Skip to content

Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia Hardcover - 2006

by Elizabeth Gilbert

A celebrated writer pens an irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure, spiritual devotion, and what she really wanted out of life.


Summary

This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali. By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise and funny author (whom Booklist calls “Anne Lamott’s hip, yoga- practicing, footloose younger sister”) is poised to garner yet more adoring fans.

From the publisher

One of the most iconic, beloved, and bestselling books of our time. This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali. By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise and funny author (whom Booklist calls "Anne Lamott's hip, yoga- practicing, footloose younger sister") is poised to garner yet more adoring fans.

Details

  • Title Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
  • Author Elizabeth Gilbert
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition 1st/11th
  • Pages 352
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Riverhead Books, New York, New York, U.S.A.
  • Date 2006-02-16
  • ISBN 9780670034710 / 0670034711
  • Weight 1.18 lbs (0.54 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.27 x 6.29 x 1.16 in (23.55 x 15.98 x 2.95 cm)
  • Ages 18 to UP years
  • Grade levels 13 - UP
  • Reading level 1080
  • Themes
    • Sex & Gender: Feminine
  • Library of Congress subjects Travel writers - United States, Gilbert, Elizabeth - Travel
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2005042435
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

Excerpt

1

I wish Giovanni would kiss me.

Oh, but there are so many reasons why this would be a terrible idea. To begin with, Giovanni is ten years younger than I am, and, like most Italian guys in their twenties, he still lives with his mother. These facts alone make him an unlikely romantic partner for me, given that I am a professional American woman in my mid-thirties, who has just come through a failed marriage and a devastating, interminable divorce, followed immediately by a passionate love affair that ended in sickening heartbreak. This loss upon loss has left me feeling sad and brittle and about seven thousand years old. Purely as a matter of principle I wouldn't inflict my sorry, busted-up old self on the lovely, unsullied Giovanni. Not to mention that I have finally arrived at that age where a woman starts to question whether the wisest way to get over the loss of one beautiful brown-eyed young man is indeed to promptly invite another one into her bed. This is why I have been alone for many months now. This is why, in fact, I have decided to spend this entire year in celibacy.

To which the savvy observer might inquire: 'Then why did you come to Italy?'

To which I can only reply—especially when looking across the table at handsome Giovanni— 'Excellent question.'

Giovanni is my Tandem Exchange Partner. That sounds like an innuendo, but unfortunately it's not. All it really means is that we meet a few evenings a week here in Rome to practice each other's languages. We speak first in Italian, and he is patient with me; then we speak in English, and I am patient with him. I discovered Giovanni a few weeks after I'd arrived in Rome, thanks to that big Internet cafÈ at the Piazza Barbarini, across the street from that fountain with the sculpture of that sexy merman blowing into his conch shell. He (Giovanni, that is—not the merman) had posted a flier on the bulletin board explaining that a native Italian speaker was seeking a native English speaker for conversational language practice. Right beside his appeal was another flier with the same request, word-for-word identical in every way, right down to the typeface. The only difference was the contact information. One flier listed an e-mail address for somebody named Giovanni; the other introduced somebody named Dario. But even the home phone number was the same.

Using my keen intuitive powers, I e-mailed both men at the same time, asking in Italian, "Are you perhaps brothers?"

It was Giovanni who wrote back this very provocativo message: "Even better. Twins!"

Yes—much better. Tall, dark and handsome identical twenty-five-year-old twins, as it turned out, with those giant brown liquid-center Italian eyes that just unstitch me. After meeting the boys in person, I began to wonder if perhaps I should adjust my rule somewhat about remaining celibate this year. For instance, perhaps I could remain totally celibate except for keeping a pair of handsome twenty-five-year-old Italian twin brothers as lovers. Which was slightly reminiscent of a friend of mine who is vegetarian except for bacon, but nonetheless ... I was already composing my letter to Penthouse:

In the flickering, candlelit shadows of the Roman café, it was impossible to tell whose hands were caress

But, no.

No and no.

I chopped tvhe fantasy off in mid-word. This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.

Anyway, by now, by the middle of November, the shy, studious Giovanni and I have become dear buddies. As for Dario—the more razzle-dazzle swinger brother of the two—I have introduced him to my adorable little Swedish friend Sofie, and how they've been sharing their evenings in Rome is another kind of Tandem Exchange altogether. But Giovanni and I, we only talk. Well, we eat and we talk. We have been eating and talking for many pleasant weeks now, sharing pizzas and gentle grammatical corrections, and tonight has been no exception. A lovely evening of new idioms and fresh mozzarella.

