Eat, Pray, Love . . . Get More Therapy

WARNING:  SPOILERS AHEAD

Elizabeth Gilbert may think she reached enlightenment over the course of her one-year journey through Italy, Indonesia and India, but after reading "Eat, Pray, Love," I beg to disagree. OK, maybe she's not weeping on the bathroom floor as often as she did, and maybe she's not actively trying to get pregnant, yet thanking God every time her pregnancy test comes up negative (at least not at the moment).  However, it's pretty clear Liz still thinks God writes little personal notes to her journal in Liz's very own handwriting. 

Actually, I like the first third of the book, which takes place in Italy.  She spends most of her time eating and lusting after hot Italian men, and I can relate to that.  But then she takes off for India and leaves me behind. She thinks she's achieved spirituality because she leaps out of a second-story window so she won't miss group prayers, and "self-mastery" because she lets herself be eaten by mosquitoes for a couple of hours rather than disturb her Vipassana meditation . . .whereas I think she's a neurotic control freak.  Tomato, Tomahto.  I think if she'd met Charles Manson or Jim Jones, she would have killed a few Pigs or sipped some cyanide Kool-aid instead of chanting the Gurugita. 

She gets me somewhat interested again in Indonesia, but when she petitions all of her friends asking them to send money so some Indonesian woman she's befriended can buy a new house, I can't help but be profoundly grateful that she's no friend of mine. In Indonesia she falls in love . . . whoa, wait a minute, no she doesn't.  She finds a wealthy Portuguese father figure, Felipe, who pays her constant cringe-inducing compliments and can't take his hands off her, but while she tells us again and again (and again) how much he adores her, she doesn't waste any time telling us how much she loves him.  No, she's really much too busy telling us how much she loves and accepts herself and her issues.  ("It's OK.  I love you.  I accept you.  Come into my heart now. It's over.")  Felipe feels flat -- a stereotypical fantasy foreign father figure (now how's that for alliteration).  I mean, come on . . . "Come here, my delicious one." "You're going to get bored of how much I touch you, and how many times a day I tell you how beautiful you are."  Yeesh.  Well, maybe she didn't get bored, but I sure did.  And I wonder how he felt about seeing all his slop vomited back up at him in print?  I bet the guys really rag on him on football night. 

The best part of the book are her descriptions of some of the people she met on her journey.  While I don't believe that Liz ever got her act together, I do believe she met some people who did.  She's always quoting them, and some of the things they said sent me off on day-long musings.  For instance:

... he went on to explain, in a mixture of English, Italian and hand gestures, that every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there.  If you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought.  Whatever that majority thought might be -- that is the word of the city.  And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you really don't belong there.

Rome's word, her friend says, is "SEX."  New York's is "ACHIEVE."  I like it.  It got me thinking about what word might sum up each of the various cities and people I know, and what word might define me ("CRANKY"). I liked a number of other observations her new friends made, too. But here's the thing -- none of these observations or realizations were made by Liz herself.  She's simply parroting the people she's met.  Her gift (and she does have one) is in recognizing interesting people when she meets them, and describing them vividly.  But she doesn't need me to compliment her when she's got Felipe. I'm sure God compliments her, too, in Liz's very own handwriting.