Eat, Pray, Love 10 years on

I realised recently that I hadn’t read Eat Pray Love in 10 years. This was a curious realisation, because I’d certainly spent the last 10 years talking about Eat Pray Love – presenting it, explaining it, defending it, expounding upon it, and oftentimes flat-out joking about it. But I hadn’t actually read the thing – not since I finished editing the final draft of the book, several months before it was published back in January 2006.

Elizabeth Gilbert on rereading her bestseller, and what she left out

This is not uncommon. I don’t know many authors who go back and reread their books once their work is done. Sometimes this is because of embarrassment (we all tend to wince at our words, in retrospect); sometimes it’s because of boredom (we already know how the story ends); and sometimes it’s just because we have moved on to other projects.

But with Eat Pray Love, my feeling was this: I had no business reading this book again, because it wasn’t really mine any more. You see, very quickly upon publication, Eat Pray Love was gobbled up by the world, and the world made it theirs – theirs to love, theirs to hate, theirs to emulate, theirs to parody.

After my book became such a surprisingly big bestseller, advertisers started using the “Eat Pray…” construct to sell just about anything. Eat Pray Shop! Eat Pray Ski! Eat Pray Drink! You can now go on “Eat Pray Love tours” all over the world – none of them officially sanctioned by me, by the way, though I’m always happy to see people travel.

Hollywood turned my story into a movie in which my husband and I got seriously upgraded by Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem. (Sad truth: my husband and I don’t actually look like Roberts and Bardem. But I still loved the movie. No, wait – that’s why I loved the movie…)

I have never stopped being grateful to Eat Pray Love for all that it’s brought me. But grateful as I am, I’ve also learnt to keep a few inches of protective space between myself and it. It just feels safer and calmer that way. But finally – in preparation for the 10-year anniversary of Eat Pray Love – I sat down and read it again. And the experience was remarkable for me.

For one thing, I had forgotten so much! This memoir recounts a year of wide-ranging travel and exploration, but so many of the details had gone missing from my memory already. Over the last decade, I think I’d narrowed down the whole Eat Pray Love experience to: pizza, pizza, pizza.

So there were people and incidents and scenes (and even meals) that I’d totally forgotten about. I’d forgotten some of the nuances of the hilarious but always transformative conversations I’d had in India with my friend Richard from Texas – who is sadly no longer with us. I’d forgotten about that road trip I took across Bali with my Indonesian friend Yude.

A good deal of the criticism levelled against Eat Pray Love has been about my extraordinary privilege, and I have to say in response: I get it. The woman who went on this trip was exceedingly lucky. Reading about this journey again drove that point home for me more deeply than ever, because: Who has 12 free months to spare, just to kick around the globe? Who has the freedom or the money for that?
In other words, I thought I had been grateful for this experience before, but perhaps I have not been grateful enough. But I also realised in my rereading that one of the reasons I was so free that year was because I was such a mess. It was easy for me to leave everything behind because I didn’t have much to leave behind.

I had no property, because I’d lost it all in my divorce. I had no romantic relationships, because I’d exploded them. I had no job, because I’d quit it. Everything was in turmoil, everything was in flux, and I was so bloody sad.

Put simply: I was not in a good place before I flew away to Italy. I’d been so depressed that I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, could barely function. I was heavily medicated with antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, and sleeping pills. I was as skinny as a stray dog. Everything about my life made me anxious, and the anxiety made my hands shake.

I had forgotten about all this. I’d forgotten the punishing shame of what it feels like to have failed at marriage, or what it feels like to have failed at life. I had forgotten what it feels like to not trust yourself in the least. It’s been so long since I felt this sad, and I guess I’d put that miserable version of myself out of my memory.
But what really struck me about the person who wrote Eat Pray Love was that she apparently felt so freaking old. This was the biggest surprise for me – how many times I use the word old in these pages, in referring to myself.
…
Opening up space for ourselves is a life-affirming act, a sacred act. I do not believe we were put here to grow old when we are still young.

This is the message, I think, that made Eat Pray Love resonate so deeply with so many millions of women – the message that, if your life has become a trash-compactor, then you are allowed to try to escape that trash-compactor, whatever it takes.

Society’s message to women has always been the opposite: Embrace the trash-compactor that is your life. Be a good sport. Give up more. Work harder. Surrender more. Your life belongs to your father, your husband, your children, your community…

But Eat Pray Love asked this question: “What if your life belongs to you?”

Eat, Pray, Love by numbers

$200,000 - The publishing advance paid to Gilbert prior to her trip
46 - The number of languages the book has been translated into
12 million - The number of copies sold globally
57 -The number of weeks it spent at the No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list.
£146 million - The amount made at the global box office for the Hollywood movie