Meet Elizabeth Gilbert,
author of Eat Pray Love

A year spent living in Italy, India and Indonesia revealed the greatest discovery of all to Elizabeth Gilbert: her own soul.

SW: Before your year-long adventure you were a writer living in New York. How did your “grown-up gap year” come about?

Elizabeth Gilbert: I had fallen into what I came to call "an early onslaught midlife crisis" -- after a bad divorce (is that redundant?), a disastrous rebound relationship and a deep depression brought about by a profound crisis of selfhood. By the time I'd turned 30, I'd achieved what all of us are supposed to be aiming for -- marriage, a big house in the suburbs, a successful career.

But while everything looked good on the outside, I knew there was only rust, corrosion and unhappiness behind the scenes. While my ex-husband was eager to have a child I felt it would be irresponsible to bring a life into a marriage that was in so much trouble. And so it came to pass that I was the woman who looked like she had the whole world in the palm of her hand, but was secretly sobbing on the bathroom floor six nights out of seven. In short: I was a flat-out wreck, and my life had become unrecognisable to me.

SW: Some people change jobs or cut their hair when they’re in a rut. You packed up your life and set out to see the world. Have you always loved to travel?

EG: I've always been somebody who finds redemption, peace, stimulation and transformation in travel. There's something about changing your physical environment that forces you to shift internally, as well. I think sometimes in our life we get stuck in what I call "Commuter Mind", which is to say: driving the same brain-pattern every day, thinking the same thoughts, hashing over the same fears, suffering over the same old grudges, day after day, mile after mile, never changing the scenery. Travel can help shake you out of that -- you MUST pay attention, you must be open to new things, you must wake yourself up when everything around you is new and unfamiliar. I hoped that taking a year for this journey would give me a way to work (and write) myself out of the dark, deep hole into which I'd fallen.

SW: You could have gone anywhere – how did you choose the three destinations?

EG: I selected the countries with care. There were certain things I felt I'd lost in my life because of all the depression and confusion, and I wanted to reignite those aspects of myself. The first thing I wanted back was my sense of pleasure and so I went to Italy for that (where else would you go?), since the Italians have always been such masters in the enjoyment of life. From there I went to India, to study in an Ashram for four months, because I deeply longed to feel some connection with divinity, some sense of my own place in the universe.

Lastly I went to Bali to try to weave those two elements together. In Western culture we traditionally divide pleasure from devotion pretty seriously, never even letting them sit in the same room together, but I'd been to Bali before and I felt that Balinese culture had a gift for braiding pleasure and devotion together seamlessly. That was my ultimate goal -- to learn how to do that in my own life, in my own heart. To make room for worldly enjoyment and other-worldly contemplation to coexist in peace.

SW: Best-laid plans can go awry: were you surprised by your experiences abroad?

EG: The only thing I'm surprised by, looking back on it all, was how well it all worked. I got more than I'd asked for out of each country. Part of this was because I was working so hard on my own redemption, really showing up for the experience in every way, but I also have come to believe that there exists such a thing as "the physics of the quest" -- which is to say, there's a natural rule in the universe, like gravity or momentum, which says that, if you are willing to go out there into the world (or in there, into your own soul) and set aside every comfort and familiarity to throw yourself into the new, and if you're willing to regard every single experience as beneficial and every single person encountered as a teacher, then the truth will not be withheld from you.

The answers will eventually reveal themselves. But it takes a huge amount of effort and commitment on your end, to be open to change and prepared to accept blessings in all sorts of confusing and contradictory forms. I believe and know this now, but I didn't know it then...so setting off on the journey was frightening and disorientating. But what good would a quest be if it wasn't at least a little bit terrifying at the outset, right?

SW: Any regrets?

EG: Not even one. And that's rare for me, since I'm usually a follower of Epimetheus, the Greek God of Hindsight, always regretting and reviewing and wishing I could do things over again more perfectly. But that year was sort of magical. It doesn't mean every moment of it was entertaining or easy; I was alone a lot, I struggled a lot to pull myself out of my depression, and there were moments of real sadness, isolation and fear.

But regrets? No. Not even one. It's a rare opportunity in a human life to be given such a wide amount of time to sort yourself out; even during the hardest times, I knew I was a lucky, lucky mortal to even get a chance to ask the cosmos my big giant questions.

SW: What were the funniest and most memorable moments for you?

EG: Well, I met a wonderful Brazilian man in Bali, fell in love, and three years later we married -- so that was pretty memorable! What comes to mind for funny, though, must be the wonderful day I spent in Rome, going to a local soccer game with some Italian friends of mine and learning a whole bunch of exotic new curses and foul-mouthed exclamations of dismay from the passionate Italian soccer fans around me. Some of those long, strung-out, fabulous chains of curses still ring in my head, and are useful when one is in the occasional traffic encounter, even four thousand miles away from Italy!

SW: What do you say to other women who feel trapped or disheartened with their lot in life?

EG: I never wanted to become the poster child for "everyone must leave her husband and move to India". I don't think my actions constitute a universal prescription, not by any means. A lot of people can't do what I did, of course, and many others either should not, or never would be interested, anyhow. And yet now that the book is out there in the world, I've been amazed and saddened by how many women I've met across the world now who say they feel all the same things, all the same doubts, questions, fears and anxieties that I did. Let's not kid ourselves into thinking that just because modern Western culture is safe, easeful and convenient that it's a psychologically easy time in which for a woman to live.

We're still in the early days of the feminist revolution -- all these ideas are new and they're all being tested out on us. How are we to organize all our conflicting desires and dreams -- intimacy, independence, spirituality, material success, motherhood, artistic expression? The one thing I do see is that nobody seems to feel she has enough time to even begin to ask these questions, and the stress of our busy lives only compounds all the confusion.

My primary advice, then, is that you somehow (and this takes muscular effort) carve out of your days some tiny amount of silent space in which you can sit safely, undisturbed, and begin to ask yourself the most dangerous question of all -- "What do I really, really, really want?" (You need to use all three "really's" or else your heart won't believe you're serious.) That's a hard answer to come to, but every journey begins with the answer to that question.

What do you really, really, really want from your one small and magnificent life? What would it take to begin getting it? Ask the question every day. Then follow the answer.

SW: Where in the world are you living now and what projects are you working on?

EG: I'm living in New Jersey, in the States -- of course! Where else? Actually I've been traveling consistently now for about four years and I've finally gotten tired and all my longings these days are for the peace and stability of a real home, so that's what I'm working on these days. That said -- I'm going back to Italy in a few weeks and hopefully to India early next year, and I'm working hard on a new book that took me all over South East Asia last year. But as my lovely husband said to me the other day, "Don't worry, darling -- I'm sure you'll never have the quiet, normal life you keep pretending to want!".

Elizabeth Gilbert’s fascinating travel memoir Eat Pray Love is available from all good bookstores.