Reviewed by Zanne Miller

Knowing the back-story of Elizabeth Gilbert’s quest that formed the basis for this book, I anticipated resonance with a capital R, having also been divorced in my mid-thirties.  I, too, experienced a disastrous rebound relationship and set off on a European adventure (OK, I went to London for a week and not to Italy, India, and Indonesia for four months each, as Elizabeth Gilbert did, but still).  I absolutely loved this book before I even opened it.  

Our relationship – the book’s and mine -- was better before we moved in together, so to speak.   The New York Times Book Review criticized her for not sharing enough of the details of her “dark days of depression” to make the reader care.  The gory details would have helped, but I am not entirely convinced that Gilbert didn’t share her deepest thoughts at the time.  They just weren’t that deep.

The post-divorce process is definitely one of self-discovery; but for Gilbert, the process of writing this book seemed perhaps to provide an excuse for her to avoid digging beneath the surface. I don’t mean to discredit her grief and loss, but there are far better books that explore that (Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, also written “the year after” is perhaps the gold standard.)  And if Gilbert was trying to explain her spiritual quest, just about anything by Anne Lamott provides a more compelling search for God.

Eat, Pray, Love works fairly well as a travel narrative, although lacking in the real conflict required to move along the promised personal narrative.  I had to resist the urge to skim ahead to the next café or even (in the case of the Ashram) the next country. The book is strongest in some of its descriptions—of the food, the sights, the individuals she encounters.  These descriptions are also where Gilbert’s writing occasionally becomes distracting — not every analogy should have ended up in print, and sometimes one or two adjectives is more than enough.

Perhaps Anne Lamott, who calls the book “wise, jaunty, and human,” is a friend and can read more into Gilbert’s personal accounts.  Or maybe she wrote the blurb for Gilbert’s book of short stories, Pilgrims, whose characters are, in fact, “wise, jaunty, human”—and fully fleshed out.   But Gilbert, as the main character in Eat, Pray, Love, is not—until the (almost-too-storybook, yet nonetheless beautiful) ending.  There, as her depression lifts, her writing begins to sing.