You don’t need to go abroad to eat, pray or love
The Kensington branch of the upmarket travel company Kuoni has a poster on the window bearing the cryptic legend: Eat, Pray, Love. It’s intelligible probably only to women passers-by and for them, it means one thing: the film of the book by Elizabeth Gilbert, starring Julia Roberts. The story involves Julia/Elizabeth taking a year out of her life — funded, though the film doesn’t make this clear, by a generous advance from her publisher — in order to discover food in Italy, God in India and love in Bali. It could just as well have been the other way round: she could have found God in Bali, food in India and love in Italy; the great thing about all these places is that they were a safe distance from home in New York, from the husband she had just divorced, and the actor she left when their affair flagged.
Anyway, for an extraordinary number of women everywhere, the film and book have been a clarion call to find themselves, preferably in the same locations.
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