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Mama Reads: Eat Pray Love
Tuesday, May 22, 2007 
There are books you just read because you need the distraction from parenting guides and gossip magazines and bills and feeling fat and Elmo. There are books you read and love. And then there are books you read that change you.
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is one of those books. One of those books you read and laugh out loud. One of those books you read and cry. One of those books you with characters you get so invested in that you hate to say good-bye. One of those books that stick with you weeks and weeks and weeks later. One of those books that you want desperately to talk about with someone else who has read it and when you find that person, all you can say is, "Ohhhh."
After a long respite from reading anything other than magazine articles and chapters on sleep training, my friend Danielle recommended Eat Pray Love to me. It was only out in hardback and so put it on my Christmas list. From the moment I pulled it out of my nightstand drawer to read, I felt the cells deep in my body begin to transform.
It sounds hokey, I know. But if you read it, you will understand.
Eat Pray Love is the memoir of woman who leaves her husband and travels to Italy, India and Indonesia to find a connection to God and to change how she is living. She practices yoga and meditation, she meets many characters along the way, she longs for loves that do not fit who she is finding herself to be. She is funny and she is flawed. I felt like she was a friend I'd known a long time ago or someone I wanted very much to know or sometimes, I felt like she was a little bit of me.
I was reading Eat Pray Love when I went into the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. On the brink of panic as I was wheeled in for a CAT scan, one of the author's most challenging meditations came to me. I said it over and over and over to myself. As I did, I felt my blood pressure drop, my worry move to the back of my mind and behind the Sanskrit words of prayer. I was reading the book at that moment for that reason. I felt that deeply.
I recommended the book to my yoga teacher who happened to be leaving for a yoga retreat and, although I wasn't aware of this, wanted a book to take along. Again, it was divine timing.
And today, one of our beloved babysitters, a student teacher and yoga devotee, eyed the book on my desk. We talked about it, about how moving it was, about how we related and clung to it. She told me that just yesterday, she met up with her best friend who has just left her life as a Dominican novice and is seeking, not in the same way as Elizabeth Gilbert but similar enough. Our babysitter pulled the book from her backpack and gave it to her friend, who read the first chapter right then. It was clearly a quiet moment that had a lot of power stirring underneath.
Our babysitter left and I put Lil E down for a nap. I sat with him sleeping in my lap for just a few minutes, then sat down at my desk to work and read email. There, in my inbox, was a message from my friend,the one who also felt the book was life-changing, about Elizabeth Gilbert, her book, her life now.
It's like this with this book. Read it, read it, read it. Then you will understand. It is not a momentous a-ha but rather, a thought or feeling or image or meditation that grabs you and hangs on for dear life.
I must find Elizabeth Gilbert. I want to see her in person and hear her voice (why does she not travel to Chicago? why why why?!). I'm not sure about Julia Roberts playing her, but maybe that's because, in my mind the author is my companion on a very personal journey of my own or a friend across the table. Not a celebrity or person who is out of reach, but rather a person I get in this small way who is trying very hard to let go, to find a way, to get in touch.
Reader Comments (5)
Jill