Eat, Pray, Love

asks why, exactly, I think I deserve a vacation in Rome when I’ve made such a rubble of my life. He asks me why I think that run ...

17 I’d stopped taking my medication only a few days earlier. It had just seemed crazy to be taking antidepressants in Italy. How ...

sion because we’re so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that comes after mi ...

cision to go the route of “Vitamin P” happened after a night when I’d sat on the floor of my bedroom for many hours, trying very ...

Still, I never relaxed into taking those drugs, though they helped immediately. It never mattered who told me these medications ...

18 Or, rather—here I am. I am in Rome, and I am in trouble. The goons of Depression and Loneliness have barged into my life agai ...

said about such spiritual consolations, of course—that they are irrational and “deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the ...

so familiar. In a flash instant, of course, I realized my mistake and laughed in embarrassment at my almost doglike confusion ov ...

19 Here’s what’s strange, though. I haven’t seemed to be able to do any Yoga since getting to Rome. For years I’ve had a steady ...

20 I needed to make some friends. So I got busy with it, and now it is October and I have a nice assortment of them. I know two ...

ent nationalities and ages. Sofie has just taken a four-month leave of absence from her good job in a Swedish bank, much to the ...

guage, a language she has to think about for a moment before she can choose her words. He said if Maria had truly allowed hersel ...

Luca has traveled a fair amount, though he claims he could never live anywhere but in Rome, near his mother, since he is an Ital ...

21 Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here, I admit it. While I have come to Italy in order to experience pleasure, during the fi ...

I once asked Luca Spaghetti if Italians on vacation have that same problem. He laughed so hard he almost drove his motorbike int ...

pleasure in their lives, asking them what their pleasures feel like, and then writing a report on this topic. (Double-spaced and ...

I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch. I peeled the eggs and arranged them on a ...

22 One obvious topic still needs to be addressed concerning my whole pursuit of pleasure thing in Italy: What about sex? To answ ...

this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my en- ergy is by becoming infatuated with ...

wherever. To my taste, the men in Rome are ridiculously, hurtfully, stupidly beautiful. More beautiful even than Roman women, to ...