Eat, Pray, Love tells how Elizabeth Gilbert uses a year of celibacy in Italy, India, and Indonesia to balance delights and devotion and to overcome the trauma of divorce, lost love, and depression.

Elizabeth Gilbert is a successful New York writer who at age 31 discovers that she is ambivalent towards motherhood and desperate to escape her marriage of convenience. Sobbing in her bathroom, Liz prays to God for the first time in her life, having grown up Protestant but with no particular faith. While her husband refuses to settle, Liz gets a magazine assignment to visit Bali and write about Yoga vacations, and there meets a healer, Ketut Liyer, who predicts that she will return and study with him.

Through David, the lover she takes after leaving home, Liz joins a Hindu meditation group and resolves to visit the Guru's ashram in India. Liz is in counseling and taking antidepressants, which get her through the divorce and and a never quite complete breakup with David. Financially destitute from legal costs, Liz gets an advance for a book on travels through Italy, India, and Indonesia. She quits taking antidepressants in Rome and quickly is stalked by Depression and Loneliness but feels God helping her get by. Liz enrolls in Italian classes, practices speaking with friends, and gains weight on what New York friends dub a "No Carb Left Behind" tour of Naples, Venice, and Sicily.

Liz next goes to the Indian ashram, where she eats vegetarian meals, scrubs temple floors, struggles to meditate, and chants the Gurugita, which she initially loathes. Liz learns to control her "monkey mind" and discusses her past with a compassionate inner circle of friends, led by Richard the Texan, who nicknames her "Groceries." When she vows to observe silence, God playfully has Liz named the ashram's Key Hostess for retreats, and she surprisingly achieves the very spiritual heights that she had thought beyond her. Liz goes to her next stop nostalgic for the spirituality that she is leaving, but she can now be with God—be God—whenever she wishes.

Liz arrives in Bali knowing only the name of an ancient healer and the town he lives near, but has little trouble finding Ketut Liyer but considerable difficulty getting him to remember her. Ketut teaches Liz simple Balinese meditation—sit and smile—and encourages her to keep up her Indian Yoga as they they spend hours discussing life. Liz befriends a destitute woman healer, Wayan Nuriyasih, and organizes friends worldwide to buy her a house. Liz's biggest surprise of a satisfying year is to meet an expatriate Brazilian, Felipe, and fall in love. They plan to split their time among America, Australia, Brazil, and Bali.