Now it is midnight and foggy, and Giovanni is walking me home to my apartment through these back streets of Rome, which meander organically around the ancient buildings like bayou streams snaking around shadowy clumps of cypress groves. Now we are at my door. We face each other. He gives me a warm hug. This is an improvement; for the first few weeks, he would only shake my hand. I think if I were to stay in Italy for another three years, he might actually get up the juice to kiss me. On the other hand, he might just kiss me right now, tonight, right here by my door ... there's still a chance ... I mean we're pressed up against each other's bodies beneath this moonlight ... and of course it would be a terrible mistake ... but it's still such a wonderful possibility that he might actually do it right now ... that he might just bend down ... and ... and ... Nope.

He separates himself from the embrace.

"Good night, my dear Liz," he says.

"Buona notte, caro mio," I reply.

I walk up the stairs to my fourth-floor apartment, all alone. I let myself into my tiny little studio, all alone. I shut the door behind me. Another solitary bedtime in Rome. Another long night's sleep ahead of me, with nobody and nothing in my bed except a pile of Italian phrasebooks and dictionaries.

I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone.

Grasping this reality, I let go of my bag, drop to my knees and press my forehead against the floor. There, I offer up to the universe a fervent prayer of thanks.

First in English.

Then in Italian.

And then—just to get the point across—in Sanskrit.

2

And since I am already down there in supplication on the floor, let me hold that position as I reach back in time three years earlier to the moment when this entire story began—a moment which also found me in this exact same posture: on my knees, on a floor, praying.

Everything else about the three-years-ago scene was different, though. That time, I was not in Rome but in the upstairs bathroom of the big house in the suburbs of New York which I'd recently purchased with my husband. It was a cold November, around three o'clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and—just as during all those nights before—I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.

I don't want to be married anymore.

I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me.

I don't want to be married anymore. I don't want to live in this big house. I don't want to have a baby.

But I was supposed to want to have a baby. I was thirty-one years old. My husband and I—who had been together for eight years, married for six—had built our entire life around the common expectation that, after passing the doddering old age of thirty, I would want to settle down and have children. By then, we mutually anticipated, I would have grown weary of traveling and would be happy to live in a big, busy household full of children and homemade quilts, with a garden in the backyard and a cozy stew bubbling on the stovetop. (The fact that this was a fairly accurate portrait of my own mother is a quick indicator of how difficult it once was for me to tell the difference between myself and the powerful woman who had raised me.) But I didn't—as I was appalled to be finding out—want any of these things. Instead, as my twenties had come to a close, that deadline of THIRTY had loomed over me like a death sentence, and I discovered that I did not want to be pregnant. I kept waiting to want to have a baby, but it didnt happen. And I know what it feels like to want something, believe me. I well know what desire feels like. But it wasn't there. Moreover, I couldn't stop thinking about what my sister had said to me once, as she was breast-feeding her firstborn: 'Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it's what you want before you commit.'

How could I turn back now, though? Everything was in place. This was supposed to be the year. In fact, we'd been trying to get pregnant for a few months already. But nothing had happened (aside from the fact that—in an almost sarcastic mockery of pregnancy—I was experiencing psychosomatic morning sickness, nervously throwing up my breakfast every day). And every month when I got my period I would find myself whispering furtively in the bathroom: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for giving me one more month to live ...

Media reviews

Citations

  • Booklist, 01/01/2006, Page 48
  • Entertainment Weekly, 08/02/2010, Page 40
  • Kirkus Reviews, 01/01/2006, Page 27
  • Library Journal, 01/15/2006, Page 0
  • Library Journal Prepub Alert, 10/15/2005, Page 42
  • New York Times, 02/26/2006, Page 1
  • New Yorker (The), 01/11/2010, Page 74
  • Newsweek, 01/11/2010, Page 58
  • Outside, 02/01/2006, Page 34
  • People Weekly, 08/23/2010, Page 50
  • Publishers Weekly, 11/21/2005, Page 36
  • Time, 02/27/2006, Page 73

About the author

Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Magic, Eat Pray Love, and The Signature of All Things, as well as several other internationally bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her latest novel, City of Girls, comes out in June, 2019.
Back to Top

More Copies for Sale

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  • Used
Condition
Used - Very Good
ISBN 13
9780670034710
ISBN 10
0670034711
Quantity Available
1
Seller
Waltham, Massachusetts, United States
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Item Price
SGD 2.38
SGD 4.10 shipping to USA

