Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

 
#103
Title: Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2007
Genre: memoir, travel
334 pages

I have tried hard to like this memoir/travelogue. Why are there so many books by 30-ish folks complaining about their lives, then offering wisdom that is at best simplistic and at worst immature? Perhaps, as I've mentioned already in these reviews, the problem is that I have become a curmudgeon. Whatever the reason, however, I found it hard to like Liz. She is tediously insecure and neurotic. If her self-depiction is accurate, I doubt I'd find her socially attractive. While I sympathize about her ugly and expensive divorce, and I'm happy on her behalf that she can afford to travel the world for a year in her early 30's, I am uncomfortable with some of the unspoken class subtext (which might remind one of the economic uneasiness occasioned by Under the Tuscan Sun), as well as the overall depiction of people from other countries as more romantic, exotic, wise, etc. than one's compatriots. The author might have been better served by a directive from her Guru to stay at home and pay attention rather than flee, or (since we all have the option to flee), at least not to write a book about it.

I keep trying to articulate why this book so rubs me the wrong way; the closest I can get is that the author's anxiety is wearying. Does this mean that her adventures aren't interesting, or that she doesn't have anything to say, or that I stopped reading? No, but I could never really lose myself in the story, or develop much empathy for the narrator. The author is a magazine writer, which means her prose is relatively clean, but her sentiments are cloying.

The book is, I think, intended to be inspirational. However, the tale unfolds too simplistically, yet with assertions of its own complexity and meaningfulness. I found it unfortunately superficial and reductive.