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Eat, Pray, Love, Hate!

One of my goals for this year is to read twenty-five books, at the moment I just finished book twenty-four (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and have no worries that I will hit my goal by Dec. 31.  I haven’t been great about posting book reviews here, perhaps next year I’ll add that goal to The List.

A little while ago Nilsa posted a book review of Julie & Julia and mentioned, in passing, her distaste for Eat, Pray, Love.  I was relieved to find another individual who was not gushing about Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir/documentary and was shocked to discover in the comments that most people did not particularly like Eat, Pray, Love.

In my next life I will have some kind of corporate sponsorship and/or independent financing to allow me to travel to exotic places and lounge about eating pasta, relaxing, and meeting handsome men.  Someone will purchase, in advance, the artistic rights to my recovery from a major life crisis and I will have the opportunity to spend a solid year wallowing and wading in said recovery because, hey, someone has already ponied up the cash for me to do so.

Wait.  Hold on.  Seriously?

The premise for Liz Gilbert’s best seller, Eat, Pray, Love, is just that.  She and her husband get divorced under emotionally tumultuous (but undefinable) circumstances, her publisher agrees that Liz should spend a year traipsing around Italy, India and Indonesia on the company’s dime and write a book about her experiences.  Now, before I get too much farther into this–allow me to explain a few things.  Am I jealous that Liz Gilbert managed to swing an all-expenses paid trip around the world?  Yes.  Do I wish someone would give me a similar opportunity?  Yes.  Do I think that her experiences helped her to “find herself”?  Ummm…not necessarily.  In a lot of ways I think it actually hindered her psychological recovery.

I agree that I am not Liz and I don’t know what she was really going through and there is no possibly way to really judge her situation.  But here’s the catch, in many ways I do know what she was going through.  She wrote it all down, page by self-depreciating, impossible-to-get-through page.  Elizabeth Gilbert is a fantastic writer, she can paint metaphors like nobody’s business and I do envy her talent as a writer.  But as a memoirist (is that even a word?), she is severely lacking.  I was shocked at the lack of honest self critique or even self-reflection.  Bad things happened to her, sure.  She somehow doesn’t seem to realize that there may have been something in her behavior that contributed to her problems.  Similarly, she is completely unaware that by changing her behavior she can change her perspective, and vice versa.  Spending a year lounging about the world, eating pasta and putting on strange meditational/self-centered religious ideals is not going to heal you.  I really don’t know how many times I can say this; I am loathing the film-version of this book because I will have to hate the whole concept all over again.

Admittedly, I may have had too high of expectations regarding this book.  I was married once, I left my husband, I had my own year of recovery with small milestones along the way.  I guess I thought I would identify with Liz Gilbert on some level.

Um….FAIL.  I didn’t find a single thing in Liz Gilbert’s experience, or the way she describes herself or her life, that I could identify with.

Actually, I take that back.  That’s not true, at the very beginning of the book when she has locked herself in the bathroom, and is sitting on the floor sobbing about her life being in shambles…I remember doing that.  Vividly.  More than once.  Okay, so I could identify with a half page of her 331 page memoir.  This is not a very convincing statistic.

Alright, I’m done ranting about the emotional crap that is scribbled all over Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth Gilbert has a talent as a writer, and I would probably read a completely fictional novel of hers, but I won’t even give away her memoir because I hated it that much.  It will be recycled.

And now I’m curious, did you read Eat, Pray, Love? Did you like it?  Did you like her writing skill?  Or her sentiment?  I’m genuinely curious.  (Also, I feel it important to mention that if you did like her book I will not judge you and we can still be friends.  We can be friends, right?  Even if I hated Eat, Pray, Love? Right?)

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