Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is a memoir about her journey to discover who she truly is and what she wants in her life. She leaves her old life in America behind, kissing her divorce and love affairs goodbye. Elizabeth takes her journey step by step focusing on improving three main components in her life: pleasure, praying and love. She improves them one at a time each in different locations: pleasure in Italy, praying in India, and love in Indonesia. By spending four months in each country, Elizabeth hopes to find herself through her primary claim, self-discovery. For the first four months, Elizabeth lives in Italy. As she settles in her new home, she tries to fight off depression from her divorce by eating and speaking a language she loves. She makes multiple friends that accept her for her and support her decision in running away from her busy life to relax in Italy. Elizabeth realizes in Italy that she only needs to please herself and with that she leaves Europe depression free and ready to pray. The next four months she spends in India, praying to her guru in an ashram. She practices endless hours of silent meditation attempting to find peace within her. She discovers that God is within her heart and will always be there. This is her most important milestone step in her journey and also a secondary claim. Elizabeth then travels to Bali, Indonesia. Here she consults a medicine man and he helps her balance everything in her life. She then finds love with a man named Filipe. Together they love each other with such devotion that she cannot part with him. Trough all her adventures in Indonesia, Italy and India, Elizabeth learned to balance enjoyment, divine transcendence and love.

My opinion is that Elizabeth 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, heartbreaking, hilarious, ethereal and she really