"Eat, Pray, Love"

AUTHOR: Elizabeth Gilbert

PUBLISHED: 2006

GENRE: Memoir

My husband, bless his soul, brought home Eat, Pray, Love in a pile of books he found at a yard sale.  (True love is fueling your spouse’s already rampant collecting habit, especially one as space-consuming as books.  But anyway.)  Wedged between The Secret Life of Bees and some historical fiction about the Taj Mahal, Eat, Pray, Love looked like a fun little read.  Alas, it was not.  Elizabeth Gilbert may be the nicest lady that ever lived, but her book is a testament to self-indulgence.  And not the “isn’t it cute, it was only $500, so I bought two” self-indulgence that lets you sneer at the page.  No, the kind of self-indulgence that disguises itself as whimsy and cuteness and “if you do what I did, you will find love and happiness and peace, and the world will learn to love again!”.  The kind of self-indulgence that guilts you into feigning happiness (“oh, it was just so inspiring!”) but really just makes you angry.

She claims it’s all true but Gilbert’s story reads like, well, fiction, not because of her writing style but because it’s easier to see Penny Marshall pitching it than Gilbert living it. The story is pretty straight forward.  (I’m warning you now, spoilers ahead.) Miserable in her marriage and New York, Gilbert gets divorced and convinces her editor to let her travel for a year, documenting her travels as she goes.  First up is Italy (too much pasta! She gained 5 pounds!  Quel horror!); then India (gruff Texans and mosquitoes interrupt her meditations!  Wacky!), then Indonesia (why, what a handsome Brazilian!  Swoon!).  Get the title there?  Eat (Italy), pray (India), love (Indonesia)?  Columbia Pictures, here she comes!

If the book had been fiction, it actually might have made a kind of cute novel, a perfect little read for the beach or on a rainy day. Girl divorces lout, girl goes on world tour, girl finds enlightenment and her next husband on a Bali beach.  But it is just so hard to believe that any one person could be just so lucky in the real world.  Plus, Gilbert glosses over all those mundane questions people like me automatically ask in our heads.  (Where’d she put all her stuff?  Who paid her utilities while she was gone?  For the love of all that’s holy, who filed her taxes?)  She is supposedly travelling along, relying on no one but herself, and yet she gets off the plane, drops her bag at the hotel, and is ready to explore, no planning necessary.

I feel I should clarify that I am not a bitter person.  But Eat, Pray, Love fits the Hollywood mold way too much to make it truly satisfying, and while it’s great that Gilbert’s story turned out so well, she’s got the luck of that one in a million.  That’s not to say that everything has to cater to the masses and people can’t rejoice in the unusual and the fortunate.  But when you treat that unusual as if it’s the norm (“oh, I just caught a plane to Bali.  What? Plane tickets? Airport security? What’s that?”), it just ends up cloy and annoying.

LENGTH: 352 pages

MAINSTREAM OR NOT?: Oprah picked it for her book club, and as we all know, Oprah is the queen of pop culture promotions. 

SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: Not unless you want to feel annoyed at Gilbert and bad about your own life.  If you must experience it, you could probably just watch the movie.  I didn’t see it but the book reads so much like a movie screenplay, I can’t imagine you’d be missing anything.  And with the movie, you get to see Julia Roberts’ winning smile as she kevtches about how she can’t find a good man.  What’s not to love!