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Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

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A woman transcends through various roles and learnings in life. As a daughter, she learns to be a person responsible towards well-being of her family and society. As she grows, she gets into role of friend and learns to be a part of unit, a role of girlfriend/wife and learns to care for someone more than herself and ultimately as a mother she learns to live for someone else. But only sometimes she realizes that she has a responsibility of one more important person and that's her. She often forgets herself and becomes what her family, friends, colleagues or society wants her to be. Only a few realize that they need to embark on a search for who they really are and what do they really want from this wonderful gift from god i.e. The life.

Elizabeth Gilroy was also educated, had a wonderful house that she and her husband together built into a home and a successful career as a writer. But by the age of 32, she realized that there was still something missing in her so-called perfect life and hence, started her journey in search of everything. She has beautifully chronicled this one year long journey in her memoir named 'Eat, Pray, Love'. Right after her self-realization and eminent divorce, she spent first four months in Italy where she pampered her gourmand self, then she spent 3 months in India in search of her spiritual self and finally in Bali, she learnt how to love herself. And when you do love yourself, you find someone who can truly love you for whom you really are. So she did fall in love with a businessman and ended her search for missing pieces from her life.

This 364 pages long book can seem a bit lengthy as the writer strolls through by lanes of her emotional and philosophical self. But it definitely proves to be a whole-hearted meal for our mind and makes us think about our own life and search for real us.

Quotes from the book:
"This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something."
"You are wishin' too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be."
"The Bhagavad Geeta - that ancient Indian Yogic text - says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection."   

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