It’s Throwback Thursday! Fifteen years ago this month, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love was published.

Around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned thirty, she went through an early-onslaught of midlife crisis. She had everything an educated, ambitious American woman was supposed to want–a husband, a house, a successful career. But instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed with panic, grief, and confusion. She went through a divorce, a crushing depression, another failed love, and the eradication of everything she ever thought she was supposed to be.

To recover from all this, Gilbert took a radical step. In order to give herself the time and space to find out who she really was and what she really wanted, she got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world–all alone. Eat, Pray, Love is the absorbing chronicle of that year. In Rome, she studied the art of pleasure; India was for the art of devotion; in Bali, she studied the art of balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence.

An intensely articulate and moving memoir of self-discovery, Eat, Pray, Love is about what can happen when you claim responsibility for your own contentment and stop trying to live in imitation of society’s ideals. It is certain to touch anyone who has ever woken up to the unrelenting need for change.