Messages in Eat, Pray, Love

Why it strikes a chord at every age

By now, who hasn't heard of (or read!) the book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert? What is it about the New York Times best-selling autobiography that has grabbed our attention and captured our collective soul? We asked four of our writers - who are different ages - to tell us what the book meant to them. We hope you will find your own insight in this reflection of Gilbert's soul-finding book (one that is soon to be a movie starring Julia Roberts).

In my 20s...
There is something a bit odd about my generation - we're not quite teenagers, but we're not quite adults yet either. I'm 22 years old working at my second job. I graduated college a year and a half ago after spending my entire life not knowing anything more than that I needed to get an education so I could land a great high paying job. So you can imagine my shock being 21 years old, never having done anything for myself not related to term papers or final exams and being thrown into a big world of expectations that I simply didn't understand and wasn't prepared for.

Anxiety ensued.

When things didn't pan out the way my parents and Disney movies said they would, I started getting depressed and having panic attacks - not because my life had gone awry, but because I was overwhelmed by all of the different paths that I could embark on and worried that I would choose the wrong one.

Then I read Eat, Pray, Love and wanted to smack myself for being such an idiot. If a woman 15 years my senior can uproot herself completely -  materially as well as spiritually - then I needed to stop being a whiny little kid and enjoy the ride. No societal stigmas can dictate what will make me happy, so instead of worrying about how I might feel 20 years from now, I need to embrace both life and change and go with the flow. (Note to parents: it's really not healthy to let your children grow up aspiring to be Ariel or Peter Pan. It just doesn't pan out - no pun intended! Why not save them the impending identity crisis? Then again, they might not become a best-selling author.)

In my 30s...
When I first saw Eat Pray Love, it was at my hairdresser's in New York. I got along with this Brazilian woman so well, we bonded on many occasions sharing stories of love, heartache and life lived and I absolutely trusted her with my unruly curls. We are both women in our 30s, so when she recommended this book, I thought, I've got to read it.

A month later, I was living in a new city, bedridden with a bad flu and pretty miserable to say the least. I managed to get myself to the bookstore to get Eat, Pray, Love - and am I ever glad I did! Elizabeth Gilbert's truly personal account is nothing less than inspiring. I had left home with a lot of heartbreak and anguish and I was trying to embark on a new life. Less than a month in a new city, and I was sick and sullen.

Through the author's grief, I was able to release mine and know that just as she had people praying for her, I had people praying for me to start anew. I found myself healing as she healed in Italy. Of course, I was also craving pasta, wine and Italian men but mainly I was in touch with my body and getting back on the road to health. As I started to recover, I entered her passage to India. I did remember some Buddhist chanting I'd learned and began meditating more as she recounted her experiences in India. Not only did this improve my health but my mindset too. I kept thinking, here she is on a self-realizing journey and everywhere there is love and support.

I had guilty feelings of leaving family and friends behind to pursue my dreams and a change I thought would benefit me. Obviously I was homesick and missing everyone terribly but seeing this protagonist take this trip and get closer to her core gave me hope. The ultimate thing I took away from the book is that home is not just a place we miss or leave or go back to, it's inside of us! So many times, we forsake it in the pursuit of what others (society, family etc.)  tell us is important. Gilbert gets in touch with her core and it motivated me to bounce back to health and get on with the new life I'd chosen - without guilt (well, almost!).

Of course, I didn't have a book deal or a divorce or a new love… yet. However, seeing a woman in her 30s turn her life upside down (then right side up), provided enough inspiration for me to believe in the unbelievable - to reach for what seems so out of reach in those heavy moments of grief. After all, as Gilbert says, "The expansion of one person - the magnification of one life - is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody's but my own." And the truth is, when your light shines, you can't help but illuminate and expand the life of others as she does when she meets the love of her life in the final chapter… of the book anyway (certainly it's the first chapter of a whole new life and book for later!). If it's possible for sensitive, artistic, searching Gilbert, than why not me or you, right? Ultimately this book provided hope and validated my own search for personal freedom and happiness.

In my 40s...
Okay, I must confess that I liked the first two parts of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love - I did not love them the way a lot of my other friends did. Gilbert was a little too neurotic for me to relate to in India (Book 2). Perhaps her self-sabotaging 20s (Book 1) were a little too close for comfort to my own emotional journey of bad early choices in love and life (I did not have a desire to relive it as I had safely made it to the other side to my own creative bliss with a proper soulmate to boot!). However, free-spirited, free-thinking and clear headed Gilbert in Indonesia was my kind of woman!

There was one part of Book 1 that I did derive great pleasure from - roaring aloud and even reading it to my husband. It was Gilbert's sardonic (or was it?) description of going back to a family reunion and the relatives who neatly mark all their accomplishments in life by family position and children - a "universally recognized" measure as she puts it. And what if you (gasp!) don't have children? Then, she concludes, "You'll need to find another purpose, another measure by which to judge whether or not you have been a successful human being." And that is a very frightening road less traveled (even more frightening to society than to those traveling it!).

It has always puzzled me why there is hardly anything written for the growing population of couples (like my husband and I) who do not have children - most of them by choice. For the record, as a woman, I equate having my own with emotional and financial bankruptcy - and my husband says, "I don't need a mini me! I'm still working on me." We cherish the kids in our life and our "chosen" role as the cool auntie and uncle. Yet our child-bearing relatives continually say things like "But you don't like kids!" No, we just don't want our own!

The bottom line is: you have a choice! Yet there is little support and even less written for those in our society without kids. Eat, Pray, Love gave a wee little voice and a sense of humor to this very personal issue that definitely needs more discussion in our society. Thanks for opening the dialogue, Elizabeth.

In my 50s...
Perhaps, what I have to say acts as a warning, from those of us who have lived a bit longer than the author of this intense honest memoir that allows us to relate to the shadows of one woman's life. Elizabeth Gilbert's happy ending is not an ending, but only a stronger foundation than the one she had before her year of reinvention, spiritual introspection and her personal awakening to indisputable love.

In my 50s I know that life can deliver even more surprises, disappointments, and grief even after we've invested everything we have to learn  to live authentically… even after we feel, as safe and sound as Gilbert describes herself on the book's last pages as "a present and fully actualized me" living in "peace and contentment."

As time goes by, no matter how good we feel about ourselves, we must step back and look at who we have become and allow ourselves to change again, chum the waters of our relationships, take our spiritual temperatures and continue to forgive ourselves as we grow and learn and perhaps change our minds once again, about who we are, or want to be.