Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2006

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 9

Chapters 10-18

Chapters 19-27

Chapters 28-36

Chapters 37-45

Chapters 46-54

Chapters 55-63

Chapters 64-72

Chapters 73-81

Chapters 82-90

Chapters 91-99

Chapters 100-108

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Food/Nourishment

The reader may assume, because of the title Eat Pray Love, that the food consumed in Italy in Book 1 is the predominant food in the memoir. Yet, Liz feeds herself constantly for a full year on this personal journey of self-discovery: physically, spiritually, and intellectually. Her appetite is omnivorous.

Liz goes to Italy after losing 30 pounds during her divorce and broken affair. She eats and regains weight—food for the body. She constantly eats. She describes her first meal in Rome as “nothing much”: “Just some homemade pasta (spaghetti alla carbonara) with a side order of sauteed spinach and garlic” (39). This dismissive attitude reflects Liz’s mental and emotional state upon arriving in Italy, but as she travels, she becomes more engaged with the process of eating and soon begins seeking out the very best food that Italy has to offer. This food not only nourishes her body but also her soul, as enriching her physical self is the first step to attaining spiritual and intellectual enrichment.

The ashram in India feeds Liz’s spiritual quest with disciplined practices that eliminate “monkey mind” thoughts and release her to experience kundalini shakti and shaktipat. This “food” nourishes her inner being and burns away the negativity. She says, “You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions” (145). She could just as well be saying “You are what you eat.” She wants to devour God: “I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water” (194). Her tendency to overeat physical food, however, extends to the ashram. Richard from Texas begins to call her “Groceries” when he sees how much food she takes from the vegetarian buffet. She learns to pray specifically, and she begins to consider thought as a kind of food. It can be healthy or unhealthy: “I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore” (197). She repeats this vow 700 times a day.

Wayan in Bali serves lunch in her restaurant, and Liz starts going every day to eat it. Wayan tells her she also needs Vitamin E. Armenia lures Liz to a party hosted by a Brazilian ex-pat by telling her: “He’ll be cooking a feijoada—a traditional Brazilian feast consisting of massive piles of pork and black beans” (293). When she experiences sexual longing that challenges her celibacy vow, Liz attempts to satisfy it with food.

I went to the kitchen in my nightgown, peeled a pound of potatoes, boiled them up, sliced them, fried them in butter, salted them generously and ate every bite of them—asking my body the whole while if it would please accept the satisfaction of a pound of fried potatoes in lieu of the fulfillment of lovemaking (316).

When it doesn’t work, she masturbates. Sex feeds Liz’s dried cartilage and her post-celibacy craving for “belly to belly” union. Felipe constantly feeds her, combining dinner with lovemaking.

Yet her intellectual “feeding” never stops throughout the book. She researches and reports on the history of the monuments in the streets of Rome, the arts and politics of Italy, and the emergence of its language. She tells the reader about the history behind the spiritual practice at the ashram and its relationship with major religions. We learn the rigid clan structure of Bali has Hindi origins. She connects her intellectual curiosity with physical food when she concludes that only “artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real” (127).

Spirituality/Prayer

Gilbert’s journey in Eat Pray Love requires coming to terms with the notion that God dwells within her. It begins in her conversation with God on the bathroom floor when a voice tells her, “Go back to bed, Liz” (17). It progresses in India when her “thoughts become like old neighbors” (223) and she can “climb down that ladder into my own hub of stillness” in meditation (231). It culminates in Bali when “nothing was fighting in my mind anymore” (362). Liz discovers that “spirit” and “God” are one.

The reader first learns about her search when she is on the floor in the bathroom and wants to talk to God. She doesn’t give it another name like “Void” or “Universe,” but rather specifically calls on “God,” whom she refers to as “Him.” The guru she meets in New York inspires her to visit the ashram in India. There Liz explores the history and dogma of various religions from the standpoint of a journalist. She conducts her research at the same time she seeks her personal path.

At the ashram, she tries Vipassana in addition to the prescribed meditation practice and discovers she can sit still without swatting mosquitoes. She rebels against the Gurugita’s 182 verses until her favorite monk tells her: “It’s a text of unimaginable power. It is a mighty purifying practice. It burns away all your junk, all your negative emotions” (180). She has plenty of both. She is finally convinced when he says, “If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it’s working on you” (180). As a result of her practice, she says that she is “pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush, I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely […] I just was part of God” (220).

When Ketut tells her to sit quietly and smile in meditation, that yoga is too strenuous, Liz takes up a practice of “smile” in the morning and her guru’s practice in the evening. It works for her. In the end, it is a personal search for the “Divinity within.” When Felipe suggests a final vacation on Gil Meno Island, it takes her back to a silent retreat on that island when she had her “ultimate truth and reconciliation hearing” (358). Her heart speaks to her mind in the silence of that beach: “I love you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of you” (362).

Liz finds that the experience validates her intellectual discovery. All religions are based on prophet seekers who end up with the same answer: God is “within,” has always been, and will always be. Ketut tells her the universe is a complete circle and that all religions are “same, same.” On this view, dogmas do not matter as long the individual’s practice unites them in peace with their inner Divinity.

