات و وضع الشجرة و تتمني و تحلم ان تفعل مثل اليزابيث / فرانسيس / سارة
تبدا من جديد في اي مكان بعيد..لا لن تكون طموحة جدا و تبحث عن كل شيء مثل اليزابيث ..بل فقط .. تهرب من خيبات امل و قهر و خذلان و علاقات ميتة و احلام مجهضة
باحت اليزابيث بالمسكوت عنه..و فعلت ما حلمت به كل نساء الارض مهما انكرن : ينطلقن بحثاً عن السلام النفسي و الحرية
عندما تقرا على لسان امراة ثلاثينية انها "لا تريد ان تكون متزوجة بعد اليوم!! و الادهي انها ترفض تماما ان تكون اما ..لانها تعلم ان الابناء ببساطة : " لكمات في الوجه " و هم جذور الشجرة ..اذن نحن هنا امام استثناء حقيقي لانها سيرة ذاتية
حتى لو لم اتفق معها مطلقا في فرديتها و انانيتها لكني لن احكم على مسيرتها الشخصية و اختياراتها . . بل فقط على كتابها
الصدق ثم الصدق و اخيرا قليل من التصنع هو ما يميز هذا الكتاب الثري المقسم ل3اجزاء
1. جزء :كله يدلع نفسه
انا افضل جزء ايطاليا بالطبع مثل الاغلبية " ....ايطاليا هي مهرب محطمي القلوب في العالم كله ..و عندما زرتها فهمت
جوها هو الافضل على الاطلاق ..اهلها "بايعين كل القضايا " بشكل لن تتخيله ما لم تراهم .. يمارسون اعمالهم بانشراح غريب ..يتعاملون مع ابشع الموضوعات بتبسط مريب..لذا هم افضل المتعاملين مع السياح و الهاربين و الناقميين
جزء : فوق بقى
بالنسبة لي جاء جزء الهند في مجمله مملا جدا ..فالتامل يمارس و لا يتم الكتابة عنه. .و قد نصلي شهورا و اعوام لنصل اخيرا للصلاة التي نرضى عنها ..فنحن من نحتاج للتواصل مع الله تعالى و هذا قد يحدث في غرفتك الخاصة ؛على البحر؛ في المسجد ..اي مكان و ليس من الضروري ابدا ان يكون في الهند
جزء 3 : انت معلم
الطبيب الحكيم الكيوت" كتوت" يفعل المستحيل ليسقي اليزابيث حكمة اهل الشرق و يشرح لها ان هناك اربعة أسرار للسعادة و الامان هي
الذكاء..الصداقة ..القوة ..و الشعر! !ا
to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength, and poetry
و لاني لا احب الشعر لن احصل على السعادة اذن 😢لا هنا و لا في بالي
اليزابيث شاركت اهل البلاد الثلاثة التي زارتها افراحهم و اتراحهم..طعامهم و بعض اوجاعهم..كل ذلك و هي تبحث عن ايمانها ..عن سلامها المنشود ..عن القليل من كل شيء ..
لذا جاء كتابها في ثلثه الأول؛ ككتاب الاحلام بالنسبة لكل ��لمقيدات
كتاب الرحلات النموذجي الذي نحلم به جميعا
ولكن من الممكن ان نفعل ذلك جميعا في سفراتنا الداخلية و الخارجية : نتعامل ببساطة ؛ بابتسامة ؛ نسافر وحدنا احيانا لنترك فرصة للتقارب الانساني ..ليس من الضروري ان نمكث شهورا و أعوام ..و لا ان ننفق 200الف دولار و لا نحرق مراكبنا قبل السفر
احيانا اليوم الواحد يقربك ممن لا تعرفه أكثر من بعض اهلك
المهم ان تفتح قلبك
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Simone Ramone
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February 4, 2016
I found this book unbelievably phoney.
I hated this so much that I got up early this morning to finish it and gave my copy to the library and honestly, I'm not too proud of that.
To me it just felt so insincere that there's no chance I would have made it past the second chapter had it not been for book club obligations.
I enjoyed her writing style, but I absolutely could not warm to her at all. To be fair, I do think she would be an excellent travel writer.
The section on India was agony to read.
I have met enough people freshly returned from Indian ashrams to know that they often seem a tad self absorbed and I also suspect that they really only get up at 3am so that they have even more "me" time.
She didn't do much to alter my opinion.
Honestly, this woman meditated longer, harder and bluer than anyone else has, past or present. She won the meditation competition that no-one was actually having.
Possibly it was not enlightenment that she found, but simply that she finally became completely self absorbed.
Easy mistake to make.
book-club
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[Name Redacted]
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March 8, 2012
Shallow, self-indulgent and mired in the sort of liberal American obsession with "oriental" exoticism that is uniquely offensive because it is treated as enobling by its purveyors. She treats the rest of the world as though it exists for the consumption of jaded, rich, white Americans and this book is a monument to that sort of arrogance and ignorance.
essays-and-autobiographies tripe
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(0v0)
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September 23, 2007
What I'm about to say must be wrong, because I couldn't get through this book. I tried. And I failed. So: I have NO BUSINESS WRITING THIS. Don't read it.
A cousin recommended EPL and I thought it would teach me something about the book market. My secret boyfriend at the public library was horrified I checked it out, given his ACLU-offensive intimacy with my record and tastes; and yes, like others, I was embarrassed to have EPL in my possession.
Because:
What IS this MOVEMENT of lily-white bourgeois women with fancy educations working themselves into identity crises that they think can be solved by a new form of coloniasm? This hyper-feminized adventure travel?
Subaltern poaching for the 21st century. Taker mentality as spiritual quest.
These people need their own version of Outside magazine or some shit. Oh yeah, they already do. It's called the GAIAM catalog.
Yeah. We're talking some serious dilettante tourism: taking entire countries as theme spas. Italy for excess, India for asceticism, Indonesia for the middle path.
Ladies: Country I is not your personal terrain for self-discovery. You don't get to interiorize Country I as a metaphor for your personal potential. If your interior journey needs a bunch of leisure time and poor countries to be realized, maybe you're asking the wrong questions.
The consumerist mentality was so self-important and so priveleged that I just couldn't make myself give this book any more time.
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