Eat, Pray, Love — A Review
My pal Angela sent me a copy of “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert, with the note “You’ll want to shake her occasionally, but a good read.”
With a recommendation like that, what else could I do? I sat down to see what the deal was. And ended up taking quite the unintended ride.
EPL is the story of a woman who hits thirty (naturally), freaks out over pressures in her unhappy marriage (naturally), goes through an unpleasant divorce (as if they’re ever pleasant), and then goes on a pretty self-indulgent and thoroughly control-freaky pilgrimage to try to get her act back together. And in doing so, she meets characters (naturally), has revelations, has several serial breakdowns, and eventually (at the convenient end of her trip and her book) meets the man she’s going to marry.
In the process, she has internal battles with her Wellbutrin prescription, eats incredible-sounding food that would probably kill me, makes all kinds of decisions about how to handle things that help you understand where the chaos in her former life probably came from, and ends up halfway around the world trying to recreate the world she left behind.
I know, I sound pretty hostile. That’s largely because I get all pissy like that every time I read a book that I could have written, better. I think my personal journey, through hitting 29 (overachiever!), freaking out over my unhappy marriage (naturally), going through my unpleasant divorce (as if they’re ever pleasant), going on a pilgrimage to get my act back together, meeting characters (as you do when you’re paying more attention to the people around you than you are to the noise inside your head), and meeting the man I married, in my not so humble opinion, is a far more entertaining journey than the one in EPL. In any case, mine had diving with sharks, a government coup at gunpoint, and several fistfights in it. At least when they made a movie, they’d need a special effects budget (the mark of any really good story is the number of explosions in it, IMO. Which probably explains the chaos in my former life, too.)
Those of you who lived through those years with me are probably chuckling at this point (I can hear you from here, Bubba). And wondering how I’d manage to disguise their identities in the final draft.
The fact is, everyone thinks their story, their journey, is interesting stuff. And the fact also is that people who should be writing but aren’t writing enough get pissy all out of proportion with the people who actually have nailed book contracts to write about what they do.
I‘ll take it as a sign. A sign that I need to get busy, writing.