Eat, Pray, Love has sold nearly 8 million copies. It is now a new movie starring the one and only Julia Roberts. And I simply don’t get it.
Sure, I enjoyed reading about all the great food in Italy and the scenery in Bali, and I will admit that at the end of the book when she gets together with a Brazilian man on the beach that I fell for it. But, besides the lovely traveling anecdotes, I don’t understand why this book was such a big deal.
The writer and center of the book, Elizabeth Gilbert, embarks on a year-long journey following a divorce and bad rebound relationship to “find herself”. Here is the full synopsis. I won’t recap the book since it has been written about ad nauseam, but I will tell you that it took me at least 3 years to finish.
Obviously, I wasn’t reading it the whole three years but I found that I couldn’t manage to get through the thing. I usually made it half way through Italy and then stopped. Now that I finished it, I have to say that I am still bewildered why everyone loved this book.
I saw Oprah’s Book Club’s endorsement of the book, I heard all the hoopla about how the book is so marvelous and then I heard Julia Roberts was going to play this woman in a movie, so I caved and bought the book. And I eventually finished it. But instead of feeling enlightened and inspired, I felt oddly disappointed.
Throughout the book Gilbert shares her insights on all things universal, mainly love and God, and I have to say that I found her condescending throughout most of it (and found myself skimming pages in the India section). Not to say that she wasn’t really funny at times, nor am I saying that, like some people, I thought that she was just a rich white lady who had the luxury of traveling for a year. I just found that most of the time during my agony of reading this book, I was rolling my eyes. I mean why is this one woman, who got to travel for a year and write a book about it, being revered as someone who can teach me something about life and God?
I talked to a lot of people and read bunches of articles trying to decipher if I had missed something groundbreaking. Why are so many women talking about the book and the movie? Am I missing some pearl of female wisdom?
The movie was also a little disappointing. The two redeeming qualities of the book are the locations to which Gilbert traveled (mostly Italy and Bali) and the vivid characters that she painted for us. The movie showcased the locations well enough, but as far as the characters from the book, it fell short. While, I can imagine it is hard to put Gilbert’s entire story into a two and half hour movie, it seems like the screenwriters didn’t even try. Even though it was Julia Roberts, I couldn’t care about the screen version of Elizabeth Gilbert.
I would say I enjoyed the movie but only for two reasons: I went with my mom for a girl’s night out and Javier Bardem. Other than those reasons, I would have to agree with some of reviews I have read (especially Jezebel’s) that Eat, Pray, Love wasn’t life changing. Three years after purchasing my copy, I have finished the book and seen the movie. I feel none the wiser. The only thing I really took from Elizabeth Gilbert’s travel memoir was that I too want to travel the world, and if someone wants to pay me, even better.