Thread: Eat Pray Love

I got hold of an ebook copy and have just finished it - really enjoyed it, she writes well and you go along for the ride with her. She has a belief in "a God" of some sort - but you don't need to share this belief to enjoy the account of her journey. Dedoo says

The book is called non fiction, but there are many stories of imagination in this book.

and I think this nails it. She did do the 12 months travel which is the basis of the book, but she also is a writer who knows how to make a good story - so there is no need to believe every anecdote literally happened to her - just enjoy the story.

Donna says

i think that the author was sucked in by the 'medicine woman' in ubud.

With this story of becoming a close friend with Wayan, then deciding to help with money, then getting worried she is being used - she conveys so well the Bali experience many Westerners meet. Of course, like all of the book this story has a "happy" ending - where many other stories we hear are not so happy.

I noted a few bits wehre the "facts" are not quite right. For example:

Gili Meno Island was my ultimate truth and reconciliation hearing. I had chosen the right place to do this—that much was clear. The island itself is tiny, pristine, sandy, blue water, palm trees. It’s a perfect circle with a single path that goes around it, and you can walk the whole circumference in about an hour. It’s located almost exactly on the equator, and so there’s a changelessness about its daily cycles.

But Lombok is like Bali more than 8 degrees south - so by no stretch of imagination is it "almost exactly on the equator".

Then this bit

We hang out one day along the long southern California–style groovy white sand surf of Kuta, then head up to the sinister black rocky beauty of the west coast, then we pass that invisible Balinese dividing line over which regular tourists never seem to go, up to the wild beaches of the north coast where only the surfers dare to tread (and only the crazy ones, at that). We sit on the beach and watch the dangerous waves, watch the lean brown and white Indonesian and Western surf-cats slice across the water like zippers ripping open the backs of the ocean’s blue party dress. We watch the surfers wipe out with bone-breaking hubris against the coral and rocks, only to go back out again to surf another wave, and we gasp and say, “Dude, that is totally MESSED UP.

These "wild beaches" with "dangerous waves" on the north coast?? Maybe they found remote beaches on the west end of the south coast and then got mixed up.

She also says

This ceremony today was held at the house of one of Ketut’s neighbors. The baby in question was a girl, already nicknamed Putu.

Earlier she had described the naming systems with Wayan, Made, Nyoman, and Ketut - and mentioned how nicknames help to sort things out. Here she seems to think Putu is a nickname rather that a firstborn.

Finally, here is her description of expats

But it seems to me that everyone I meet here used to be something once (generally “married” or “employed”); now they are all united by the absence of the one thing they seem to have surrendered completely and forever: ambition. Needless to say, there’s a lot of drinking.

Is that us?