Book Review: Eat, Pray, Love

I just finished reading Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia and joined the ranks of millions of other middle-aged, Starbucks-swilling, gym-going readers. Good Lord, I hate being predictable. At least I didn't read it for a book club.

Eat, Pray, Love is the memoir of Elizabeth Gilbert. Flush with book advance money, Gilbert runs off to Italy, India, and Bali to recover from a soul crushing divorce and a turbulent rebound-boyfriend. She goes to Italy to learn Italian, to India to learn how to meditate, and to Bali to meet up with some shyster medicine man that she met on a previous trip.

Memoirs ask a lot of their readers. Not only do you have to like their writing and their tales, but you have to like the authors as people. You sort have to be friends with them. Gilbert is a hard person to be friends with. She's rather self-involved. She devotes pages and pages to the task of figuring out which word might embody her entire essence. Ariel Levy recently wrote, "one generally doesn’t indulge another person’s emotional processing at this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex."

She's also a drama queen who takes four years to get over a divorce. I cross the road to avoid people like that, because they just talk about themselves for hours and hours on the phone and never ask you about yourself. Four years is a long time to brood about a divorce that you instigated. I've had some bad break ups in my day, but nothing that took four years to heal. The worst break up required four months of grieving and a summer with a sliding-scale shrink on Central Park West.

While waiting for my appointment one afternoon, I overheard some guy in the waiting room saying that he described himself as someone who hung around in circles with people who were friends with Uma Thurman. In other words, he defined himself as a friend of a friend of Uma Thurman. He really needed his sliding-scale shrink. /tangent

Still, there is something of value in this book. Even for a non-yoga person like myself, her descriptions of life in an ashram, Balinese culture, and the lives of expats were fascinating. She certainly had a marvelous adventure traveling around the world to remote corners of the world. She lovingly describes the off-beat characters that she meets on her travels.

Gilbert also taps into the desire that we all have to cut ourselves loose from responsibilities and mundane routines and to sidle up to a bar in Key West. No mortgage, no job, no after-school pick ups, no piano recitals. Just a backpack and passport. Sound good, huh? Even better than that.. How about a whole year where you do nothing but think and write about your own mysterious inner-workings? She's a self-indulgent hippie. 

I have a weakness for hippies though. In this area of the country with driven elites and their three-car garages and status symbol boots, it's refreshing. And, maybe by the end of the book, I even became friends with Gilbert.

Comments

[Amy P]

"She's also a drama queen who takes four years to get over a divorce. I cross the road to avoid people like that, because they just talk about themselves for hours and hours on the phone and never ask you about yourself. Four years is a long time to brood about a divorce that you instigated."

I think 4 years is actually pretty fast. A decade seems to be more like it, particularly if kids are involved, since there's an ongoing relationship between the former spouses, like it or not.

[Russell Arben Fox]

I'll pass your recommendation on to Melissa; she's had this book on her to-be-read list for ages. But hey, why the slam on book clubs?

[MH]

I think 4 years is actually pretty fast. A decade seems to be more like it,

If that's true, middle and upper-class white women with good lawyers and flexible morality may want to make divorce "plan B" for getting rid of a spouse. I'm guessing the sentence would be less than 10 years in most cases.

[MH]

And why is my wife telling me that the bulging can of tomatoes is probably still good.

[Sandy D.]

..her descriptions of life in an ashram, Balinese culture, and the lives of expats were fascinating. She certainly had a marvelous adventure traveling around the world to remote corners of the world. She lovingly describes the off-beat characters that she meets on her travels.

For a really refreshing look at some different cultures (and adventures), can I recommend Vojtech Novotny's "Notebooks from New Guinea"? It's the opposite of self-indulgent, and his comparisons of Czech post-communist scientists and New Guinea tribesman are funny and fascinating.

[Sandy D.]

Link to Novotny's book, which I forgot to add is delightfully illustrated: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199561656?ie=UTF8&tag=httpwwwgoodco-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0199561656&SubscriptionId=1MGPYB6YW3HWK55XCGG2

[af]

People who marry people they met in their 20s (I assume that's you?) never quite get how hard it is to end a serious relationship once you pass a certain age. It's not like breaking up with your college boyfriend. But yes, she did strike me as the sort of person who'd go on and on about herself and not ask about you!

[Doug]

I think I'd rather read an accounting textbook. In Swahili.

[lmc]

I'm with Doug, and not just because kiSwahili's an awesome, musical language.

I've found expats tend to go on and on about themselves as well. (Sometimes so that the entire country they're in is about themselves and their virtue/hipness/brilliance/ART. The business sorts, who don't think of themselves as expats, were at least more honest, and had better taste in drinks.)

[Amy P]

"I've found expats tend to go on and on about themselves as well. (Sometimes so that the entire country they're in is about themselves and their virtue/hipness/brilliance/ART."

That sounds like a warm-country ex-pat. There's also the traditional hard-drinking and embittered expat, who shows up a lot in Graham Greene. I thought this was an entirely a literary invention, until it started happening to a friend of mine.

[harry b]

I think the stats are that 10 years after a divorce 40 percent of people are still angry or very angry with their ex-spouse. I might be exaggerating, and my divorce books are all at work, but its something like that. I know a lot of people who are still angry 20, 25, years later

Being an ex-pat is a bit like being divorced, and about as hard to get over. (I know about being an expat from experience; I've not, mercifully, been divorced, but both my wife and I have divorced parents).

My wife read the Gilbert book, and I looked at it occasionally, reading paragraphs that made me want to throw up. I'm not just an expat, I'm English.

