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Elizabeth Gilbert is a Philadelphia-based journalist for GQ. Her previous books were finalists for the PEN/Hemingway, National Book, and National Book Critics Circle Awards.
In her memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, we meet Liz at the age of thirty-one when she no longer wants to be married, doesn't want to have a baby, and doesn't want her big house in the suburbs. In the throes of a bitter divorce, she decides to go on a sabbatical through Italy, India, and Indonesia, using an advance she gets to write a book about her journey.
With humor, compassion, and zest, the author embarks upon her interior and exterior quest to speak Italian, meditate in an ashram, and reconnect with a Balinese medicine man. Admiring her "fearless eating" and friendliness to the point of being able to "make friends with the dead," we join Liz as she learns pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and balance in Indonesia. We hear the water as sex "runs through the fountains" in Rome. We feel "the soul excuse itself from time and space to merge with the infinite" at the ashram. We taste "turmeric juice, for keep clean the kidneys" in Bali. Like the author, we don't to leave, and maybe we don't have to because the book is being made into a movie starring Julia Roberts.
(See another review of this book, here)
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