Есть, молиться, любить / Eat Pray Love

LOVE STORY
Комментарии и словарь И. С. Гавриш

УДК 	372.8
ББК	81.2 Англ-93
	
Г47
Гилберт, Элизабет.
Г47	         Есть, молиться, любить : книга для чтения на английском языке / Э. Гилберт.  — Санкт-Петербург : 
КАРО, 2024. — 272 с. — (Love Story). 
ISBN 978-5-9925-1715-6.
Перед вами книга-бестселлер, которая была успешно 
экранизирована и завоевала любовь читателей во всем мире. 
Это автобиографическая и глубоко личная история про поиск и принятие себя, любовь к миру, путешествия и свободу.
После тяжелого развода писательница из Нью-Йорка 
Элизабет решает целый год путешествовать по миру. Три 
страны ее длинного путешествия, Италия, Индия и Индонезия, каждая по-своему учат Лиз радоваться ежедневным 
мелочам и не бояться нового опыта. В попытках обрести 
прочную почву под ногами она достигает гармонии с собой и 
встречает новую любовь.
Роман печатается с незначительными сокращениями и 
снабжен комментариями и словарем.
УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ-93
©	 КАРО, комментарий, 
словарь, оформление, 2024
ISBN 978-5-9925-1715-6

BOOK ONE
ITALY
or
36 Tales about 
the Pursuit of Pleasure

CHAPTER ONE
I wish Giovanni would kiss me.
Oh, but there are so many reasons why this would 
be a terrible idea. To begin with, Giovanni is ten years 
younger than I am, and—like most Italian guys in their 
twenties—he still lives with his mother. These facts 
make him an unlikely romantic partner for me, considering that I am an educated American woman in my 
mid-thirties, who has just come through a failed marriage and an interminable divorce, followed immediately by a passionate love affair that ended in heartbreak. 
This has left me feeling about seven thousand years old. 
This is why I have been alone for many months now. 
This is why, in fact, I have decided to spend this entire 
year in celibacy.
Giovanni is my Tandem Exchange Partner. He teaches me Italian and I teach him English. I discovered Giovanni a few weeks after I’d arrived in Rome, thanks to a 
big Internet cafe. He had posted a flier on the bulletin 
board explaining that a native Italian speaker was seeking a native English speaker for conversational language 
practice. Right beside his appeal was another flier with 
the same request, word-for-word identical in every way. 
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The only difference was the contact information. One 
flier listed an e-mail address for somebody named Giovanni; the other introduced somebody named Dario. But 
even the home phone number was the same.
Using my keen intuitive powers, I e-mailed both 
men at the same time, asking in Italian, ‘Are you perhaps 
brothers?’ Giovanni wrote back: ‘Even better. Twins!’
After meeting the boys, I began to wonder if perhaps I should change my rule a bit about remaining celibate this year. For instance, perhaps I could remain totally celibate except for keeping a pair of handsome 
twentyfive-year-old Italian twin brothers as lovers...
But, no.
No and no.
I look for healing and peace that can only come 
from solitude.
Anyway, by now, by the middle of November, Giovanni and I have become friends. As for Dario—I have introduced him to my adorable little Swedish friend Sofie, and 
they’ve been sharing their evenings in Rome in a different 
way. But Giovanni and I, we only talk. Well, we eat and we 
talk. We have been eating and talking for many pleasant 
weeks now, sharing pizzas and gentle grammatical corrections, and tonight has been no exception.
Now it is midnight and foggy, and Giovanni is walking me home to my apartment through these back 
streets of Rome. We are at my door. We face each other. 
He gives me a warm hug.
‘Good night, my dear Liz,’ he says.
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‘Buona notte, caro mio1’ I reply.
I walk up the stairs to my fourth-floor apartment, 
all alone. Another solitary bedtime in Rome. Another 
long night’s sleep ahead of me.
I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone.
Grasping this reality, I drop to my knees and press 
my forehead against the floor. There, I offer up to the 
universe a prayer of thanks.
First in English.
Then in Italian.
And then in Sanskrit.
CHAPTER TWO
And since I am already down there in prayer on the 
floor, let me hold that position as I reach back in time 
three years earlier to the moment when this story began—a moment which also found me in this exact same 
posture: on my knees, on a floor, praying.
Everything else about that scene was different, though. 
That time, I was not in Rome but in the upstairs bathroom 
of the big house in the suburbs of New York which I’d recently purchased with my husband. It was in November, at 
around three o’clock in the morning. My husband was 
sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom sobbing.
1	 Buona notte, caro mio. — итал. Спокой
̮ной
̮ ночи, дорогой
̮.
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I don’t want to be married anymore.
I don’t want to live in this big house.
I don’t want to have a baby.
But I was supposed to want to have a baby. I was thirty-one years old. My husband and I—who had been together for eight years, married for six had built our entire life 
around the common expectation that, after passing the age 
of thirty, I would want to have children. But I didn’t. I kept 
waiting to want to have a baby, but it didn’t happen. And 
I know what it feels like to want something, believe me. 
When the magazine I worked for was going to send me to 
New Zealand, to write an article about the search for giant 
squid, I felt delight. And I thought, ‘Until I can feel as ecstatic about having a baby as I felt about going to New Zealand to search for a giant squid, I cannot have a baby.’
I don’t want to be married anymore.
In daylight hours, I refused that thought, but at 
night it came to me again and again. What a catastrophe. 
I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life—so why did I feel so overwhelmed with 
duty, tired of being the breadwinner and the housekeeper and the social coordinator and the dog-walker and 
the wife and the soon-to-be mother, and—somewhere 
in my stolen moments—a writer...?
I don’t want to be married anymore.
My husband was sleeping in the other room, in our 
bed. I equal parts loved him and could not stand him.1 

