This is a true story from the author's unusual but very beautiful quest for happiness.
Elizabeth Gilbert was a young successful writer with everything that she thought she wanted: money, acclaim, an upscale lifestyle, and a husband who wanted to start a family. But she was clinically depressed. She was sobbing her heart out every night on her bathroom floor, begging to a God she didn't believe in for help. She divorces her husband, goes through a bitter battle with him, loses all her money, takes a lover, falls desperately in love with this lover, continues with her depression, loses this lover, and becomes irrevocably heart broken.
She realizes then that she had truly lost herself in her pursuit of everything that the world told her she needed: success, money, and love. To find herself and take back her whole heart she decides to take a one-year sabbatical from her job. She decides that her path to healing was a three part (four months each) model where she was to explore the pleasures of eating in Italy, her spirituality (prayer) in India, and the balance of both pleasure and prayer -- love -- in Indonesia.
She takes us on a very personal, sometimes painful, often hopeful, and always beautiful journey from devastating pain to true joy. A very honest book. A very inspiring read.
This book is for everyone. Pain and the quest for happiness in universal after all. A disclaimer for the men, this is written from a female's view of pain so it could get a little dramatic at times.
