Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It by Elizabeth Gilbert Read Free Book Online Page A

husband, a newspaper photographer, died sitting in a massive Arts and Crafts–style oak chair he’d made in our garage. His sister, a costumer for a major filmmaker, helped him sew the leather cushions on her industrial machine. A community college journalism instructor and newspaper adviser, I was in my office at school when I got the call from the coroner’s office. That day I learned that coroners don’t call you to wish you a good day and, long before the tears came, that my universe had toppled in on itself.
    It was a complicated marriage; aren’t they all? By the time he died, seventeen years into it, we were living in different towns, though we saw each other on weekends. Most of his coworkers thought he was divorced. We weren’t. We still owned a house together, shared a dog. We loved each other; we were family and stayed that way. He was forty-eight years old; I was forty-two.
    I spent the next few years taking bits of his ashes in plastic film containers to places he’d loved, to places he’d wanted to go, to places I wanted to go. I deposited them quietly, illegally, in water, in earth, in the mulchy detritus of fall leaves, in snow and once, as close as I could get to slowly creeping lava on a big island in the middle of the sea. I stood and watched as Madame Pele gently surrounded him with thick, steaming fingers, then oozed over him, making him part of her.
    I came to think of him as my companion spirit, always with me. Sometimes I’d walk in the house and smell him, and I’d say what he used to say when he heard my voice on the phone:
There you are
.
    I took a trip with some of his ashes up the coast of British Columbia, on a small paddle wheeler that looked as if it had just starred in a production of
Showboat
; the captain announced that we were going to see a ghost town. I’m a Californian; I immediately thought of crumbling cabins tilting into deserts, the lone tumbleweed bouncing through the parched scene. But this was land black with old trees, flowing ribbons of dark sea and, over it all, sky so blue it looked like crayons right out of a fresh box. And even from the water, I could see that the tiny town of Ocean Falls was no ghost town. There were people on land, and cars, and on a hill a rose-colored house beaconed its way into mybrain. Out of nowhere, a voice in my head began to relay a story:
My mother painted our house bright pink the summer I turned ten, in a fit of creativity.
    I’ve been writing since I could hold a pencil; I know a fictional character when I hear one. I went to my cabin on the boat and got pen and paper, began scribbling what I heard and saw. In that moment a novel was born.
    The next summer I went back with my new partner and his camera. We flew in on a float plane, landed on the saltchuck (a mixture of fresh and salt water) and explored the town, which smelled like pines and the sea. We learned about its history as a once-thriving mill town that housed five thousand people at its peak, now mostly empty, the old paper and pulp mill a hull of its former self. It rained for all five days we were there; Ocean Falls turned out to be the wettest spot in western Canada.
    I came home with lots of notes and interviews, with characters and the story of a town the government attempted to bulldoze and burn down before its remaining residents got the destruction stopped. Then I stopped, too. Intimidated, terrified of what lay before me. The responsibility I had taken on to tell this story—which no one had asked me to tell, no one had offered to publish—overwhelmed me.
    I put all my Ocean Falls material away and went back to my job, resigned to being “just a teacher.”
    Until
Eat Pray Love
showed up. I, like millions of others, fell in love from the first pages, with Liz Gilbert’s voice and her story. It wasn’t my story exactly, but it was a good one, the very best kind. Immediately I grabbed a pencil and started