Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search For Everything by Elizabeth Gilbert, ISBN 9780747585664

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'Eat, Pray Love' is a journey around the world, a quest for spiritual enlightenment and a story for anyone who has battled with divorce, depression and heartbreak.

It's 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She's in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they're trying for a baby - and she doesn't want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing: pleasure, devotion and balance. So she travels to Rome, where she learns Italian from handsome, brown-eyed identical twins and gains twenty-five pounds, an ashram in India, where she finds that enlightenment entails getting up in the middle of the night to scrub the temple floor, and Bali where a toothless medicine man of indeterminate age offers her a new path to peace: simply sit still and smile. And slowly happiness begins to creep up on her.

RRP: $24.95

About the Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert was born in Connecticut in 1969 and was raised on a small family Christmas tree farm. She is the sister of the young adult novelist Catherine Murdock author of Dairy Queen and The Off Season. Elizabeth went to college in New York City in the early 1990's, and spent the years after college traveling around the country and the world, working odd jobs, writing short stories and essentially creating what she has referred to as her own MFA program.

After more than five years of sending out work for publication and collecting only rejection letters, she finally broke onto the literary scene in 1993, when one of her short stories was pulled from the slush pile at Esquire magazine and published under the heading The Debut of an American Writer.

Since that time, Gilbert has published consistently and always to high praise. Her first book, a collection of short stories called Pilgrims was said by Annie Proulx to be the work of a young writer of incandescent talent. That collection, which was a New York Times Notable Book, received the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Next came Stern Men, a bittersweet novel about lobster fishing territory wars off the coast of Maine, which was also a New York Times Notable book. The Last American Man, her biography of Eustace Conway, an eclectic modern day woodsman, was a finalist in 2002 for both The National Book Award and The National Book Critic's Circle Award.

Her most recent book is the #1 New York Times Bestselling memoir "Eat, Pray, Love," about the year she spent traveling the world alone after a difficult divorce. Anne Lamott called Eat, Pray, Love "wise, jaunty, human, ethereal, heartbreaking." The book has been a worldwide success, now published in over thirty languages. It was named by The New York Times as one of the 100 most notable books of 2006, and chosen by Entertainment Weekly as one of the best ten nonfiction books of the year. In 2008, Elizabeth was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, by Time Magazine. There are now over Five Million copies of this paperback in print.

In addition to writing books, Elizabeth has worked steadily as a journalist. Throughout much of the 1990's she was on staff at SPIN Magazine, where with humor and pathos she chronicled diverse individuals and subcultures, covering everything from rodeo's Buckle Bunnies (reprinted in The KGB Bar Reader) to China's headlong construction of the Three Gorges Dam. In 1999, Elizabeth began working for GQ magazine, where her profiles of extraordinary men from singers Hank Williams III and Tom Waits (reprinted in The Tom Waits Reader) to quadriplegic athlete Jim Maclaren earned her three National Magazine Award Nominations, as well as repeated appearances in the Best American magazine writing anthologies. She has also written for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, Real Simple, Allure, Travel and Leisure and O, the Oprah Magazine (where her memoir "Eat, Pray, Love" was excerpted in March, 2006.) She has been a contributor to the Public Radio show "This American Life", and -- perhaps most proudly -- has several times shown up at John Hodgman's Little Gray Book Lecture Series, most notably during Lecture Four on the subject "Hints for Public Singing."

Much of her writing has been optioned by Hollywood. Her GQ memoir about her bartending years became the Disney movie "Coyote Ugly." According to Variety "Recently, Paramount Pictures has acquired screen rights to the Elizabeth Gilbert memoir "Eat, Pray, Love" and will develop it as a star vehicle for Julia Roberts".

The author currently lives in New Jersey, and is at work on a new book.

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Reviews of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search For Everything by Elizabeth Gilbert

eat pray love
Reviewed by Anonymous, 07/12/2009

Eat, Pray, Love is an enjoyable enough story of physical and emotional travel. Elizabeth Gilbert describes difficult feelings with great competence and relays her experiences with a good dose of wit. The book is also neatly structured, divided up into three parts to cover each of the author's destinations: Italy, India and Indonesia. Unless you are really mean, you won't be able to help feeling happy for this woman who went through a horrible time before picking herself up and willing herself to find something better.

The quibble with this book is that the narrative drive suffers from having the outcome of Elizabeth's journey as common knowledge thanks to her exposure on the Oprah Winfrey show. Perhaps the (excessive) hype surrounding this book works against it, giving readers expectations of something that will be hugely inspirational, eternally uplifting and life-changing. Short answer; it's not. In the end, Eat, Pray, Love is simply a deeply personal story belonging to one person only. It's not a journey to be replicated. It's not a step-by-step guide to finding yourself . It's not a map for the emotionally lost. Yes, some readers may find comfort in seeing their own feelings and circumstances mirrored in the words of the author, but this book is no more likely to bring on an epiphany than any other well-written story.

Taken for what it is (a story, not some sort of girl power bible) there is much to enjoy in the journey that the author takes. Even though she went through hell (and she is pretty honest about the depression she suffered) it is still easy to envy Elizabeth Gilbert. To be able to absolve yourself of responsibility and spend a year travelling is simply an impossibility for most people contemplating it. Four months eating and aimlessly wandering around Italy? Come on! That's not fair!

Eat, Pray, Love
Reviewed by Briony, 12/12/2008

Eat, Pray, Love takes you on an amazing journey which places you in the heart of Elizabeth Gilbert. A realistic, passionate and mesmerising experience that captivates it reader til the very end. An inspirational novel that I have recommended to all of my friends!! A great read for all including travellers (or wannabes), singles, couples, or just someone looking for a great, uplifting read.

Eat Pray Love
Reviewed by Lauren E, 11/12/2008

This book has more than earnt its title of a best seller in 2008. It is a very honest, well written memoir of Elizabeth Gilberts year long pursuit of passion, balance and wisdom after a difficult divorce whilst travelling around the globe. The book could easily appeal to a wide range of readers, will leave you panting for a sequel and remembering the authors name for a long time aferwards.

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