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

underlining, because she was talking to me. Richard from Texas was talking to me, too, when he said: “Someday you’re gonna lookback on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing.”
    I realized then that my heart was still broken from the loss of my husband; that all our hearts get broken in the process of these messy, imperfectly perfect lives. But I also knew how grateful I was for the circumstances that led to that heartbreak—for the huge, love-filled, life-changing events that made me, well, me. As Felipe tells Liz in the book: “This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
    And I knew that was true, too. That I had walked imperfectly through a marriage, that I was, as Liz learned from the Bhagavad Gita, living this life in my own awkward, stumbling way. I had tried. I was still trying.
    So I opened my heart to the voices inside, went back to Ocean Falls two more times, did more research, more interviews. I found myself ready to put on the page stories of trees and a town surrounded by mountains and water, inaccessible by road, a small place with people who lived and loved and died. I was helped in this by a writer who didn’t know me, but whom I felt somehow I knew, who chronicled her journey to reclaim her heart by traveling to Italy, India and Indonesia. Her book had helped me to reclaim my heart, too. She’d helped me to find the confidence to write three drafts of a historical novel, though I didn’t have a publisher waiting for it. Because it was a story I wanted to tell. It showed up on the page, under my typing fingers:
There you are
.
    It took me years to write. It found an agent who loved it. It’s had more than two dozen rejections, but we keep trying. I’ve revised it more than once, each time grateful for the chance tocreate another version of it. Which, as
Eat Pray Love
reminded me, we do every day, creating anew with, if we are lucky, big love and thankfulness and surprises—lots and lots of surprises.
    I look upon this process as a great adventure. I have tried for something. The writing, the research, the travel to this out-of-the-way place has changed me. My broken heart has healed, even though you can still see the cracks if you look closely. My companion spirit has been joined by others, some of them fictional, all of them alive within me. I am ready to be delighted by what comes next.

Adventurous Woman
    â€”
    Laurna Strikwerda
    W hen I first read
Eat Pray Love
, it completely freaked me out. As a twenty-seven-year-old woman, I didn’t just read it as Liz’s story—I read it as a story about what I was supposed to want. I was supposed to want to be adventurous.
    I’m sure that scaring impressionable twenty-seven-year-olds was the last thing that Elizabeth Gilbert ever wanted to do when she set out to write a memoir about finding her own fine self. I imagine she wanted to tell her story, and if it resonated, great. But her story became bigger than her—it became a story about what it means to be a young woman with infinite choices and possibilities. Why would you keep doing what women have done for centuries if you could chart your own course? Why would you do what your mother or your grandmother had done, and be tied down to one place, if you could be on a plane to the next bit of unknown territory?
    I remember my mother talking about being one of the first women in her small Christian college to go on to graduate school, let alone travel to France to do her research. At the time, such a decision was considered a huge step into the unknown. But I’m a member of the
Eat Pray Love
generation of women, and I felt I was expected to do more than that.
    I did travel. I visited several countries in college, making my way slowly around the globe with twenty-five other classmates and a