In Rome she vows to relearn the “art of pleasure,” tossing back gelato for breakfast and lots of wine for supper. The money allows Gilbert, who by her account lost almost everything to her ex, the luxury of a year of travel, which she divides into three parts, each with its own mandate. September 11 happens in there as well, and with both her emotional and physical landscapes thoroughly gutted, Gilbert sinks into a depression marked by several believably scary dark nights of the soul.īut then a ray of light, in the form of an advance from her publisher, pierces her gloom. She leaves her husband, falls in love again, gets way into yoga, struggles through an ugly divorce, has her heart broken by her new love, and loses 30 pounds from the stress.
It’s a less-than-inspirational moment, pleading for help alone in the middle of a “lake of tears and snot,” but it sets in motion a chain of life-changing events. More precisely, she strikes up a chat with God: “Hello God. After months of emotional turmoil and many nights spent crying in the bathroom, she completely breaks down, sobbing on the floor one night, desperate and afraid, and she begins to pray.
Married and miserable, she realizes she doesn’t want her husband, doesn’t want her comfortable suburban New York home, doesn’t want her high-flying career, and adamantly doesn’t want a baby. To be fair, as the book opens, three years before her sabbatical, things aren’t going well. Her new memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, is her account of that transformative year, and it’s to Gilbert’s great credit that by the end of it I didn’t totally hate her tall, thin, blond guts.
She got to spend her 34th year globe-trotting on her publisher’s dime, and in the process she not only found true luv (with a sexy, older Brazilian man) but also got a grip on something far more elusive: true peace. An accomplished journalist and fiction writer, she has four books and many laurels to her name-her 2002 biography of a rogue Appalachian outdoorsman, The Last American Man, a National Book Award finalist, remains one of my favorite recent pieces of nonfiction. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & RecreationĮat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert (Viking)Įlizabeth Gilbert has got it going on.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.Get your Best of Chicago tickets! Ticket prices go up May 15 > Close
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