Despite having sold over ten million copies worldwide, Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” continues to receive mixed reviews from its readers and critics since its release in 2006. The book follows recent divorcee Liz to Italy where she indulges in the pleasures of food, then India where she struggles through the task of prayer and meditation and finally to Indonesia where, with the help of her own personal guru, she attempts to learn to love again.
Essentially a story of self-discovery, the book “has been passed from woman to woman like the secret of life” (Sunday Times) and this is what initially made me want to read it. Gilbert writes in a way that makes you feel like you are walking in her shoes, from the frustrations she feels when unable to grasp the art and benefits of the meditation she experiences, to the relief she feels once she learns to embrace her loneliness rather than suffer with it. Her personal style of writing makes the book an enjoyable and somewhat easy read. The descriptions of the places she visits only serves to make me want to travel and experience the world (outside of what we class as the ordinary) more so.
I would recommend the book on the basis that you enter it with an open mind; any one particularly sceptical about the power of religion and meditation shouldn’t completely ignore the middle section of the book. Despite the somewhat technical terms and drawn out explanations of her time in Indonesia, the skill of prayer and sacrifice become essential to understand the changes that have taken place in Liz’s character.
As a book which remained a New York Times Bestseller for over 200 weeks it seems impossible to write it off as simply the laments of a middle class American woman who had the luxury to escape the demands of her everyday life and travel the world, and yet this is a common criticism. Some readers may interpret Liz’s story as that of a woman immersed in the problems of her own life and therefore ignoring everything else taking place around her. Especially during her travels, you may expect an enlightenment of some sort, in that Liz will look outside the confines of her own life, but some may see it that instead, her narrow view simplifies the vast and intricate cultures she experiences.
Admittedly, depending on your preferences the writing can appear rather indulgent, but it allows you to invest in one woman’s journey rather than an excessive plot and this is why her style of writing excels. The book does lose momentum towards the end but stick with it and if nothing else, Julia Roberts plays the lead in the film adaptation so surely that gains some points!
As a reader, one of the main strengths of the book lays in Gilbert’s attempt to deal with suffering from depression, a condition viewed as impossible to convey, and yet her personal and often humorous style of writing communicates this journey in an enlightened way. This may be why some critics and readers believe that she is in no position to be writing about something which she obviously hasn’t experienced the extremities of, because if she had, she would be unable to express it in such a light hearted and confident way.
However, having read and enjoyed it, I choose to take the book as a an example of writing which can inspire and comfort, rather than as a reader who is trying to trump her experience with a worse case example, as this approach ruins the gems of truth and inspiration which do exist in Gilbert’s work. I also think it is important to remember that she is writing retrospectively, how she “took on depression like it was the fight of [her] life”, and so feels that she has come out the other side of her suffering. As readers, we should be praising this rather than questioning the legitimacy of her pain.
Following these criticisms comes the egocentric nature of Liz’s writing, but I think it’s important to recognise early on that she admits she has chosen to adopt this selfish nature to try and deal with her past. Some readers might argue that there are thousands of women all over the world in her position; recently divorced, unmotivated and somewhat lost and yet they all brush themselves down and get on with life.
But surely, if we all had the choice and the money to travel the world for 12 months to attempt to find a long term solution to these problems, we would too. The least we can do is praise Gilbert for using her skill of writing on such a personal level to share her experience and allow her 10 million readers to taste a portion of the freedom she is lucky to embrace.
In her words: “That’s the thing about a human life- there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed”- appreciate the book as one woman’s journey rather than as a set of instructions for us all.
This is what she chose to do with her life, and perhaps the success of the book is in questioning the reader – what will we choose to do with our own?
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Laura Roche