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books: Reading between the lines.

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

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

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One of the many dangers of the spiritual journey as a genre is that of taking oneself too seriously, and Gilbert is, if anything, almost too aware of this: She is trying very hard to make friends as she writes, to win over skeptics, and probably buy them a drink at the bar. As she points out on the ashram: "It's been amazing for me to discover that even here, even in a sacred environment of spiritual retreat on the other side of the world, I have managed to create a cocktail-party-like vibe around me." She has a fantasy of being known as "the Quiet Girl" in the Ashram, but she can't quite bring herself to abandon her chattiness. And it is, in a sense, as the failed Quiet Girl at the ashram that Gilbert narrates this book.

Gilbert's charm and self-deprecation largely defuse any prejudice against her self-reflection and complicate and ironize the spiritual journey she presents. "Here I am in this sacred place of study in the middle of India and all I can think about is my ex-boyfriend? What am I, in eighth grade?" Her writing can border dangerously on cuteness. At times, one is aware of her trying too hard to be liked; one feels the belabored mechanism of her jokes. But there is an undeniable intimacy in her tone, an authentic effort toward honesty that disarms criticism. She is after the kind of connection with the reader that you have with someone you sit next to on a plane, to whom you tell your life story, and never see again.

And there is a lightness of touch here that belies the earnestness implicit in her quest. Gilbert has the impressive and fairly unusual ability to make fun of herself and be serious all at the same time. In some sense this dual perspective, this irony and seriousness mingled together, re-energizes the formal strategies of the memoir; it lets air into the claustrophobic story of recovery: "The bathroom, always the bathroom! Heaven help me, but there I am in a bathroom again, in the middle of the night again, weeping my heart out on the floor in loneliness. Oh, cold world—I have grown so weary of you and all your horrible bathrooms." There is a predictable self-pity that we expect to find in books of this ilk; Gilbert complicates and plays with it, rather than delivering the pure hackneyed form. In the end, self-revelatory memoir is only as good as the writing: and maybe, to rise above the inherent self-indulgence, and our innate resistance to the spectacle it creates, it has to be better than the average first novel. In this particular case, it is.

So why then is my affection for Eat, Pray, Love so furtive? In part it is because of the inevitable arc of recovery built into the story. When I picked up Eat, Pray, Love, with its pretty, inviting cover, I was reaching for a happy ending: There would be no book if Gilbert returned from her travels tanned but confused. The memoir lacks the ambiguity we associate with a more literary effort. It feels like there is something inherently trashy about reading for that redemption, for a happyish ending in a tropical place. But there is a rich and compelling strand here: a story of how Gilbert goes from a very serious depression to being basically all right that has nothing to do with pasta and gurus. How does one get better? If one has the stamina to narrate the process, to write frank and chatty postcards from this immensely difficult transition, then one is in fact putting rare and valuable information out into the world. And so I would say for summer, Eat, Pray, Love is a transcendently great beach book.

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Katie Roiphe is the author of Still She Haunts Me.
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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

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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

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(7/5)

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