Eat, Pray, Love: One
Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia stars Liz
Gilbert, a successful career woman locked away in the remote castle of a failed
marriage. Rather than waiting to be saved, she sets out on a quest for
self-actualization: eating her heart whole in Italy, reaching enlightenment in
India, and rescuing a friend in Bali before stumbling upon her Prince Charming
and living Happily Ever After. Across the journey, she meets comedic relief in
the form of Richard, her trusty steed in India, and Wayan, an amiable healer
able to cure a tough urinary tract infection with a “brown juice … that stank
like corpse” (299). Through the ups and the downs, Gilbert is able to charm readers
with her feminine virtues: consistent humility, piety, and sexual modesty –
with a finely tuned wit to match. In total, Gilbert’s memoir is nothing short
of a fairytale for the modern-day woman.
However, Gilbert’s story is not sprinkled with fairy dust
from the outset. Rather, the first two sections of her journey are grounded in
a reality that is gritty yet inspiring. She is an independent woman who encounters
difficulty in assuming the housewife role expected of her. The depression she
experiences upon having her heart broken while enduring a divorce surpasses
Rapunzel weeping in a tower. Gilbert writes: “I’d sat on the floor of my
bedroom for many hours, trying very hard to talk myself out of cutting into my
arm with a kitchen knife” (50). Moreover, when she decides to heal herself
through a year-long odyssey of self-discovery, she does so with her own
resources, independently financed by a successful writing career. Born into
humble beginnings (although I live a hop, skip, and a leap away from her hometown
which is quite urban and features few tree farms), she is a self-made woman who
decides to purify her life from the distracting influence of men and take an adventure
alone with her thoughts and wishes.
This is the kind of tale I want to push into the hands of
the fifth-grade girls in my Tunbridge service-learning classroom (or rather,
wish for them to read once they’re old enough to understand the mature content).
At eleven years old, the boys have already gotten pushy – I mean this both
literally and figuratively. The other day, a girl sat in a chair reading while
a boisterous young man tried to earn her attention. She ignored him, only
pausing from her book to ask, “Why are you standing so close to me?” He denied
that he was and she replied, “Your knee is touching my knee. Back up.” He gave
her a playful push and left her alone. I silently applauded her gall and hoped she
would maintain that air of civil irreverence throughout the rest of her
formative years.
Yet, the ending portion of Gilbert’s journey in Bali takes
on an unrealistic tone that I would not want diluting the expectations of my
young fifth graders. From the moment she arrives, Gilbert rides a wave of good
luck that is simply improbable beyond belief. A borderline senile medicine man
recalls her from years prior, she finds a rental property that resembles Eden
without getting ripped off, a healer cures her terrible infection with some
herbs, and lastly, she stumbles into the arms of a man who wants to love her
selflessly forever. He is overwhelmingly warm and affectionate, declaring early
on: “I recognize you don’t love me yet the way I love you, but the truth is
that I don’t really care … You can decide to feel however you want to, but I
love you and I will always love you” (311). He is the perfect feminist man,
caring solely for her needs, and at the end they decide they can work out a
life together in America, Australia, Brazil and
Bali. Gilbert gets her cake and eats it too; a resolution saccharine enough to
undermine the humanity of the rest of the memoir, reducing Eat, Pray, Love to an idyllic tale about the pursuit of Happily
Ever After.
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