Social Structure

It is one thing to research cultures intellectually and quite another to live there day to day among the people. This experience gives Liz an understanding of where she fits within the culture of her birth, with its expectations of what a woman must do. She comes to terms with her deviation from its “norm” in pursuit of ambition and career and her revulsion toward childbirth and raising a family.

Italy appears to be a “free” society, yet many young men live at home with their mothers and maintain teenage romantic attachments. Italy has its contradictions. Celebrated for its arts and culture, Italy’s institutions have often been corrupt, from emperors to the mafia. Yet art and beauty prevail. Gilbert hypothesizes: “Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one’s own senses, and this makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe” (127). Art in Italy rises above corrupt institutions, for “artistic excellence is incorruptible” (127). Luca Spaghetti has been to America where, he says, people work too hard and eat “Amtrak Pizza.” He will take the Italian pleasure of a good meal. For Liz, after four months, she will, too. She loves Italy, loves Rome, yet its word, “sex,” does not define her.

When Liz and Richard leave the ashram and go out into the village, they see women in saris with sledgehammers breaking rocks. The ashram, with its pristine gardens and secluded beauty, is surrounded by poverty. The caste system prevails, and “Karma” is accepted. Richard warns Liz if she doesn’t get over her “monkey mind,” she might come back with a sledgehammer. Caste and Karma hold people in line, unlike in America, which has a degree of social mobility.

Bali’s tourism advertisements cover up its violent past, the predilection for manipulation, and the underbelly of corruption. The Balinese people, with their Hindu structure, accept “place” determined by caste and clan. The three questions asked by the Balinese reflect this outlook: Where have you been? Where are you going? Are you married? Mario embodies this outlook. Gilbert says that he is only happy when he is mentally and spiritually “at the intersection between a vertical line and a horizontal one, in a state of perfect balance. For this, he needs to know exactly where he is located at every moment both in his relationship to the divine and to his family here on earth” (250).

Gilbert also observed this emphasis on “place” at her mother’s family reunions. She felt that she didn’t fit in. The awareness of structure in the cultures of Italy, India, and Bali provides a framework for Gilbert’s understanding and acceptance of her unique “inner divinity” and her role in American culture. It finally sinks in and she “gets it” in Bali. She comes to believe that there is nothing wrong with being Liz, as she is right here and right now.

Sex

Although the word “sex” does not appear in the title of the book, Gilbert’s sexuality frames the memoir. Sex plagues her marriage in the expectation that she “should” get pregnant by 30. When she ends the marriage and begins an affair with David, it leads her to misery. It ends when nights with him are a nightmare and, she says, “in his bed, I became the only survivor of a nuclear winter as he visibly retreated from me, more every day, as though I were infectious” (22). She says that her addiction to David results in “infatuation’s final destination—the complete and merciless devaluation of self” (22). Liz takes a vow of celibacy for a year to heal from the obsessive and selfish sexual relationships she has maintained since the age of 15. Yet, the first sentence of “Italy” is” “I wish Giovanni would kiss me” (7). She grapples with loneliness by telling herself to “never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings” (71).

Gilbert’s past relationship decisions and failures haunt and block her emotional release. When she obsesses over them, Richard from Texas confronts her about the control issues that dominate her relationships. She needs to seek a different kind of relationship. He tells her she needs to go from a droughtmaker to a rainmaker, that the best way to “get over” someone is to “get under” someone else. She can avoid sex in the ashram, but its complications prevail in her “monkey thoughts.”

Bali brings a degree of reconciliation with sex. Ketut has had sex with only one woman, his wife. He doesn’t understand the concept of “romance”: “She, the only woman I ever make sex with. So I do not know” (308). Ketut and his wife had no children. Unlike Ketut, Wayan openly discusses toys, potions, and techniques. Gilbert says, “Then, to our lurid fascination, she described the different massages she does for men’s impotent bananas, how she grips around the base of the thing and kind of shakes it around for about an hour to encourage the blood to flow, while incanting special prayers” (331). Women are divorced and abused for infertility in Bali. Wayan tells sterile husbands that the wife needs healing sessions. “When the wife comes to the shop alone, Wayan calls some young stud from the village to come over and have sex with her, hopefully creating a baby” (333).

By the end of her year of travel, Liz has gone from experiencing sex as a marital burden to a pleasurable completion of mature companionship. Liz tells Felipe that, before she met him, she thought she “might be alone and celibate forever,” and that she “would live the life of a spiritual contemplative” (323). He tells her to contemplate this: he “then proceeds to detail with careful specificity the first, second, third, fourth and fifth things he is planning to do with my body when he gets me alone in his bed again” (323). When she and Felipe come together, she finds that they “are a perfectly matched, genetically engineered belly-to-belly success story. There are no parts of our bodies which are in any way allergic to any parts of the other’s body” (325). In the “Preface” to the “Tenth Anniversary Edition,” Gilbert lists this question among the biggest and oldest questions of human life: “Do I have the right to experience pleasure and peace?” (xxi). Her answer is yes.