The Audio Book Club on Eat, Pray, Love
Our critics discuss Elizabeth Gilbert's blockbuster memoir.
Posted Thursday, Aug. 12, 2010, at 12:55 PM
Also in Slate: Literary agents are being flooded with pitches for the next Eat, Pray, Love. And view a slide-show essay on the trope of the woman liberated by divorce.
Columbia Pictures' big-screen adaption of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Lovepremieres this week. In 2008, Slate's Audio Book Club debated whether Gilbert's best-selling memoir, about a recently divorced woman who embarks on a long journey across the globe, is self-indulgent chick-lit or a great beach read with artistic merit. The audio is reposted below.
To listen to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, click the arrow on the player below.
You can also download the audio file here, or click here to subscribe to the Slate Audio Book Club feed in iTunes.
This month, the Audio Book Club presents a heated discussion of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, which Katie Roiphe described as a "transcendently great beach book" in her July 2007 Slate review.
"Dilettante" columnist Stephen Metcalf, NYU professor Roiphe, and Slate culture editor Julia Turner argued about the book's artistic merits, its structure, and whether it's possible to even imagine a man enjoying the book. Is Gilbert merely a "high-level hack"? Are negative responses to the book evidence of the tendency to dismiss women who write memoirs as "self-indulgent"? The conversation runs about 55 minutes.
You can also listen to any of our previous club meetings by clicking on the links below *:
Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson
The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
Independence Day, by Richard Ford
The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud
The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Everyman, by Philip Roth
Saturday, by Ian McEwan
The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
Questions? Comments? Write to us at podcasts@slate.com. (E-mailers may be quoted by name unless they request otherwise.)
* To download the MP3 file,right-click (Windows) or hold down the Control key while you click (Mac), and then use the "save" or "download" command to save the audio file to your hard drive.
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Stephen Metcalf is Slate's critic at large. He is working on a book about the 1980s.
Katie Roiphe, professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, is the author most recently of Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages, and the forthcoming In Praise of Messy Lives.
Julia Turner is Slate's deputy editor and a regular on Slate's Culture Gabfest podcast.
You can email her at juliaslateturner at gmail.com or follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/juliaturner.