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DR. STEVE MCSWAIN
It made little sense to me why my wife would hide Eat, Pray, Love in the nightstand beside our bed. So, when I decided to see what all the fuss was about, I reasoned, "No need to buy a copy since there's a perfectly good one in the nightstand beside our bed."
You'd have thought I just made off with the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.
I promised to protect it, to handle it with as much care as a paleographer would an ancient text--no bending of the edges, no underlining, circling, or writing in the margins--things I typically do with my own books.
Negotiations failed, however. "Put it back," she ordered, "and get your own."
So, I did. Wasn't expecting much, either. "What could Eat, Pray, Love contain," I asked myself, "that would cause her to guard it like it was the Holy Grail?"
I barely arrived at the first scene, however--the one where Gilbert is sleepless, sprawled across a cold bathroom floor at 2AM--and I was hooked. In a failed marriage, she cries out to God, the first of many conversations the author, Elizabeth Gilbert, has with God. From there, she acts as a guide on a journey the two of you take through Italy, then India and Indonesia, in search of her soul, in search of a life that matters. There's no pretense with Gilbert, which is why I like her. You're invited to peer into her soul, and your own as well.
Sitting in a corner cafe; sipping the finest wine made of the Sangiovese grape; sharing secrets and disappointments, readers feel like they're best friends with Gilbert. That's because it's easy to believe in her. When she describes her marital failings, not those of her spouse, she's brutally transparent. When she talks about her love affair with David, even before her own divorce is final, she hides nothing. It is this honesty that makes what she says about faith, about God, just as believable.
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