[laura]

It is interesting that this book has been on the best seller's lists for ages. Julia Roberts is starring in the movie. I think a lot of people would really love to drop everything and roam the planet for a while.

[bj]

Ah, interesting insight on expats. I am an immigrant (kind of, though I came here very young, but my parents are immigrants) and I see the difference between the expats in my acquaintance, like the English who aggressively avoid taking an interest in American politics, or the Australian who insists on her kids calling her mum.

I'm guessing though that Americans might always be expats, and never immigrants. Does that apply to English/Australians/Canadians, too? How about the French & Irish. Do they ever adopt America?

[Matt]

When I lived in Russia Russians always wanted to introduce me to some other American they knew and I always tried to find a reason to not be introduced. A larger percentage of them, perhaps the larger percentage, were ex-pats in Russia because they had something wrong with them that made them not able to make it in the US. Or they were taking advantage of that apparently universal fact that foreign guys seem sexier to local girls. Or they'd turned into drunks. Or a mixture of the above. I don't know how often this is true in other locations or nationalities, but there was a very good chance that an American you met in Moscow or Petersurg (not where I lived, but where most of the Americans I met lived) he (almost always a he) was someone you'd not want to spend time with.

I think a lot of people would really love to drop everything and roam the planet for a while. Surely. Many people probably even think their experiences are worth telling to everyone, but usually they'd be wrong. Nothing I've learned about this book makes me think the author was right in thinking it.

[cranberry]

The British ex-pats in our neck of the woods are...very social. We belonged to the local Newcomers' group, and the Brits were the backbone of the partiers. Could it vary by nationality? I'd assume that the British ex-pats might have a healthier self-image than American ex-pats.

I read the book, or at least skimmed it, after reading enough to realize that the author reminded me strongly of people I cross the street to avoid.

I've read the author has a new book.

[Amy P]

I think there's something special about English-speakers, even when we don't like each other. For one thing, there's a shared resistance to learning foreign languages. You might think that Canadians would be the exception with all that bilingual stuff, but it's largely hype. Bilingual Canadians are, as a rule, Quebecois. From what my husband tells me of his school years in Canada, anglophone kids don't take French in school seriously and try to learn as little as possible, even though it's very important for a successful government career.

There's a fun (if not deep) movie called L'Auberge Espagnole, which is about a group of young Europeans sharing an apartment in Spain. One of the best (although excruciating) parts of the movie is when the English brother of one of the housemates comes and makes an ass of himself (making Nazi jokes to the German, etc.).

[Doug K]

must say I enjoyed Ariel Levy's snipe..

living in the strange isolated bubble of apartheid S.Africa, I always thought world travellers/expats would be interesting people, basing my expectations on writers like Patrick Leigh Fermor. Then I met some of them in Malawi and was astonished by the vapidity of their conversation, mostly about exchange rates and where the best ones could be found. It was a sad disillusionment.

bj's distinction between expats and immigrants is useful, a good point. I know several SA immigrants who still behave like expats: though I do notice it's hard to assimilate when your spoken word accent marks you as forever alien.

[Amy P]

"Many people probably even think their experiences are worth telling to everyone, but usually they'd be wrong."

There's a very amusing section in Stuff White People Like about this. It's a sort of madlibs where you plug in your particular details.

"My study abroad experience was intense. I barely learned anything, but I traveled so much and met this amazing (boy/girl) from (+1 Europe or Australia, +2 for Asia, +3 for South America, +5 for Africa) and we had a short but beautiful relationship. I acquired a taste for (substance, +1 for food, +2 for alcohol) and cannot wait to go back to try it again. After graduation I took a year off to (activity, +1 for work abroad, +1 for travel, +3 for volunteer/Peace Corps). It was incredible, I learned so much about myself and about life."

I score 9, by the way.

[Doug]

Expats are a lot like everyone else, just in a different place. Momma got it right: "It takes all kinds."

I'd bet that much depends on the stage of life that people are at, and a fair amount depends on the location. Eastern Europe in the 90s, for all that it is a cliche, was an unusual historic moment, perhaps like interwar Paris or Berlin. But your expats who are over with their families are different from the guys in their 20s, who are different from the au pairs on one-year visa things, who are different from the peripatetic English teachers, who are different from the staffs of the local international school, who are different from the support people at an Army base, who are different from the musicians, who are different from the embassy/consulate types, who are different from the people who left over Vietnam, who are different from the exchange students who stayed, who are different from the programmers Microsoft brought over, who are different from, well you get the idea.

As a friend of mine said recently, "Geographies of belonging are complicated." He's American, married to a Dutch woman, eligible for UK or German citizenship if he so desired. He could see taking one of those on, but not Dutch, where he actually lives and works and may be up for tenure.

And the most visible expatriates are probably not the most representative. (On the other hand, expatriate asshattery in Moscow did give us the eXile, so there's that.)

Also noting the strong gender divide on reactions to the book, or rather to writings about the book.

[MH]

From what my husband tells me of his school years in Canada, anglophone kids don't take French in school seriously and try to learn as little as possible, even though it's very important for a successful government career.

I remember meeting Canadians from one of the wheat-intensive areas. They spoke as much French as I did and I've never taken a class in French. They regarded being required to learn French as an unfair imposition best met with passive resistance. In my opinion, they were probably right.

[MH]

I was hanging-out with farm belt Canadians because the Austrailians were too drunk, the Germans were too German, and everybody else didn't speak English.

[Jody]

If there are any English departments left in 50 years, some poor grad students are going to have a field day with this era of the self-involved memoir. (Which isn't to say that there have been no good memoirs in the past 15 years, but my god, do so many of them have to look as if they started as essays for the style section in the New York Times?)