Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It Read Free

mistake in the book—literally. I should have known better. I thought that I could cheat the system, skip the middle, jump straight from the bathroom floor to the beach in Bali. I kept hearing Richard from Texas’s voice: “If you want to get to the castle, you’ve got to swim the moat.”
    Eventually, I dipped a toe into the goddamn moat.
    I ended the relationships that weren’t helping my self-esteem. I found a job I loved. I went on a silent retreat at a Benedictine monastery in the Shenandoah Valley. I tried harder, and talked to myself with a softer voice. I made more mistakes. I recognizedthat, like
japa mala
beads, life is a string of small successes, big failures, love, loss, bravery, fear—all looped together in an infinite circle.
    Over time, I learned to listen for what is calling out to me—sometimes in a loud, commanding voice, other times in a whisper. I learned to forgive myself for being scared and imperfect, for making mistakes. I stopped allowing myself to use those mistakes as an excuse to not try new things. Instead, I have to be brave. I have to try.
    That’s what
Eat Pray Love
makes me do.

The Gift
    â€”
    Mallory Kotzman
    M y mother divorced my father when my brother and I were toddlers, after she had uprooted her life and moved east to accommodate her marriage. She remarried when I was six, to a man eight years her junior, and moved us to a smallish town outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where she set up house with her new husband, a new baby and a slew of in-laws.
    Growing up, my mother and I had a tumultuous relationship. She was a bundle of contradictions, soft and pliable one moment, fierce and bold the next. Some days we were best friends, and others, total enemies. Yet the one thing that bonded us for life was reading. Many of my most treasured memories are of being tucked in at night with my mother settled next to me, her smooth butterscotch voice giving life to the characters on the page. The books evolved as I aged; I graduated from theBerenstain Bears to Madeleine L’Engle to S. E. Hinton to Anne Rice, and eventually even Ayn Rand. When I hit adolescence, instead of going shopping, we went to the library. When my mother became the sole breadwinner after my stepfather was injured in a motorcycle accident and I took up the slack by caring for my younger brother, I would retreat to my bedroom every spare moment I had and find solace in the pages of a book.
    When I was twenty-three, my mother and I reached a sort of peace. We began to meet for lunch and dig for buried treasure at the local thrift stores—we had the kind of mother/daughter relationship we had always dreamed of. We talked about politics, the latest trends, my itchy feet and always, always books. She mentioned
Eat Pray Love
to me shortly after its release, saying that Elizabeth reminded her of me—no desire to have children, a distaste for marriage but not relationships, and a drive to travel the world. My mother said she couldn’t see me living in our town long-term; she told me that she couldn’t picture me “settling” anywhere. She just hoped I would find a home base to use as I traveled the world.
    I laughed this idea off and tucked it away, along with my dreams of traveling internationally. We lived in a town that people often talked about leaving but rarely did. But I did tell my mother I would buy this book, which had made her think of me. Yet with a hand on my arm, in a serious tone, she told me not to.
    â€œMallory, don’t. I want to buy it for you. It feels like a book I should give to you,” she said.
    I promised my mother that I wouldn’t read it until she gifted it to me.
    Not long after, the world caved in. Just when we werebeginning to have an honest, adult relationship, my mother was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. She was given eight to ten months to live. It was June 2011.
    On November 5, 2011, around three a.m., she passed away.
    I