Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Eat, Pray, Love

by Elizabeth Gilbert

Penguin Publishing Group, 2007

ISBN: 978-0143038412

352 p.p.

Also Known As Thank God We Finally Got Out Of India.

I have come to really embrace the memoir as a mode for women writers to express the inexpressible. I have always found religion to be a concept that is greater than expression and, inevitably, harmed by an attempt to express it specifically. I have always loved a travel epic or a nod to any type of journey-literature (this is probably the fantasy buff in me; I love the idea that we all take a journey). I, obviously, like women writers and want to support an ever-developing modern feminist ideal.

I’m just not sure what to do about Eat, Pray, Love, the Elizabeth Gilbert mega-hit that has sent droves of loyal fans to Italy, India, and Indonesia.

On the one hand I really did like the idea of a modern explorer going to live in these places for months and giving a bit of a bird’s eye view about it—I’ve been to Rome but I certainly haven’t lived there and I was a teenager when I went so I was mostly concerned about how I was going to get the older boy on the trip to make eye contact with me because we were clearly soul mates (ah, to be young and more distracted by a boy than glorious Roman architecture). However, Gilbert had similar problems as my sixteen year old self—she was so concerned with herself and her lingering divorce (and lingering break up with her boy-toy David) that she admittedly mostly just saw plates of food in Italy. It’s not a crime to not be into the culture and the history but she went to Italy purely to learn how to speak and eat. The food was seductive but the Italian language has never done it for me… and I got better history lessons about Bali than Italy so I wasn’t sure what to do. Why was I in Italy? To listen to Gilbert eat her way through her feelings? Potentially. But I just wasn’t sure why I was in Italy to do this.

Explorer novels or memoirs generally… explore. They give landscapes and culture and insider-knowledge. The insider knowledge I predominantly got from Eat, Pray, Love was all about Gilbert herself.

The author is, in many respects, the every-girl. She is self-conscious, she worries about what people think, she tries too hard to make people happy and to make them like her. She is a classic case of East-Coast personality: her mind never quiets, there-are-always-a-thousand-things-to-do-and-a-million-people-to-please-so-if-everyone-and-everything-could-just-make-space-for-her-so-she-can-get-down-to-business-that-would-be-perfect-thank-you. The New York mind runs a mile a minute (we sympathetic New Jersey-ians keep pace). She has trouble finding herself which is why she was taking this journey to begin with—for that, I think we must forgive the sort of vacuum of self that most of the culture of the places she visits disappears into.

Maybe I came to Eat, Pray, Love thinking that Gilbert was going to walk me through these places with the devotion to telling other people’s stories that I would bring to such a journey—I love being on trips, thinking up stories, stashing locations in my head for future use in fiction—but Gilbert intends to set out for herself so we must embrace her as the actual landscape. For all intents and purposes this book might as well have taken place in Little Italy and Little India (though I will give her Bali) for all the “journey”-ing that took place. It seemed that Gilbert needed to be oceans away from her problems to solve them but it could just as well have been Ireland, Iceland, or Australia as Italy or India.

My griping about missing more of Italy aside, I did like the author's personal journey. I might not always understand her, I might not always agree with her (Oh God India—did we not agree about India), but she reminds me of the type of friend I might have: she’s going through a rough time that I haven’t had and I can’t really imagine being through, but she’s being candid, reaching out to me for some level of support and trying to tell me what she’s garnering from this experience. If you can’t appreciate that on some level I imagine you have a difficult time keeping friends (though I would suggest picking up Gilbert when you are either in a perfect place and feeling benevolent toward all people, or when you are in exactly the same sort of turmoil as she is in). I happen to be benevolent right now so she worked on me—tell me all your problems Gilbert because I have ears to listen.

I have previously said, and I stand by it, that women can’t spend time tearing one another down if they want a world where they are generally treated better. This is a concept Italy-Gilbert firmly believes in. A mentality she attacks throughout Eat, Pray, Love are the proverbial “whys” of womanhood: why do we put pressure on ourselves to get married, have children, stay skinny, do what everyone wants us to do, act the way we are expected to act. And we all have a way we are expected to act—even if the prescription varies from person to person.

When we got to India, I admit that I found her very hard to follow—she was diving into her “faith” period and I could appreciate her yearning for self-understanding but not how she got there. However, if this worked for her (and if it works for you) it can’t be bad. I don’t find myself spiritually invested in yoga (I want to get into it for the Bend-Ability some of Gilbert's teachers condemn people for liking) but I embrace the concept of knowing yourself. If you are curious about whether or not the spiritual aspect of yoga is for you, Gilbert will give you the tour of the Ashram in all it’s (to me, mind-numbing) glory. I was utterly relieved to be out of the India section of the book because Gilbert never really saw India at all—she only visited the Ashram and I was shackled to this religious practice I wasn’t game for. Where is the Taj? Where are all the marvelous pieces of architecture? Where is the tour? Where are the friggin’ elephants? (Even the movie gave me an elephant for crying out loud). Again though, just because I didn’t like it doesn’t mean that it is invalid—Gilbert was finding herself and the Ashram was essential to that process.

We finally arrive in Bali and I found myself relieved. This is the most authentic of the three locations in so many ways. First of all, the author knows herself so much better so the deep intricate moments of self-examination are limited. Bali is also a place where she takes interest in the place and not just in herself—she really gets engaged with the history, the stories, the culture. I learned about Bali (and a giant nerd like me enjoyed that) and I got less and less Gilbert as she focused outwardly much better and I got to enjoy Felipe, Wayan, and the host of Indonesian characters (native and non).

Despite my feelings on how Gilbert chose to get there, she achieved the ultimate goal of any person, male or female, which is personal understanding. She knows who she is and what she wants by the end of this journey—and we should all have a degree of sympathy for other humans who need to find themselves and be lenient in our judgment about how they attain it. Gilbert gets frequently shot down as “chick lit” and she also gets bashed for being a real American, colonizing these native peoples and using them in self-serving literature à la the Victorian explorers in ages long gone. We may need to suspend our knee-jerk judgments on what type of literature this is—it is so highly personal a journey that we must always wrap our interpretation up in the vital reality that this wasn’t (and was never meant to be) our road. We are following her—and for some reason we want to condemn her as if modern people (again people, male and female alike) aren’t allowed to find themselves, as though the journey is indicative of a failing on her part and, simply, it isn’t. This shouldn’t be vilified as “chick lit” any more than children should be vilified for trying on everything in their parents’ closets in an attempt to see what fits them. Just as the child can’t fail to find some form of an answer, Gilbert can’t fail here and it is not our job to judge what she “tries on.” Finding yourself isn’t a failure and Gilbert’s road map is unique and colorful whether you are looking for a map of your own or simply going along for the ride.

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Elizabeth Gilbert is a writer currently living in New Jersey (with “Felipe” from Eat, Pray, Love). She has had a long and varied career in writing that include the piece that inspired Coyote Ugly, The Last American (a piece on Eustace Conway), and a new book on marriage called Committed. She also had an extremely popular TedTalks on “genius” which garnered her significant attention.