I had a very love/give-me-a-break relationship with this book, so I had to give it a week or so before writing a review to let it settle. I began the book on an optimistic note, then quickly became annoyed with the long, rambling chapters justifying the author's use of the word "God" and how OTHER words for "God" are neither better nor worse, more nor less accurate, than "God" but this author feels a connection with the word "God" so she's going to use it here but REALLY, there are LOTS of ways to express the concept, etc. etc. etc.

I breathed a sigh of relief when the Italy section began, and my annoyance quickly turned into enjoyment; in fact, during this section, I couldn't put the book down. I found the author's honesty endearing and her handling of telling the story of her divorce to be very tasteful (she declines to go into much detail or to take cheap swipes at her ex-husband--a choice that becomes even more obviously conscious as the book goes on and the reader realizes that bold honesty is not something this author shies away from).

The India section, though it had its bright moments and colorful personalities (Richard from Texas was one of my favorite people in the book), was sluggish, especially during long examinations of the author's difficulty with meditating, her relationship with God, and other highly personal experiences that, frankly, I applaud her for living so fully and experiencing so honestly, but don't feel they are really relevant or all that interesting to anyone else. They're the stuff of personal journals, not dinner-table conversation. The best example of this was a chapter in which the author abruptly reveals that she traveled through her meditative vortex and encountered God. There's no setting the stage or putting the experience into the context of the rest of the book, just several long pages describing the ways she couldn't possibly describe it. Sections like this, to me, only alienate the reader.

The last section, set in Bali, did much to humanize her after those esoteric meditations on...meditation. I loved that the reader could really feel that she was finally transcending this deeply inward, wounded stage of her life and coming out onto the other side. Her writing shed much of its cumbersome devotion to detail, and we began to hear from her not every day or every moment, but periodically, to give us an update on where she'd been and what she'd been doing. It felt to me that she was finally living her life instead of just writing about it.

After a few days of processing the book, what stood out for me was the author's truly courageous willingness to write in an intensely personal style and be completely honest about herself. There were points when her honesty made me feel a bit uncomfortable--the type of uncomfortable where you wonder, "Did she mean to tell us that??" But in the end, I admired that the book was so unapologetically truthful--really a deeply felt, no-holds-barred account of one person's struggle to live through the joys and devastations that we all experience. It's not often that an author lets her readers in so completely, and though it didn't always connect for me, I appreciated that.