It's 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She's
in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they're trying for a baby -
and she doesn't want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love
affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time
to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing:
pleasure, devotion and balance. So she travels to Rome, where she learns
Italian from handsome, brown-eyed identical twins and gains twenty-five
pounds, an ashram in India, where she finds that enlightenment entails
getting up in the middle of the night to scrub the temple floor, and Bali
where a toothless medicine man of indeterminate age offers her a new path
to peace: simply sit still and smile. And slowly happiness begins to creep
up on her.