What do You think about Eat, Pray, Love (2007)?
I just kept thinking wahhhhhh the whole time. Poor woman wants out of her marriage so she leaves.... wahhhh. Poor woman is depressed so she whines wahhhhh. Life is so unfair for the poor woman wahhhh.Please, poor woman is completely lost so what does she do? Why she takes a year off and travels to Italy, India & Indonesia to try and find herself. I wish I could say that this was fiction but it isn't. She's lost! Join the club but at least you have the money and the lack of responsibility to travel for an entire year and not have to worry about family, money and I don't know life in general. She finds herself by traveling to three parts of the world - Italy to find her body, India to find her spirit and Indonesia to find a balance between the two. OK, that part I get but I just had a real difficult time finding sympathy for a woman who is able to do all of that and still find time to whine about how hard life is for her. And guess what there's going to be a sequel - she remarrying so you know soon she will be divorcing and traveling to New Zealand, Prague and the South Pole to enlighten herself even more.Added to add - great now it's a movie. Soon they will make The Secret into a movie and we can all call it a day.
—Denise
Wow. I just gave Eat, Pray, Love a tearful send-off. And now I will relate to you the reasons why.The book has helped me come to terms with the fact that this whole divorce healing process is taking so long, longer than any of my friends expected I think, and that it's not over. But even so, it's OK. I can still live my life and do new things and make new friends and still work through it. I'm not cheating anyone by giving them what I've got right now, as opposed to the miracle woman that I think I should be. I don't have to stop living until I've deemed myself "healed," because I am pretty sure this has changed me forever. Which is OK. It's good, actually.The author starts making a concerted effort to repair herself. She has a moment of self-forgiveness:I also knew somehow that this respite of peace would be temporary. I knew that I was not yet finished for good, that my anger, my sadness, and my shame would all creep back eventually, escaping my heart and occupying my head once more. I knew that I would have to keep dealing with these thoughts again and again until I slowly and determinedly changed my whole life. And that this would be difficult and exhausting to do. But my heart said to my mind in the dark silence of that beach: "I love you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of you." (p. 328)This has been somewhat of a mantra for me in recent months. I read in a sort of self-help book back in May a quote that has stayed with me: "The only person who will never leave you is you." By choice or no, everyone in your life is bound to leave you someday. You must take care of yourself, and be happy with who you are. Especially if you're going to spend every day of the rest of your life with YOU.Despite our best efforts to be happy, however, we're human and shit happens: She'd fallen in love with a Sardinian artist, who'd promised her another world of light and sun, but had left her, instead, with three children and no choice but to return to Venice and run the family restaurant. She is my age but looks even older than I do, and I can't imagine the kind of man who could do that to a woman so attractive. ("He was powerful," she says, "and I died of love in his shadow.) (p. 101)"Died of love in his shadow" is exactly it. I can't put it any better. I don't even think it needs explanation. There is pain and sorrow everywhere, within everyone. "Life is what happens while you're making other plans." Right? The author ends up in Bali, visiting daily with a medicine man. She asks him how to cure the craziness of the world:Ketut went on to explain that the Balinese believe we are each accompanied at birth by four invisible brothers, who come into the world with us and protect us throughout our lives. When the child is in the womb, her four siblings are even there with her--they are represented by the placenta, the amniotic fluid, the umbilical cord, and the yellow waxy substance that protects an unborn baby'sskin...The child is taught from the earliest consciousness that she has these four brothers with her in the world wherever she goes, and that they will always look after her. The brothers inhabit the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength, and (I love this one) poetry. The brothers can be called upon in any critical situation for rescue and assistance. When you die, your four spirit brothers collect your soul and bring you to heaven. (p. 251) I love this spiritual Balinese metaphor for familial love and protection. I may only have 3 brothers, but I do feel like they are my Western counterpart to the Balinese brothers. My family has been with me all the way through this past 11 months.Another thing. I am reassured about my own attempts to travel, see people, grow, learn, live, love. Happiness is achieved with hard work. I've known this all along, and tried my very best to apply it to my marriage, but was dealt a blow