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Elizabeth Gilbert has her sweet revenge. Her yearlong odyssey to recover from a bitter divorce, bouts of depression and a disastrous rebound love affair has landed her on the best-seller list for the first time.
Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love" (Viking, 331 pages, $24.95) is an engaging, but also substantial memoir that recounts four months spent in three distinct places with three distinct goals -- Italy (in search of pleasure), India (faith) and Indonesia (balance).
The 36-year-old writer is scheduled to be on the "Today" show this morning. She visited Seattle last week and proved to be a wisecracking cutup and a reflective soul, both during an afternoon interview and an evening event at The Elliott Bay Book Co., where she attracted an overflow crowd.
P-I: What was the biggest challenge in writing this book?
Gilbert: That seems like a simple question but it's not. Giving myself the permission to do this was actually the biggest challenge -- letting myself experience the journey and imbibe everything that was happening. I had to feel it was an OK use of my time, not just a self-indulgent, narcissistic wasting of my time and the time of everyone else.
Well then, what would you say to those who are put off by the notion of another book by someone who gets to do what they cannot do? Those who think such a journey was very self-indulgent?
First of all, it would be nice if they read the book before they said that. I'm well aware of the hesitant impulse some people might have in picking up this book, but I would hope they would change their mind if they read it.
That self-indulgence question seems particularly American -- I never had anyone in Italy or India or Bali raise that issue. It seems part of our puritan residual dross. It saddens me that we in this country have difficulty recognizing a sincere, honest quest to understand one's place in the world. What is it that people would have preferred that I do in that year -- buy an SUV?
... I did struggle with that question, especially in Italy. But looking back now at the misery and depression and despair that I felt before then -- to have continued that life would have been enormously self-indulgent. To take a year to pull my s--t together was an act of community service. I'm one less screwed-up, neurotic mess in the world.
What does it mean to you to have the book become a best seller?
I still haven't processed that yet. ... I'm sure the long excerpt in Oprah magazine this month is why the book is on the best-seller list. But that's the only place I would have wanted it to be excerpted. Because her readers are who this book is for -- those women who might be asking, in various forms, versions of the same questions I was asking myself. This book is for women who are crying on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night, as I was, which I am finding is a lot of women.
What changes or lessons wrought by the trip still affect your daily life?
Every thing, every day. People have the conception that enlightenment or inner peace is a destination, like climbing up a mountain where you get to the top and people take a Polaroid of you that proves you've achieved enlightenment. But it is a non-stop process. I am not like some woman laminated in bliss. I still wobble and weave, but my pockets are filled with tricks, tools and talismans to help guide myself better. Main thing is there was a time when I was really shattered, but now I feel a trust to be in charge of myself. Some days are good, some bad, but I now trust that, more often than not, I will make beneficial decisions that are humane and moral.
What about you and Mr. Brazil (the older man she meets in Bali who spells curtains to her vow of a year without intimacy)?
We're very much together. He is living with me in Philadelphia. After two years, it's still a really simple, sweet, nourishing love story. We both wear rings, although we are not married. But this is as married as we want to be; we don't plan to have kids so there's no reason to marry.
What actually went amiss or even wrong in your odyssey? And to what do you attribute your great good luck?
Things had gone so wrong for so long before that. People would never say I was lucky if they had seen me at 30 when I spent three solid years crying every day. Yes, give me some of that snot-filled time crying on the bathroom floor or that divorce that stretched on for two years. And there were things in India that were hard, not that it didn't go well. Those were grueling long extended episodes of battling my demons in meditation. That wasn't simple, wasn't fun.
But, for the most part, I did feel as though I were traveling within a bubble. I did not get sick, did not get robbed, met friends everywhere, had doors open everywhere. And if you don't mind me getting a bit astral, I think that had to do with the physics of the quest. If you are brave, if you ever cut away everything that is confining, and if you are willing to accept whatever is the proper answer and not flinch, then the truth will be given to you.
My life has been shown that and I can only believe that it's true. So when people say to me that I'm so lucky, the only thing I can think is: Try it and see for yourself. Really try it, and not halfway; try it and see if it doesn't turn out to be the case for you.
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