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

Liz’s sister, Catherine, arrives a few days later and takes her mind off her sadness. Catherine is three years older, three inches taller, an athlete, a scholar, and a mother. She and Catherine are different. Catherine, a marathon runner who devours facts rather than food, arrives in Rome with five guidebooks and a mental map of the city. She dominated Liz until she was 28 and Liz finally stood up to her. They re-adjusted their relationship when Liz was going through her divorce, and Catherine showed both interest and compassion. Liz says that she only pays attention to the “story,” but Catherine pays attention to facts and details. Catherine absorbs history in such a way that the past becomes present. Liz says she would never use the passato remoto tense in Italian, the remote past.

Catherine’s visit leads Liz to notice her sister is a wife and mother, and she isn’t. When they were growing up, Liz expected the opposite, that she would be the one with a houseful of kids and Catherine would be alone reading in bed. Liz still isn’t sure if she wants children. She doesn’t want to do it out of fear of regret. It was an issue in her marriage when her husband accused her of selfishness.

Liz recalls a party in New York celebrating the gallery opening for an artist who was a new mother. It was held in her loft; and she was taking care of her infant, talking about her work, and leaking breast milk through her cocktail dress. Liz holds the image of her at the sink cleaning up after the party while her husband sat with his feet up. The thought of this as her future makes her tremble.

Liz contemplates the generations at her mother’s family reunions where each one knows its place. Having a spouse and a family assures this continuity. By stepping outside, she needs another purpose. For Liz, it’s writing. Liz takes comfort in a passage from Bhagavad Gita: “It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection” (105). Compared with her sister, Liz’s life is presently unstable. All her belongings are stored at her sister’s house. She knows she may someday be Crazy Aunt Liz, “the divorcee in the muumuu with dyed orange hair who doesn’t eat dairy but smokes menthols” (106).

They venture out to visit dozens of churches, with Liz mostly concerned about when they will eat the picnic lunch she brought. They attend an early morning mass at St. Susanna and listen to Gregorian chants. Both weep. No one in their family is religious, but Liz engages in spiritual investigation. To illustrate their difference, Liz tells the story of a family in which both the mother and her three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. Liz said the family needs Grace, and Catherine said, “that family needs casseroles” (100), and she organized the neighborhood to bring them dinners for an entire year. When she leaves the next day, Liz asks her to call when her plane lands safely, a way of saying goodbye they both use to confirm “I love you.”

Liz takes the next six weeks to travel around Italy, short trips to get a feel for places and find the best food. She drops out of her Italian language school to learn on the street. She says that it has “finally sunk in that I can go wherever I want” (107). She stops seeing her friends in Rome, and Giovanni tells her she is a “spinning top.” One night in a hotel room on the Mediterranean she is awakened by the sound of her own laughter, and she realizes she was laughing in her sleep. She doesn’t remember the dream.

Liz takes the train to Florence to meet her aunt and uncle who are visiting from Connecticut. She spends some time with them visiting historic sites and then leaves them to go on to Lucca. She describes the butcher shops with their sensuous displays of sausages, hams, and chickens. Across the street from the birthplace of Puccini, she enters a restaurant said to have the best mushrooms in town and orders risotto ai funghi.

She visits Bologna next, where the food is even better than in Rome. It occurs to Liz that the train stops through Italy are the names of famous foods and wines: Parma, Bologna, Montepulciano. Liz shares a train compartment with a young man who calls her “cute.” She engages in conversation with him fluently and gets “hit on,” thrilled that she is flirting in Italian.

A friend she met in Bali, whom she calls Crazy Linda from Seattle, meets her in Venice. Liz says that Linda’s self-esteem is so high that depression could never stalk her. Her cheerfulness overwhelms the sinking gloom of Venice, which, Gilbert says, “seems like a wonderful city in which to die a slow and alcoholic death” (111). They eat breakfast every morning at a family-owned restaurant run by a beautiful woman who “swears that everyone who lives in Venice regards it as a tomb” (112). Liz can’t get depressed with Linda there.

Liz returns to Rome, steps off the train, and thinks it is good to be back, but then remembers her conversation with her friend Maria’s husband, Giulio. She told him that as much as she loves Rome, it is not her city. It is the city of a woman they watched walk by, dressed to the “nines” with a poodle. Giulio explained to her that every city “has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there” (114). His word for Rome: Sex. Liz figures this explains why it doesn’t feel like her “hometown.” They discuss different City words: New York—achieve; Los Angeles—succeed; Naples—fight.

When Liz shares the “word” idea with her friend Sofie, she lands on “conform” for Stockholm. Liz begins to wonder what her word is. The last few months could be “seek,” but then also “hide,” but then perhaps “pleasure.” The exercise in finding her “word,” which clearly isn’t “sex,” prompts her to go into a boutique and purchase lingerie of every kind, things she has never owned. She asks herself the question yelled at the soccer game when a player passed the ball to no one: “Per chi?” For Whom?

Luca Spaghetti’s birthday falls on America’s Thanksgiving Day, and he decides he wants to celebrate it with a traditional turkey feast. He picks Liz up after work to drive north from Rome to his friend’s house for the birthday party. He intends to begin roasting the twenty-pound turkey around 9:00 p.m. On the same day, 19 Italian soldiers are killed in Iraq. Italians call it “The Americans War,” and George Bush’s “personal vendetta.” Despite this, Luca wants to use his birthday for an American Thanksgiving. Liz’s friend Deborah accompanies them.

Since it takes so long to roast the turkey, Luca fries pieces of turkey breast while Liz presides over a group effort to make stuffing. After many bottles of Sardinian wine, Deborah suggests they follow the American custom of joining hands and saying what they are grateful for. When it is Liz’s turn, she expresses gratitude that she has overcome depression, for old and new friends, and for Luca’s birthday celebration, crying as she speaks. Luca says, “Your tears are my prayers” (121). They drink wine until the party ends, and Luca drives them back to Rome.

None of Liz’s pants fit anymore. She has gained twenty-three pounds. She buys a pair of “My Last Month in Italy Jeans” (122). When Liz asks the clerk if she resembles a cow in the jeans, the clerk says “No.” Nor does she resemble a pig, or a buffalo. Liz enjoys the vocabulary practice. When she says maybe she resembles a “buffalo mozzarella,” the clerk concedes, “maybe.”

Liz will go back to America for Christmas before she flies to India. She decides to spend her last week in Italy in Sicily. Once she arrives, her first question as always is “where is the best food.” She goes into the recommended trattoria and tells the proprietress to bring her the best food possible because this is her first night in Sicily. It turns out to be the best food she has eaten in Italy.

She visits Syracuse, the “link between ancient Greece and ancient Rome” (125), which Thucydides considered the equal of Athens and where Plato thought the actual philosopher-ruler might evolve. A fisherman directs her to a restaurant with no name, and she luxuriates in another meal. It leads her to examine her priorities in the past four months: lovely meals, speaking a beautiful language, napping in a garden, and enjoying the sunlight on a fountain.

Gilbert says that the Mafia has been the only successful business in Sicily for centuries. In Palermo, which Goethe praised for its beauty, she walks through World War II rubble. She recalls Luigi Barzini’s 1964 book The Italians. He queried why Italy, which produced the finest artistic, political, and scientific minds, has never been a world power. He attributes it to the corruption that permeates the government, the military, and academia, but not the arts where artistic excellence is “incorruptible.”

By experiencing her identity crisis and working through it, Liz says that she discovered a glimmer of happiness in the Italian language, reading Italian words in the bathtub. She came to Italy thin and has put on weight. She says that she is now more expanded and anchored.