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Summer ReadingShould you read the best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love?

By Katie RoiphePosted Tuesday, July 3, 2007, at 7:28 AM ET

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.I have to admit that I felt a twinge of embarrassment on the subway when I opened Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, which is currently No. 1 on the New York Times paperback best-seller list. It is precisely the sort of inspirational story of one woman's journey to recovery that I would never expect myself to pick up in a bookshop. Were I to summarize the plot, many discerning and skeptical readers would immediately put it back on the shelf. Eat, Pray, Love begins with Gilbert in her early 30s, crying on the floor of a bathroom of a big suburban house because she realizes that she does not want to have a child; she divorces her husband, falls dramatically to pieces, and then travels around the world. Along the way, she finds god in an ashram in India, big plates of pasta in Italy, and triumphs over her severe depression. Doesn't it sound awful? It is not.

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Admittedly, the memoir is constructed with a certain amount of artifice. As one gathers from her catchy title, Gilbert orchestrates her recovery in three parts: She goes to Italy to experience pleasure, India to explore spirituality, and Indonesia to find something she calls balance. In real life, of course, one doesn't often get to structure one's emergence from a black period quite so neatly. But the artificiality of the venture doesn't matter. If the journey is fake in certain ways—too willed, too self-conscious—within all the fakeness a real evolution occurs. The rubric of travelogue gives Gilbert, an insightful, disarming, joyous writer, enough time, enough quirky situations and settings, to dramatize a fascinating and turbulent period of life. Her true engagement with the outside world, her tiny observations about everything from the Balinese response to divorce to Italian men eating cream puffs after watching sports, reinvigorate the more conventional arc of her recovery story. She takes the shopworn narrative of depression and instills it with liveliness, which is in itself such a strange and refreshing endeavor that we end up liking her.

Before Gilbert's marriage fell apart and she began her epic travels, she led a fairly conventional life: She had a husband, two homes, a successful writing career, and was contemplating having a child. All of this structure, this safety, breaks down rather abruptly, and she seems, as she relates it, to fall exotically out of regular life.

While she is in Rome, Gilbert decides to be celibate since she has careered from one relationship to another since her late teens. As she puts it: "How many different types of men can I keep trying to love, and continue to fail? Think of it this way—if you'd had ten serious traffic accidents in a row, wouldn't they eventually take your driver's license away? Wouldn't you kind of want them to?" Abandoning her breakfasts of yogurt and wheat germ, she eats so much gelato and pasta that she happily gains 15 pounds. This is the pure, concentrated idea of Italy that she has come to find. But the most telling anecdote from this phase of her trip is that she goes to a lingerie store and buys herself huge amounts of exquisite lingerie that no one will see. It is in these rogue details, in the accidental glimpses of recovery, that the more interesting story of the book is told. Beneath the official itinerary of redemption, Gilbert gets better slowly, and she is a smart enough writer to show us how.

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Katie Roiphe is the author of Still She Haunts Me.
COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

I love food, and I liked the cover, and as I librarian I can justify reading something to hyped because I need to be familiar with what my patrons want. I took Eat, Pray, Love with me on a trip to California (hoping for good airplane reading). I ended up leaving it there. I made it with her through Italy, but once she went into the Ashram I was so tired of hearing her talk about her woe-stricken upper middle class neuroses that I could not go on. Yes, she makes fun of her own self-pity, but for me that did not make it any easier to digest.

--camille

(To reply, click here.)

You did a great job articulating my same feelings on this book. Initially, I would only read it alone on my porch, convinced that I couldn't possibly like it given the insane hype. But it was that good. I felt the feel-good ending coming too, but you know, by then, I thought, Bring it on. Also, it read like a funny amalgam of all my friends--the adventurous one, the celibate one, the yoga/seeker, and the one who doesn't want kids (me), so, as silly as it sounds, there was something for everyone. Nice review with a twist.

--JHo

(To reply, click here.)

I haven't read this book yet, but I probably will at some point. I've heard rave word-of-mouth reviews but I'm put off by the economic or class issue that seems to be evident. How many people who go through a divorce or other devastating event can just pick up and travel the world to "find themselves"? Not many. Which of the two homes did she end up with after the divorce?

--tinkerbell

(To reply, click here.)

(7/5)

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