I’m sure most of you aware of the Dallas Museum of Art’s Arts and Letters Live program. Each year, the DMA brings in great authors to come and speak about their works (this year Ian McEwan and David Sedaris are just two of the big names who will make appearances). Tomorrow night, you can hear Elizabeth Gilbert speak about her memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. Lots of people loved this book. It was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. After a divorce, Gilbert travels to Italy (eat), India (pray), and Indonesia (love), and documents her experiences. She’s appearing at the Eisemann Center in Richardson at 7:30pm tomorrow night. Click here for tickets. To read an interview of Gilbert by Becky Winn, click here.
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I traveled to Whataburger (eat), Lew Sterrett (pray), and A Gentleman’s Tanning Experience (love). Not in that order, though. My experiences were also documented, but without my consent. That’s all I’m allowed to say at this time.
I hate that book with the intensity of a thousand suns.
@CDD – why?
Let me answer for CDD, if I may.
Overall, Gilbert is entranced with her own well-pampered drama. Narcissistic doesn’t even come close. At the start, she’s desperately unhappy and dumps her husband for no real reason that she can give except that the poor shlub wants kids (as evidence for what must be the true, utterly selfish reasons for the breakup: Gilbert feels so guilty she gives him pretty much everything in the divorce settlement). After the rebound guy and she break up, she decides to find God — and it certainly helps that finding God involves a $200,000 advance from her publisher. She goes to Rome but doesn’t sleep with any Italian men — for Gilbert, an incredible step on the path to enlightenment because it actually involves a bit of self-denial in the land of female sex-tourism but isn’t it wonderful that all the Italian men adore her anyway. God, she’s a looker; she’ll tell you herself. Repeatedly.
Through all this, her ongoing conversations with “Richard from Texas” may be the worst things in the book. Full of so many canned platitudes and such cutesy, folksy crap, it’s hard to believe Richard is real. (I don’t, and I’ll bet money that someone at Arts & Letters Live asks her about the “real” Richard. She’ll get very coy and not say anything truly informative.) On the other hand, if he IS real, he’s probably Robert James Waller (Bridges of Madison Count).
Gilbert is in such grief over her lost loves and her own dependence on men (translation: she’s guilty over jilting these guys). You can tell how soulful she is; she actually loses weight (making women readers everywhere envious).
Then in Bali there’s this weird contrivance about a gift, asking her friends for 18k to give to another woman who ultimately doesn’t deserve it. And having lost weight, Gilbert of course ends her celibacy in complete ecstasy (orgasmic fireworks, please) — and aren’t we all happy for her, having found God and love in an older Brazilian man. But then, after all that blather about independence and finding herself, she promptly marries him.
Soooo … we’re supposed to sympathize with a woman who went off on her own to find herself and her spiritual salvation, which involved no hardship, ultimately helped no one else, and she did this by traveling around the world for a year, eating well — all of this on 200k?
The only wisdom I found in this book was pretty simple: Get the cash in advance.
I would’ve accepted a simple “it stunk”.
Richard from Texas.
And I didn’t say any of that crap.
yeah, I always say that book could have been renamed “Me, Me, Me” or “Eat, Pray, Shut Up”. Self-centered, whiny, annoying – that was my take away of this woman. And what infuriated me most of all was that this was HER ACTUAL LIFE. If it was fiction, it would have just been another chick lit offering. Sheesh, wouldn’t we all love to flit around the globe when ish gets tough, doing yoga and gorging ourselves on food and wine. but we don’t. we suck it up and deal with life like normal human beings. eh.