Dammit, Elizabeth Gilbert

The truth is that in the darkest days of my life, Liz Gilbert's "Eat Pray Love" inspired me to travel solo and find myself. But I had something she didn't have, and I secretly resented her for it.

This article is best experienced by listening to the voiceover by the author. Just click the play button to begin listening. Enjoy!

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In the preface to the 10th Anniversary Edition of Eat Pray Love,

Elizabeth Gilbert

tells a story of a letter she received from an irate woman who began “Listen, bitch!” The woman proceeded to unleash her fury, yelling (if you can yell in writing), “Don’t you think I hate my marriage, too, bitch? Don’t you think I wish I’d made different choices in my life? Don’t you think I would love to divorce and go find myself in the world?”

My title probably conjures up a similar vibe. But let's be real, it's just my lame attempt at clickbait. (If you’re reading, I guess it worked.)

But also.

It’s the snarling, rasping voice of a monster lurking deep within my psyche—a beast I'd only managed to momentarily appease. In the years before my own divorce I would periodically approach its shadowy lair bearing burnt offerings of poetry and oblations of hope. But every time I'd whisper a dream for myself and my future, it would snarl back, low and ominous, "It’s too late for you," and I would creep into my closet, close the doors so my kids wouldn’t hear me, and cry. I'm betting it's the same monster hiding in the psychological catacombs of the woman who fired off that scathing missive to Liz Gilbert.

Solo travel is a peak experience. A rite of passage. A medicine.

I bought this 10th Anniversary Edition of Eat Pray Love back in 2016, exactly ten years after its first publication. I was getting ready to leave for the first vacation I had ever taken by myself and for myself in… well… forever as far as I could figure. Before I left, I asked a friend if she could recommend a good beach read. Her top pick? Eat Pray Love.

For those of you who haven’t read it yet, Eat Pray Love chronicles Liz Gilbert’s year-long journey of self-discovery post-divorce. Her odyssey through Italy, India, and Bali in the pursuit of pleasure, devotion, and balance respectively would captivate readers worldwide, and inspire countless women to break free from their unhappy marriages and mundane lives. She would ultimately be hailed as a “genre buster,” selling kazillions of copies and setting an impossible bar for memoir writers forevermore.

But somehow I had never heard of it. I had missed it entirely amidst the vicissitudes of young mothering. I didn’t read much of anything during the years between my first baby in 2004 and my fourth baby in 2013, and I had some catching up to do.

At the time, I was still married, but my marriage was imploding. For two years after leaving the Mormon church together, my husband and I hadn’t just lost our footing. We were “swinging” in every conceivable sense of the word. “Swinging” as in embracing the world of open marriage, complete with swingers’ parties, partner swaps, and sex clubs. But also “Swinging” as a pendulum does—from the hard right of religious fundamentalism to the hard left of nihilism and hedonism—our only tether to our former respectable lives being our duty to our kids.

I had never traveled solo. But I stumbled upon a Facebook ad for a yoga retreat in Tulum, Mexico, which sparked within me an inexplicable obsession. It wasn't just about finally seizing an opportunity to escape, now that my youngest was nearly three and could be left with dad. No, there was a specific objective driving me—to fulfill my long-standing fantasy of a one-night fling with a stranger. This was the itch that had tormented me since our departure from the Mormon church—an experience I still felt deprived of, despite the whirlwind of drunken escapades and wild nights.

Miraculously, my husband not only greenlit the plan but cheered me on. (They say that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But I was still too naive to read the fine print on his approval. I’m saving the details for the memoir, but let's say for now that the permission slip came with sinister strings attached.)