and learned that I can only be responsible for my own happiness. I can't sacrifice myself for the happiness of someone else. I can't erase myself because someone else is having a temper tantrum at the airport. (I used to jokingly tell people that I pretended not to know him at the airport when he'd pitch a fit. But it was true.) And now I've been able to spend time making myself happy. At first I would elatedly think things to myself like, "I'm in the car and no one is angry. It's quiet, no one is yelling or punching the steering wheel or threatening to turn around in 5 minutes if the traffic doesn't clear up. No one is weaving violently around cars and looking sideways at me as if to say, 'Don't challenge me, I AM a safe driver!' I can change the radio station. I can even turn the radio off. I can be ME."Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it... And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. (p.206)So how does one move on after trying so hard and failing to make someone else happy? The author of the book has gotten divorced and goes on a year-long voyage of self-discovery, and ends up returning to a place she had visited during the throes of divorce, but this time she is completely content. I read this part and immediately thought of Friday night, driving home from my friend's house. I drove past a Wawa where I had pulled over to cry my eyes out on my way home from her house one night in the spring. It was one of those moments in the car where I was alone and driving with my thoughts, and it was bad enough that I had to stop the car. I remember calling Andrea and crying it out with her. But on Friday I looked at the lot and thought, "Poor Jen." And I was sad for myself and what I had been through, but in a sort of "she-went-through-a-lot-and-it-breaks-my-heart" kind of way. Like I was thinking about someone else, a best friend, not living it in the moment. Now, although my experience was on a much smaller scale than Elizabeth Gilbert's, I SEE. I understand. I identify.I think about the woman I have become lately, about the life that I am now living, and about how much I always wanted to be this person and live this life, liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself. I think of everything I endured before getting here and wonder if it was me--I mean, this happy and balanced me, who is now dozing on the deck of this small Indonesian fishing boat--who pulled the other, younger, more confused and more struggling me forward during all those hard years... Knowing already that everything would be OK, that everyhing would eventually bring us together here. Right here, right to this moment. Where I was always waiting in peace and contentment, always waiting for her to arrive and join me. (pp. 329-330)And that's not all: In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices. (p. 334)
—Jen
First, understand that I went into this book already hating it. I read the last third of it in grad school and wrote a paper that used it as a source. The summary version: As recently as 50-100 years ago, men were writing about going to foreign countries and striking up affairs with exotic women. Now, it is Western women who seem to be doing the same. And they do it in a surprisingly unimaginative fashion. Think about it:1997: How Stella Got Her Groove Back, by Terry McMillan: A divorcee swears off men, goes on a trip to the Caribbean and falls for a Jamaican guy half her age. It's fiction, yes, but the plot seems to be one that rings true for many. (And also, it kind of happened in real life.)1997: Under the Tuscan Sun, by Frances Mayes. (Nonfiction) A woman flees a cheating husband in the U.S. by going to Italy and ends up falling into a relationship with a much younger Italian man. 2002: An Italian Affair, by Laura Fraser. (Nonfiction) A woman flees a cheating husband in the U.S. by going to Italy. Oh, wait. Yeah, same plot as Under the Tuscan Sun, same country. Older man. Starting to see a pattern?And finally:2006: Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert. (Nonfiction) A woman goes through a messy divorce, decides to spend a year without men visiting countries that begin with the letter I. Oh, and guess what? She meets and falls for an older man. Didn't see that coming, did you? Sigh. Yeah, so that was my feeling about this book going in. Hackneyed, cliched, boring. And the first 30 pages nearly killed me. Oh, the crying and the wailing and the feeling sorry for herself. Shoot me. But then, damn it, she grew on me. Annoying, but true. I didn't want her to, but she did. Sort of. I can't explain it. I couldn't put the damn book down, but at the same time I didn't feel like I was loving it. I thought about it a lot afterwards, too, which usually is, for me, the sign of a decent book. Sigh. This book's been on the NYT bestseller list for FOREVER, and it has sold a million copies. There's clearly something going on here that people are connecting with. And I guess I connected with it too, on a certain level. That doesn't, however, excuse the rampant verb tense changes in every other chapter, but whatever. So, to sum: I didn't want to like it, but I did. Mostly.
—Elizabeth
