Megs

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

I had to abandon the book after a few chapters because I didn't think my kindle could handle being thrown at a wall, and what I did read I spent telling Elizabeth Gilbert to get over herself!

The author is a thirty-something journalist living a perfect, Carrie Bradshaw-style life with her perfect husband in their perfect home in New York. But one night she wakes up and realises this isn't enough for her. After a night spent writhing around on the bathroom floor, wailing and feeling sorry for herself, she finally decides God has spoken to her and told her to leave. Storming out of her marriage, she immediately shacks up with an inappropriate toyboy and blows up her divorce proceedings into the trial of the century.

Luckily for her, she has a generous editor who offers to pay her to go off round the world for a year and find herself (or perhaps they just really wanted some peace). So off she goes to Italy to live the cliche - the beautiful language, the gregarious Italian grandmas force-feeding her delicious pasta and ripe tomatoes, the long siestas, the passionate brown-eyed boys desperate to sleep with her... I understand she then goes on to repeat the same pattern in Indonesia (replacing the gregarious grandmas with ancient yogis feeding her spiritual wisdom), but I couldn't bear to read that far.

This could have been an interesting/inspiring read, but I couldn't get past the endless stream of cliches and the author's drama queen attitude. She needs to get some perspective and realise the world doesn't revolve around her.