Eat. Pray. Love. Rinse. Repeat.

Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir "Eat Pray Love" was my first read on the trip through Italy. It's deservedly a "woman's book", but this guy just had to know.

To sum it up, Gilbert...

Eats her way through Italy, thinking about her bitter divorce (ex-husband is unmentionable) and her passionate, unstable relationship with a New Yorker (his name surely changed). Picks up Italian--the language, that is, not a single Italian male (she would have us believe). Drops her anti-depressant medication.

Prays like a son of a gun in the ashram in India. Learns to unleash her chakras. Teases her Robert from Texas until he moseys on. Loses that weight she put on in Italy.

OK, those of us following along know that Indonesia will mean "love". It was not as simplistic as it might have been, i.e., she does not fall in love with the teacher/healer whose influence caused her to come to Indonesia in the first place. But Ms. Gilbert has turned on that overhead light on her taxi, and before long someone hails her when she's in the right mood.

Just a passenger, she thinks. By the end of the book, though, her older Brazilian lover (she had to get used to the idea that her 30-something could go for a 50-something, no matter what skills he had in patient seduction) was thoroughly tangled in her hair.

Her section on Italy, the one of the three locales about which I'd consider myself expert, was accurate and perceptive, though hardly original. She wisely confines herself to a few areas of focus in her diaries--eating, the language, and getting those previous guys "right out of her hair". All of those topics struck chords that resonated with me--for example, I once fled to Italy to escape my unhappy love life.

Her wit is the book's saving grace--it was up-front and wisecracking in Italy, non-existent in oh-too-serious India, and mildly self-deprecating in Indonesia (her steady state). It was no challenge at all to read the whole thing in 3-4 days at the beach.

Oh--Rinse. And Repeat. Those are the sequels.