13 out of 13 people found this review helpful.
Funny light read feels more like fiction than a memoir
Date of Review: Jul 1, 2007
The Bottom Line: Read it. It is fun and short. It will have you smiling.
Eat, Pray, Love is a memoir bisected into three parts. In the first Author Elizabeth Gilbert travels to Italy to overindulge herself from one satiating plate of food to the next. She uses vivid description of the people around her and the things she consumes in a humorous and whimsical way. She does this in effect as an escape for the things that were occurring in her own life back in America, e.g. she is older and got divorced.
After her brief "vacation" she books off to India for a third of the book to seek solace from her life in a more active way by practicing meditation to find her own truths. While this section of the book is supposedly the heaviest subject matter, it still maintains the comical air of its previous section. The author manages to float the reader along in an airy way if not the transcendental manner.
The third section of the book is about her balancing her life between the two extremes indulgence and meditation. She wants to finally achieve the balance that was like Buddha finding his own "middle way" or path to nirvana.
While this book holds no revelations to the reader, as the journey in person had on the author, it is a nice memoir which is an easy and humorous read which encourages the reader to seek his/her own happiness.
