Chapter One Hundred Seventy-Three: Eat, Pray, Love

Okay, so for years and years--nearly a decade, actually--I'd intentionally avoided reading Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love mainly on the objection that the title and cover combined seemed to me to exude such complete smug pretentiousness.  The blurb on the back of the book didn't exactly help to dispel that impression, either.  But as soon as I started listening to a later book by Gilbert (Big Magic--see my previous post), I was enchanted by the author and her delightful reading voice!  So I decided, despite my apprehension about Eat, Pray, Love to give it a listen, and I was surprisingly glad I did!  I found myself enjoying this memoir despite myself.  Eat, Pray, Love gives enough of the backstory on Gilbert's messy, distressing, and drawn-out divorce that you can understand why she'd want to spend a year out of the country afterward (even if you, like me, are pretty jealous that she was in the financial and professional position to just drop everything and live abroad for a year).  For various reasons, which you'll have to read (or listen to) the book to find out, she decides to spend four months in Italy, then four months in India, and finally four months in Indonesia.  She's mostly doing some intense soul-searching, which sounds vaguely self-indulgent on her part and tiresome to experience secondhand as a reader or listener, but I was surprised at how interested and even invested in her experiences I became as I listened.  Also, she meets some fantastically interesting people along the way who also make their way into this memoir: it's not just an inner monologue, but also the best kind of travel-writing.  If you, like me, have been avoiding this book, I'd urge you to at least give it a try, and if you're interested in memoirs or travel writing, definitely check it out.