Eat, Pray, Love
2001
- viajes
- travel
- biografía espiritual
- biografía
- description and travel
- religious aspects of self-realization
- self-realization in women
- spiritual biography
- viaje
- autoras estadounidenses
The story
This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali. By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise and funny author (whom Booklist calls "Anne Lamott's hip, yoga- practicing, footloose younger sister") is poised to garner yet more adoring fans.
What it’s like
Warm, chatty first-person prose that moves like a long letter from a friend who has just returned from abroad: sensory and self-amused, full of cafe tables, saffron-scented Roman evenings, the stillness of an Indian ashram and the humid greens of a Balinese village. The sensory world arrives through appetite and attention, with food, heat, morning light on terracotta, and the small comedies of being a stranger in other languages. The vibe is rueful, luminous and candid, a restless heart slowing down in stages. It suits a slow weekend with a cup of tea, a long-haul flight, or a summer afternoon on a balcony when you want company rather than plot. Pacing is unhurried and digressive, with long reflective passages broken by bright anecdote and self-deprecating humor. The emotional register is hopeful and tender, with grief, heartbreak and depression handled frankly but never bleakly. The arc follows a woman in her thirties learning to trust her own desires again, gradually choosing pleasure, faith and balance over fear. Intensity is very low: no violence, no gore, nothing sexual on the page beyond frank, non-explicit romance, and sadness that is honest but gentle. It is for readers who want an intimate travelogue of self-discovery, the kind of book that feels like being let into a clever friend's diary.
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