Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert, 2006
Memoir & biography Travel & nature
A woman walks out of a marriage and a script she never wrote, and spends a year in Italy, India and Indonesia finding out what she actually wants. Witty and hopeful, with a wandering pace and a voice that turns private misery into wry, wondering travel.
Feels like hope and wonder. About memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy witty, introspective travel memoirs about a woman rebuilding after divorce. The book spends real time on sobbing and marital unhappiness before the travel.
Why read it
A funny, hopeful account of leaving a life that looks fine from outside and paying attention to what she wants. It offers armchair travel to Italy, India and Indonesia with a candid narrator.
A page from the book
There is a kind of crying that only happens where nobody can hear it.
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. Elizabeth Gilbert.Before Eat Pray Love, Gilbert tended bar in New York and wrote a 1997 GQ essay about it — the piece that inspired the film Coyote Ugly.
Books that feel like this
More by Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
Elizabeth Gilbert, 2019
An old woman explains the Manhattan theatre years that made her — the showgirls, the bad decisions, the pleasure taken without apology.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Eat, Pray, Love for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy witty, introspective travel memoirs about a woman rebuilding after divorce. The book spends real time on sobbing and marital unhappiness before the travel.
- What is Eat, Pray, Love like?
- Witty and hopeful, with a wandering pace and a voice that turns private misery into wry, wondering travel. Feels like hope and wonder. About memory.
- What should I read after Eat, Pray, Love?
- If you liked Eat, Pray, Love, try A Daughter of the Samurai (Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto), When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi) and Wild (Cheryl Strayed).
A taste of the feed
A mother unpicks generations of needlework so her daughter can pass unnoticed.
All that winter the household was busy getting me ready for school. The pathos of these preparations I did not realize; nor, I think, did any of us. Mother spent evening after evening bending her stately head over wonderful embroidered garments, ripping out, stitch by stitch, the exquisite work of hands folded in rest generations ago. Then Ishi would dye the silk and make it into plain garments suitable for my school life.
A Daughter of the Samurai · Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto
The wilderness grief leaves you in, and the years it takes to walk out.
It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again. To be the woman my mother raised. To remember how she said honey and picture her particular gaze. I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn’t know where I was going until I got there.
Wild · Cheryl Strayed
The silence after you stop being corrected is not kindness.
He said, when you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up. And that’s a lesson that stuck with me my whole life. Is that when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care.
The Last Lecture · Randy Pausch
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