Memoir: Eat Pray Love

"These are some days from my life. There was no writing in those days, but they made the writing that came after possible." --David Bergen, "And You Arrive on the Other Side With Nothing" from Writing Life

Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, Eat Pray Love, is not about writing, but about the days that made writing possible. In the aftermath of a painful divorce and the break-up of a love affair, Gilbert fashioned a year-long pilgrimage for herself, to the countries of Italy, India, and Indonesia.

In Italy she pursued pleasure: "There are so many manifestations of pleasure in Italy, and I didn't have time to sample them all. You have to kind of declare a pleasure major here, or you'll get overwhelmed. . . . I found that all I really wanted was to eat beautiful food and to speak as much beautiful Italian as possible. That was it. So I declared a double major, really--in speaking and in eating (with a concentration on gelato)."

Then to India, where she undertook devotion, spending four months in an Ashram: "I arrive right on time for the 4:00 AM meditation session which always starts the day here. We are meant to sit for an hour in silence, but I log the minutes as if tey are miles--sixty brutal miles that I have to endure. By mile/minute fourteen, my nerves have started to go, my knees are breaking down and I'm overcome with exasperation. . . . An Ashram is supposed to be a place where you come to deepend your meditation, but this is a disaster. The pressure is too much for me. I can't do it. But what should I do? Run out of the temple crying after fourteen minutes, every day?"

Finally she landed in Bali, Indonesia to find balance, with no further plans than to revisit a medicine man she met two years earlier: "I don't know exactly what I'd imagined it would be like to meet Ketut again, but I did hope we'd have some sort of super-karmic tearful reunion. And while it's true I had feared he might be dead, it hadn't occurred to me that--if he were still alive--he wouldn't remember me at all. Although now it seems the height of dumbness to have ever imagined that our first meeting would have been as memorable for him as it was for me. Maybe I should have planned this better, for real."

I devoured this book in three days, one for each country. I was riveted by Gilbert's humour and self-analysis, her love for the people she meets and the geography around her, her paradoxical mix of humility and confidence. And she tells a ripping good story about connecting with God and healing the soul.

For a clearer glimpse into her writing life, try this lecture that Gilbert gave at the NYU School of Journalism:

What do you do if the right words don’t come to you, a student asked, during the question-and-answer period after Gilbert’s talk. “Don’t be fooled,” said Gilbert. “[Writer’s block is] a trickster sent to keep you from what you’re meant to be doing.” It comes to sap your confidence, she insisted. Gilbert confronted this trickster at an artist’s residence in Wyoming in 2004, while writing her memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. For her first drafts, she confided, “I’m a plough mule, not an artist.” Facing down writer’s block, she said, “I will plough one row, turn around and plough another row, and all those rows are pages.”

I'm tempted to be jealous of this woman, but I'm opting for gratitude instead, thankful that she lived this year of her life and then wrote it all down for the rest of us.