irb #1- eat pray love

For my IRB memoir, I decided to read Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It is her story of how she went from being an unhappy married woman to getting divorced from her husband and traveling to find true happiness. She leaves all of her troubles and confusion behind in New York and spends a year abroad, spending four months each in three different countries. In Italy she learns about pleasure, in India she examines her aspect of devotion, and lastly, in Bali, she finds out about the balance between worldly and religious enjoyment. 

What has interested me until now is her progress from being a woman suffering from depression and ending up crying until 3am every night, into someone who is free from burden and travels around the world discovering her true self. Also, her choice of the three countries she visits and the three aspects she wants to discover about herself interested me, because she seemed to be very determined to really learn about who she is as a person.

So far, in the book, she has described some of the events of the past few years that caused her to become so eager to travel around the world experiencing new cultures. She explains about the situation with her husband, as well as the confusion she feels about David, and more importantly, she shares a lot about her characteristics and the story of how she first began to pray. I am now on chapter 26, or as she calls it, the 26th bead, in the novel out of the total 108 beads. Up to this point, she has left New York and is now in Italy, learning Italian, a language she had always wanted to learn, and eating delicious foods.

One topic I would like to further develop is the aspect of how the author believes that her three journeys will help her. She explained very thoroughly why she began her year overseas in the first place, but she didn't specify as to how she thought this would help her with the panic and depression she was feeling when she was in New York.