Its 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. Shes in her thirties she has a husband a house theyre trying for a baby - and she doesnt 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.