Show Details

Description:
Riverhead Books. Used - Very Good. . . All orders guaranteed and ship within 24 hours. Your purchase supports More Than Words, a nonprofit job training program for youth, empowering youth to take charge of their lives by taking charge of a business.
Item Price
SGD 2.38
SGD 4.10 shipping to USA

Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Elizabeth Gilbert

We are sorry, this copy is no longer available.
Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

by Gilbert, Elizabeth

  • Used
  • Acceptable
  • Hardcover
Condition
Used - Acceptable
Binding
Hardcover
ISBN 13
9780670034710
ISBN 10
0670034711
Quantity Available
1
Seller
Kingwood, Texas, United States
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Item Price
SGD 7.16
FREE shipping to USA

Show Details

Description:
Riverhead Books, 2006-02-16. Hardcover. Acceptable. 6x1x9.
Item Price
SGD 7.16
FREE shipping to USA
Eat Pray Love : One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

Eat Pray Love : One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

by Gilbert, Elizabeth

  • Used
Condition
Used - Good
ISBN 13
9780670034710
ISBN 10
0670034711
Quantity Available
3
Seller
Reno, Nevada, United States
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Item Price
SGD 8.02
FREE shipping to USA

Show Details

Description:
Penguin Publishing Group. Used - Good. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages.
Item Price
SGD 8.02
FREE shipping to USA
Eat Pray Love : One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Eat Pray Love : One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  • Used
  • good
  • Hardcover
Condition
Used - Good
Binding
Hardcover
ISBN 13
9780670034710
ISBN 10
0670034711
Quantity Available
13
Seller
Seattle, Washington, United States
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 4 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Item Price
SGD 8.30
FREE shipping to USA

Show Details

Description:
Penguin Publishing Group, 2006. Hardcover. Good. Missing dust jacket; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.Dust jacket quality is not guaranteed.
Item Price
SGD 8.30
FREE shipping to USA
Eat Pray Love : One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Eat Pray Love : One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  • Used
  • good
  • Hardcover
Condition
Used - Good
Binding
Hardcover
ISBN 13
9780670034710
ISBN 10
0670034711
Quantity Available
4
Seller
Seattle, Washington, United States
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 4 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Item Price
SGD 8.30
FREE shipping to USA

Show Details

Description:
Penguin Publishing Group, 2006. Hardcover. Good. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.Dust jacket quality is not guaranteed.
Item Price
SGD 8.30
FREE shipping to USA
Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

by Gilbert, Elizabeth

  • Used
Condition
UsedGood
ISBN 13
9780670034710
ISBN 10
0670034711
Quantity Available
1
Seller
Interlochen, Michigan, United States
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Item Price
SGD 8.81
FREE shipping to USA

Show Details

Description:
UsedGood. The item shows wear from consistent use, but it remains in good condition and works perfectly. All pages and cover are intact (including the dust cover, if applicable). Spine may show signs of wear. Pages may include limited notes and highlighting. May NOT include discs, access code or other supplemental materials.
Item Price
SGD 8.81
FREE shipping to USA
Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

by Gilbert, Elizabeth

  • Used
Condition
UsedAcceptable
ISBN 13
9780670034710
ISBN 10
0670034711
Quantity Available
1
Seller
Interlochen, Michigan, United States
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Item Price
SGD 8.81
FREE shipping to USA

Show Details

Description:
UsedAcceptable. The item is very worn but continues to work perfectly. Signs of wear can include aesthetic issues such as scratches, dents, worn and creased covers, folded page corners and minor liquid stains. All pages and the cover are intact, but the dust cover may be missing. Pages may include moderate to heavy amount of notes and highlighting, but the text is not obscured or unreadable. Page edges may have foxing (age related spots and browning). May NOT include discs, access code or other supplemental materials.
Item Price
SGD 8.81
FREE shipping to USA
Eat Pray Love : One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

Eat Pray Love : One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

by Gilbert, Elizabeth

  • Used
Condition
Used - Good
ISBN 13
9780670034710
ISBN 10
0670034711
Quantity Available
8
Seller
Reno, Nevada, United States
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Item Price
SGD 9.07
FREE shipping to USA

Show Details

Description:
Penguin Publishing Group. Used - Good. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages.
Item Price
SGD 9.07
FREE shipping to USA
Eat Pray Love : One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

Eat Pray Love : One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

by Gilbert, Elizabeth

  • Used
Condition
Used - Good
ISBN 13
9780670034710
ISBN 10
0670034711
Quantity Available
12
Seller
Mishawaka, Indiana, United States
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Item Price
SGD 9.30
FREE shipping to USA

Show Details

Description:
Penguin Publishing Group. Used - Good. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages.
Item Price
SGD 9.30
FREE shipping to USA