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Jen's review

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

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19501.Eat_Pray_Love_One_Woman_s_Search_for_Everything_Across_Italy_India_and_Indonesia?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167249254m/19501.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19501.Eat_Pray_Love_One_Woman_s_Search_for_Everything_Across_Italy_India_and_Indonesia?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/11679.Elizabeth_Gilbert">Elizabeth Gilbert</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/14091484?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 5 of 5 stars Wow. I just gave Eat, Pray, Love a tearful send-off. And now I will relate to you the reasons why.
 
 The book has helped me come to terms with the fact that this whole healing process is taking so long, longer than any of my friends expected I think, and that it's not over. But even so, it's OK. I can still live my life and do new things and make new friends and still work through it. I'm not cheating anyone by giving them what I've got right now, as opposed to the miracle woman that I think I should be. I don't have to stop living until I've deemed myself "healed," because I am pretty sure this has changed me forever. Which is OK. It's good, actually.
 
 The author starts making a concerted effort to repair herself. She has a moment of self-forgiveness:
 
 
 
 I also knew somehow that this respite of peace would be temporary. I knew that I was not yet finished for good, that my anger, my sadness, and my shame would all creep back eventually, escaping my heart and occupying my head once more. I knew that I would have to keep dealing with these thoughts again and again until I
 slowly and determinedly changed my whole life. And that this would be difficult and exhausting to do. But my heart said to my mind in the dark silence of that beach: "I love you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of you." (p. 328)
 
 This has been somewhat of a mantra for me in recent months. I read in a sort of self-help book back in May a quote that has stayed with me: "The only person who will never leave you is you." By choice or no, everyone in your life is bound to leave you someday. You must take care of yourself, and be happy with who you are. Especially if you're going to spend every day of the rest of your life with YOU.
 
 Despite our best efforts to be happy, however, we're human and shit happens: 
 
 She'd fallen in love with a Sardinian artist, who'd promised her another world of light and sun, but had left her, instead, with three children and no choice but to return to Venice and run the family restaurant. She is my age but looks even older than I do, and I can't imagine the kind of man who could do that to a woman so attractive. ("He was powerful," she says, "and I died of love in his shadow.) (p. 101)
 "Died of love in his shadow" is exactly it. I can't put it any better. I don't even think it needs explanation. There is pain and sorrow everywhere, within everyone. "Life is what happens while you're making other plans." Right? The author ends up in Bali, visiting daily with a medicine man. She asks him how to cure the craziness of the world:
 
 
 Ketut went on to explain that the Balinese believe we are each accompanied at birth by four invisible brothers, who come into the world with us and protect us throughout our lives. When the child is in the womb, her four siblings are even there with her--they are represented by the placenta, the amniotic fluid, the umbilical cord, and the yellow waxy substance that protects an unborn baby's
 skin...
 The child is taught from the earliest consciousness that she has these four brothers with her in the world wherever she goes, and that they will always look after her. The brothers inhabit the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength, and (I love this one) poetry. The brothers can be called upon in any critical situation for rescue and assistance. When you die, your four spirit brothers collect your soul and bring you to heaven. (p. 251) 
 I love this spiritual Balinese metaphor for familial love and protection. I may only have 3 brothers, but I do feel like they are my Western counterpart to the Balinese brothers. My family has been with me all the way through this past 11 months.
 
 Another thing. I am reassured about my own attempts to travel, see people, grow, learn, live, love. Happiness is achieved with hard work. I've known this all along, and tried my very best to apply it to my marriage, but was dealt a blow and learned that I can only be responsible for my own happiness. I can't sacrifice myself for the happiness of someone else. I can't erase myself because someone else is having a temper tantrum at the airport. (I used to jokingly tell people that I pretended not to know him at the airport when he'd pitch a fit. But it was true.) And now I've been able to spend time making myself happy. At first I would elatedly think things to myself like, "I'm in the car and no one is angry. It's quiet, no one is yelling or punching the steering wheel or threatening to turn around in 5 minutes if the traffic doesn't clear up. No one is weaving violently around cars and looking sideways at me as if to say, 'Don't challenge me, I AM a safe driver!' I can change the radio station. I can even turn the radio off. I can be ME."
 
 
 Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it... And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. (p.206)
 
 
 So how does one move on after trying so hard and failing to make someone else happy? The author of the book has gotten divorced and goes on a year-long voyage of self-discovery, and ends up returning to a place she had visited during the throes of divorce, but this time she is completely content. I read this part and immediately thought of Friday night, driving home from my friend's house. I drove past a Wawa where I had pulled over to cry my eyes out on my way home from her house one night in the spring. It was one of those moments in the car where I was alone and driving with my thoughts, and it was bad enough that I had to stop the car. I remember calling Andrea and crying it out with her. But on Friday I looked at the lot and thought, "Poor Jen." And I was sad for myself and what I had been through, but in a sort of "she-went-through-a-lot-and-it-breaks-my-heart" kind of way. Like I was thinking about someone else, a best friend, not living it in the moment. Now, although my experience was on a much smaller scale than Elizabeth Gilbert's, I SEE. I understand. I identify.
 
 
 I think about the woman I have become lately, about the life that I am now living, and about how much I always wanted to be this person and live this life, liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself. I think of everything I endured before getting here and wonder if it was me--I mean, this happy and balanced me, who is now dozing on the deck of this small Indonesian fishing boat--who pulled the other, younger, more confused and more struggling me forward during all those hard years... Knowing already that everything would be OK, that everyhing would eventually bring us together here. Right here, right to this moment. Where I was always waiting in peace and contentment, always waiting for her to arrive and join me. (pp. 329-330)
 
 And that's not all: 
 
 In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices. (p. 334)
 
 
 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/142287?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Jen's review
rating:

Wow. I just gave Eat, Pray, Love a tearful send-off. And now I will relate to you the reasons why.

The book has helped me come to terms with the fact that this whole healing process is taking so long, longer than any of my friends expected I think, and that it's not over. But even so, it's OK. I can still live my life and do new things and make new friends and still work through it. I'm not cheating anyone by giving them what I've got right now, as opposed to the miracle woman that I think I should be. I don't have to stop living until I've deemed myself "healed," because I am pretty sure this has changed me forever. Which is OK. It's good, actually.

The author starts making a concerted effort to repair herself. She has a moment of self-forgiveness:

I also knew somehow that this respite of peace would be temporary. I knew that I was not yet finished for good, that my anger, my sadness, and my shame would all creep back eventually, escaping my heart and occupying ...more

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message 1: by Mamafeelgood

04/09/2008 07:24AM

This was beautiful. I can't wait to finish reading this book.