82 pages • 2 hours read
Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
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Food
Liz’s changing relationship with food reflects her transformation. This is most clear in the “Italy” section, which depicts Liz exploring Italian cuisine. In one scene, she prepares lunch for herself after a shopping spree, arranging each item on her plate into a “masterpiece of lunch”—asparagus, soft-boiled eggs, goat cheese, olives, salmon, “making something out of nothing” (70). She repeats the word “nothing” in descriptions of meals consumed soon after her arrival in Italy. Her attitude toward food is linked to her self-esteem. The end of her affair with David left her with a lack of self-worth. She goes from being “nothing” to deserving and demanding “only the best” in Book 1, which is subtitled “36 Tales About the Pursuit of Pleasure.” Her first question when she visits any city other than Rome is, “Where is the best food in this town?” (124), reflecting her changed perspective. By the time she makes her last Italian journey, to the island of Sicily, the asks the proprietress to bring “her very best meal.”
Loneliness and Depression
At the beginning of the narrative, Liz personifies loneliness and depression. They stalk her, take up residence in her apartment in Rome and leave the smell of cigar smoke. They haunt her monkey mind during meditation in the ashram. The Gurugita burns away the ego and turns it into pure ash. Liz uses metaphor to describe her obsessive patterns of behavior that don’t work. In one, a suppliant to a statue of a saint makes the same request over and over, to win the lottery. The statue finally comes alive and tells him to go buy a lottery ticket. In another, a cat needs to be tied outside to a pole each day so it will not disturb meditation. The practice becomes so routine that soon the meditators cannot meditate unless the cat is tied to the pole. When the cat dies, they can’t meditate. These metaphors demonstrate the rigidity with which we approach our experience.
The Oak Tree
Wayan has a plan to find the right man for Liz. Ketut has a plan to bring Liz to balance and harmony. Yet, God’s plan will be the one executed. To illustrate, Gilbert introduces the Zen Buddhist belief about the acorn and the tree: The future tree, which produced the acorn, wants so badly to exist that it draws “the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity.” The oak tree “creates the very acorn from which it was born” (364). Liz, sobbing on the bathroom floor, is the acorn. What has grown from the acorn is this woman, now living the life she wants, “liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself” (364).
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By Elizabeth Gilbert