1	 I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. — 

Я одновременно и любила его, и терпеть не могла.
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I couldn’t wake him to share in my distress—what would 
be the point? We both knew there was something wrong 
with me, and he’d been losing patience with it. We’d 
been fighting and crying, and we were tired in that way 
that only a couple whose marriage is collapsing can be 
tired.
The many reasons I didn’t want to be this man’s 
wife anymore are too personal and too sad. On this night, 
he was still my lighthouse and my albatross in equal 
measure. The only thing more unthinkable than leaving 
was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn’t want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, 
without causing any consequences, and then not stop 
running until I reached Greenland.
This part of my story is not a happy one, I know. But 
I share it here because something occurred on that bathroom floor that changed forever my life. What happened 
was that I started to pray.
You know—like, to God.
CHAPTER THREE
Now, this was a first for me. And since this is the 
first time I have introduced that word—GOD—into my 
book, and since this is a word which will appear many 
times again throughout these pages, it seems only fair 
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that I pause here for a moment to explain exactly what 
I mean when I say that word.
Let me first explain why I use the word God, when 
I could just as easily use the words Jehovah, Allah, Shiva, 
Brahma, Vishnu or Zeus.1 Alternatively, I could call God 
‘That,’ which is how the ancient Sanskrit scriptures say 
it. But that ‘That’ feels impersonal to me and I myself 
cannot pray to a That. I need a proper name, in order to 
fully sense a personal attendance. For this same reason, 
when I pray, I do not address my prayers to The Universe, The Force, The Supreme Self, The Whole, The 
Light, or The Higher Power.
I have nothing against any of these terms. I feel they 
are all equal because they are all equally adequate and 
inadequate descriptions of the indescribable. But we 
each do need a functional name for this indescribability, 
and ‘God’ is the name that feels the warmest to me, so 
that’s what I use.
Culturally, though not theologically, I’m a Christian. 
I was born a Protestant. And while I really love that great 
teacher of peace who was called Jesus, I can’t swallow 
that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is 
the only path to God. Strictly speaking, then, I cannot call 
myself a Christian.
1	 Jehovah, Allah, Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu, Zeus — Иегова (имя 
бога в Ветхом Завете и в каббале, он же Яхве); Аллах (имя 
бога в исламе); Шива, Брахма, Вишну (божественная триада индуистского пантеона); Зевс (главный
̮ из богов-олимпий
̮цев в древнегреческой
̮ мифологии)
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I have always responded with excitement to anyone 
who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead lives very 
close to us indeed—much closer than we can imagine, 
breathing right through our own hearts. I respond with gratitude to anyone who has ever voyaged to the center of that 
heart, and who has then returned to the world with a report 
for the rest of us that God is an experience of supreme love.
In the end, what I have come to believe about God is 
simple. When the question is raised, ‘What kind of God 
do you believe in?’ my answer is easy: ‘I believe in a magnificent God.’
CHAPTER FOUR
So I spoke to God directly for the first time. In the 
middle of that dark November crisis I was interested 
only in saving my life. What I said to God through my 
sobs was something like this: ‘Hello, God. How are you? 
I’m Liz. It’s nice to meet you.’
That’s right—I was speaking to the creator of the 
universe as though we’d just been introduced at a cocktail party. But we work with what we know in this life, 
and these are the words I always use at the beginning of 
a relationship.
‘I’m sorry to bother you so late at night,’ I continued. ‘But I’m in serious trouble. And I’m sorry I haven’t 
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