336, 335: I will read Eat, Pray, Love again

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On Facebook, I follow Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of a moving portrait of an adventurer called 'Last American Man'. She also wrote 'Eat, Pray, Love' which is the book she is most popular for. I loved that. I also loved her novel, 'Signature of All Things' as well as her TED talks. Overall, I really, really like whatever she writes or says.

In her memoir, 'Eat, Pray, Love', Gilbert falls in love with a man in Indonesia. In 'Committed', she explores their journey as a couple before they get married. In her interviews on 'Signature of All Things', she talks about how nourishing their partnership was. He would cook for her and wait for her to finish a chapter so that she could read it out to him.

Her page on Facebook is such a wonderful repository of beautiful, kind messages of how to live in joy, how to keep being creative, how to stay in the light.

Yesterday, she wrote that she and her partner of 12 years were separating.

I took that pretty hard. I have just returned from a holiday in the mountains and was all fresh and everything. Yet, when I read that message on the wall, my stomach twisted into knots and I felt the same fear and pain that I had felt at the time of my divorce. (Thankfully, the memory is very faint now.) Yet, I wished that I could unsee that message and hope that I had dreamed it up.

But who knows why any two people get together or why they drift apart? I just know that the journey Gilbert went on in 'Eat, Pray, Love' had resonated so hard and deeply with me, that any news of her life seem to trickle into mine. Maybe that's what Holden Caulfield meant when he says in 'Catcher in the Rye': '“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.” 

 I'll read Eat, Pray, Love again as a friend, then.




Comments

Anonymous said…
That's a cool quote from Catcher in the Rye - I really really wanted to call Neil Gaiman after listening to him read the Graveyard Book. After listening to him read the Christmas Carol, I thought that even if I did not know him personally, the fact that I could get him to tell me a story as I drove or went to bed - was even a better thing! Like dinner without worrying about the dishes! (That doesn't sound creepy, does it?) After listening to the first short story on Trigger Warning, tho, I just wanted to call up and say, "Come ON, now! You can do better than that!"
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