All About Eating, Praying and Loving - A review of Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

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Late one cold November night, in the suburbs of New York, a thirty-one-year-old blonde was sobbing on her bathroom floor. She didn’t want to be married anymore, she realized that she was trying to keep this part of her hidden.  Domestically speaking, she has accomplished a great deal - where to live and with whom she wanted to live in - but she also wanted to get out.


Elizabeth Gilbert then went through a whirlwind of a divorce and had to end it by giving away the house and a lot of her money to her ex husband as alimony.  


After her divorce she went for a year long wander lust holiday, first to Italy, then to India and finally to Indonesia.  In Italy, she indulged herself into the local culture by taking up and Italian language class and by taking Gelati in the morning and went searching for the best pizza in Italy.  Throughout her Italian adventure, she desperately tries to  nurse her depression into the closet by getting acquainted with the matron of the hostel she was staying and cooking her own Italian food.  By the end of her Italian trip, she swears that she has overcome her depression.


Next, she travels to India.  Her quest to India is to practice further medication techniques at her Guru's ashram. We are kept unaware of her Guru's name as well as the location of the ashram as Gilbert wanted to protect the privacy of the ashram as she has promised in the introduction of her book.  Waking up in the wee mornings to join the meditation group, she battles with the constant nagging of thoughts in her mind.  She tries to find inner peace within and finally think she saw "God" one morning.  This brings her to her next destination - Indonesia.


In her final destination, she finds love in Bali, Indonesia when she met Ketut, a ninth generation Indian medicine man, which she met two years prior to her visit to Bali.  Ketut couldn't recognize her at once but eventually remembers her, much to her delight. Ketut has asked her to come to Indonesia to teach him English while he would teach her everything he knows.  Elizabeth eventually meets Felipe, a Brazilian man, who himself, has also experienced a painful divorce, falls deeply in love with her and the story ends with a romantic twist, which the writer leasts expects.