Eat Pray Love

{via.}

Or, Get Out of My Head Elizabeth Gilbert.

When I first wrote that, I originally wrote “Get out of my heart,” which is maybe what I actually meant, but I’m not quite sure yet, having put down this book literally less than ten minutes ago (as I write this).

To say that I devoured this book would be appropriate, especially given part of the title. To say that I breathed it in, examined it, and exhaled the unnecessary parts, would be accurate.

I put off reading Eat Pray Love for a long time. I heard of it when it was first released, but being something like fifteen or sixteen at the time, was almost definitely too young for it. I would have comprehended the plot, certainly, I might have maybe related to certain aspects of the book, but certainly not in the way I did now.

Which is to say that the entire time I read it (in under 24 hours – I paused only to help a good friend pick out an outfit for a wedding and to get just enough sleep to function), I was thinking, “GET OUT OF MY HEAD ELIZABETH GILBERT.”

Which is, really, the highest compliment I can give this book. Any book. This has happened to me a few times before, namely with Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk and The Awakening by Kate Chopin. All three of these books have made me alternately laugh, cry, and be overwhelmed with a sense of companionship and of meeting a soul-friend, which if you’ve never had a soul-friend, someone who reached down into the deepest parts of you and met you on a level of yourself you didn’t know existed, then hope or pray you find one soon.

The way Eat Pray Love made me sit up and go “Yes – someone else gets it,” even when I’m not quite sure what it is, astounded me. No, I haven’t been divorced. No, I haven’t chilled with a medicine man in Bali or lived in an Ashram in India or gone on a No Carb Left Behind experiment in Italy, but I have cried my heart out on my floor multiple nights in a row and lost myself entirely in a relationship and been heartbroken and bitter and desperate and wondered how the fuck I got to where I am. How Liz Gilbert goes about acknowledging these parts of her life and then solving them on her own terms is wonderful in an indescribable way.

That’s a lie. Little in this world is indescribable. All else I’ll choose to say though is this: Buy this book now. Put it on your bookshelf, remember that it’s there. Read it someday when you’re going through a time of self-discovery and change, when you need someone to be a soul-friend, even if you’ve never actually met.

{These opinions are my own. No one paid or asked me to write this and I mean every word I say about this book.}